World of WarCraft: Server Mergers Not an Option

At one point or another many of us have had a stint on a dead server. The kind of place were there are only a handful of Karazhan guilds and maybe one guild that's managed to down Gruul (or, in the case of many servers, no big raid guilds and one that's farming Illidan).

In many ways, the problem is self-propagating, as the lack of decent end-game progression immediately available causes frustrated players to transfer off the server in droves and nobody ever really starts anything. As new players ding 70, others transfer off, and the population never really grows. Many of these servers are also in "dead" Battlegroups, where even the lure of hardcore PVP isn't enough.

How do we fix these problems? There's no quick answer. The 'recommended' tab was created in order to provide emphasis on low pop realms for people new to the game and has generally worked. One of the oft-suggested solutions is server mergers, which many other games (Dungeons and Dragons online most recently) use in order to maintain healthy server populations. Drysc is quick to remind us of the problems with this:

We're certainly looking at additional means to help realms that have lower populations.

There are a couple issues with merging realms though that we would need to take into heavy consideration if one were to be considered. As many of the lower population realms are PvP, faction balance has to be taken into careful consideration. Would a merge worsen, improve, or leave any faction balance unchanged? Would a merge move the population up too high, queuing or leading to queues for the realm after that point? Do we have realms of the same time zone and type that would merge well under these conditions? There also many logistical issues with merges which ultimately effect the end user, such as conflicting character and guild names. So, in the end, a merge would only be considered if all other possible options have been completely exhausted.

We're not just throwing recommended tags up on realms, and calling it a day. The recommended tag has done a lot of good for a lot of realms, but if we're seeing that they're no longer helping reach the type of population numbers we would like to see, then we would investigate alternate means. That's sort of where we're at now.

What does this mean for you, the level 70 on a low pop server desperate for some raid action? You've only got two options: transfer to a launch server and join the never ending queue of people looking for a raid guild, or engage in the long and arduous process of forming your own raid guild.