I don't know how much discussion can be had. However, I thought it was at least informative for people to know since most of us reading this forum are on overpopulated servers. I'm actually happy that Blizzard has given some proactive thought to the mess they'll have on their hands when the expansion comes out.

You can find the original posted by Tseric here.

Nice plan for those on the crowded servers, I especially like that it will to keep people in one guild if the GM picks a realm first.

I hope it works out for them.

Huh, that's curious, a forced transfer of sorts. I'm glad to see they're actively tackling the population issue. Mal and Ganis, anyone? We seemingly had it real bad before the expected holiday drop in players due to our large amount of raiding guilds all logging in at the same times, but it looks like some other realms have some pretty intense overpopulation. Here's to hoping those of you with long nightly queues get some relief.

I'm a little worried about the potential here for exacerbating population imbalances. Taking your average retail PvE server with a 3A:1H ratio, the Horde will miss half of their population much more than the Alliance will theirs. If the split ends up lopsided, it'll be even worse on the server with the short end of the stick. Having played on a reroll server that started out even and quickly shifted to Alliance heavy, once Horde population falls below a certain critical mass, it tends to plummet as people transfer off or reroll again.

I can definitely see this happening to Mal'ganis. People seem reluctant to even take advantage of the free transfers, and I can just imagine the population influx once everyone returns for TBC.

Same for Bloodhoof, even though the majority of it's population is casual. Over the past week the queues have jumped from 200 to over 600 just from an influx of people coming back from TBC. It's amusing to see people post on the forums with the remarks of "Wow I come back for TBC and there are 600 queues?"

Realm splitting will be something interesting, as there are many factors which will determine if it's successful in any way (of course to Blizzard it doesn't matter since the population is decreased). But factors for us such as the Horde to Alliance ratio, and even AH and Gold stability. It would also suck to see some guilds split up because Blizzard failed to have the manual transfers of the recipients carried out.

They wouldn't need to resort to this if they blocked transfers to servers with high populations properly. Here on Illidan we know that the realm will be plagued with queues (already happening) and overpopulation when BC launches...going by warcraftrealms numbers, we have slightly more people than Mal'Ganis and yet every week that passes we see more transfers arriving.
We shouldn't have to say goodbye to half of the established server population just because Blizzard can't stop the ebayers from transferring to a realm with a cool name/good reputation.

Skywall is 24th on the server pop list and despite us never really having many high end raid guilds, my guild is most progressed on horde and we've only killed 3 bosses in naxx, we do have over 300 people queues every night. I have posted this on the realm forums and on the guild forums, its going to be a good time finally getting these realms split up.

Moreover, Skywall is still a "suggested" realm when people first sign up for the game, which really isn't helping when we're only 9k people short of kargath the post populated server.

I feel sorry for the 23 servers more populated than us, and hope they bring this about quickly.

That's actually a common misconception. If you ever get the "Suggest a Realm" thing while you already have characters on a server, it'll always try pointing you to a server you already have characters on, assuming of course the options you select match up with the server type your existing characters are on.

It's only "Suggested" to you because you already have character on that server, if Skywall truely was still a recommended server then your queues would be going up much more steeply :P

Edit: Damn, beaten to it >_<

I'll have to pass this information on to the rest of my fellow skywallians that are too dense to figure this out on our own.
:D

Ya, we've (Skywall) only had one moment of fame on the suggested realm list- last year, morning of the day after Christmas for about 2 hours- we had level 1's pouring in like a flood, shot us up into miserable queue's that took 4 months to taper off. Since we'd been a pretty healthy med pop server before and we were a suggested realm for such a short period I assume it was a mistake o.o

Queue's came back in late November and have been gradually building ever since. We're over 600 queue's, btw. I hit a 620 one last night. =( This makes me a sad panda.

By the same token I don't think we have a large enough raiding community (at the least) to really split it. I mean how would that work? We barely have/had (Since Immix is doing bizzaro things atm) the raider population to maintain 3 Naxx guilds, and of those all three were importing transfers on a semi regular basis to keep from literally consuming each other. Split the top guilds in two and half the "feeders" and the casuals would pretty much own the server while raiding died. I don't know how they manage it, but the sheer number of casual/semi casual folks on skywall is astounding.

I'm hopeful that, like free transfers on/off servers they'll skip over us. =) I'll sit through my 600 queue's if it menas that I can still play on the same server with all the folks I've known since day 1.

I am curious as to how the realm servers are set up and managed from the perspective of queues. Uldum is fairly low population (looks like about 10K from the US realms stats) but we still have 300+ queues on a regular basis since December and it is just getting worse. Are all servers the same size (cpus, memory, etc.)? Are we more likely to be on old hardware with correspondingly low queues? Or do we have fewer overall players as per US realms but those players are more active than many other servers?

I think that's actually the real problem; I know if something like that was going to happen, my guild would go to one of the options.

And since we all have friends in other raiding guilds, we'd talk to them, and odds are we'd all wind up on the same side of the partition. Most of my friends ingame are in raiding guilds, and like you said: you want to keep playing with the people you've been playing with. Hell, I talk to our horde counterparts pretty regularly (PvE, so we all have opposite-faction alts if for no other reason than to chat with people on the opposite faction), I'd bet that *they* would ask.

So now we have all the raiders (or at least the raiders in the same tier of content) likely to head to the same partition. So, best case you wind up splitting into a raider/non-raider grouping. More likely, *everyone* finds out and tries to head to the same partition. In which case either Blizzard has to force people to go where they don't want to, or you wind up with a continuing overfull server, or you wind up with one server full of active players and one server a ghost town.

Absolutely Bekah, I agree 100%. Horde side, we've got 3 guilds that have downed at least 1 boss in naxx, two of them only downing anub(Osmo/Synergy). We(Defiance) have had server xfers coming to us constantly and we've recruited them to suffer through our attrition problems, up to November we were raiding 7 nights a week, and naxx was 4 of those 7 nights.

This leads to about 4,600, out of 5,000 Skywall Horde players that do not actively raid very much. If we were to split I am nearly 100% sure that Osmosis, Defiance, and Synergy would not end up on the same side as we have some bad blood between members of our guilds, which is /drama all the time.

IF skywall horde split, we would have some serious problems, 2500 players on the server? WoW would we suffer from lack of population. I don't feel sorry for you Bekah, you guys have plenty of people over there! Though I understand you guys have just as many casual players as us. Skywall is hurtin.

Durotan had a queue of 1k for a week or so during primetime hours. Since we've been selected for free transfers, the queues are down to 600 or so. An unfortunate side effect is that an already weak horde population (13kA:~4kH) is getting thinned as guilds are transferring off, basically narrowing an already narrow horde raiding scene. Horde's always been the red-headed stepchild on Durotan, but I think it's only going to get worse, kinda sad imo.

Unless a lot more people decide to play Horde and even out the factions I don't see how this will help the Horde much. Just going on a gut feeling here but a decent habitable realm should have at least 4k to 6k+ per faction, anything lower than that and the servers lower faction would have a tough time supporting a decent raid environment. Not to mention less items on the AH, tougher to find people with rare recipes and a lot more intangibles.

Using this US Realm Stats. Looking at the servers who would be eligible for a server split (realms with total pops of over 16k?) most of them support an Alliance population of over 10k and a split would leave them with around 5k players, a decent amount but most horde servers have a population ranging from a pathetic 2k to about 5 servers with 10k but mostly around 6k to 7k. A split would leave most horde realms with a populations under 4k effectively killing raiding on the server.

I'm surprised Blizzard cares this much about queue times and over-population.
Time and again proving we are in fact, in good hands

Thanks for this, Spiritwolf.

As I write this, two major raiding Hordeside guilds have already transferred off of Eonar, while only one such Alliance guild has moved (with another trying to trick everyone else into moving, it seems). As has been mentioned before, splitting realms only exacerbates an already bad problem, which is the faction population imbalance. The best analogy I can think of is in taxes - a man with $1,000 misses his 20% far more than a man with $1,000,000 misses his.

I'm not going to go so far as to say this is the "death" of Horde raiding, especially with the lowering of the raiding cap to 25. But I will say that it seems Blizzard really has no intention of seriously addressing this imbalance anytime in the future, period. So far the best they've thrown at us is "ZOMG HORDE HAS NO PURTY RACES IF WE GIVE U GUYZ A PURTY RACE ULL GET MORE PPL" (and the "Alliance needs more fugly" counterpart). If they aren't even willing to take preventive measures to ensure that the population goes even more out of whack, and are in fact actively aggravating the problem in an attempt to address a "larger" concern, then it's pretty much guaranteed that it's not a major concern for them.

Edit Add:

To further illuminate this problem, my old server, Feathermoon, has an Alliance guild that has killed Kel'Thuzad, with several others deep into Naxx. There is only one Horde guild that has cleared the Spider Wing (and so far have only killed Patch and Grobb once), with only one other guild that is even attempting to go through Naxx. That sole Horde "powerhouse" recently had to deal with losing roughly 10 of its hardcore raiders, including several tanks. Their solution? Take 10 of the best players from the other guilds on the server, including their fully geared T2 tanks to replace the ones lost.

GG Blizzard.

Have you seen Draenei females in action? I think they will be way more popular than Bloodelves.

Is it logical to think that more servers = more stress on Blizzard's hardware = Same, if not more lag than before?

Plus the fact that they've just released 10 servers in the last two months, and they were hinting at even more new servers at release of the expansion...

Or am I just assuming?

As long as they keep the split servers in the same Battlegroup why does it matter?

Sure world pvp will take a hit but its better than the alternative.