The developers of World of Warcraft have announced that more realms will be linked. This has happened before. This time, the smallest German realms are up next, bringing several advantages for them.
Which realms are involved? In a new post in the official forum, Vyraneer from Customer Support announced that some realms are to be linked. They will be grouped together in the following clusters:
- The Eternal Vigil / Silver Hand with The Consortium, The Syndicate, The Abyssal Council, The Argus Watch, The Death Knights, and Cult of the Damned
- The Mithril Order / Council of Dalaran with The Night Watch, Explorer’s League, Deathwatch, and Circle of Cenarius
- Lizard Cauldron, Mal’Ganis, and Taerar with Blackhand
The first two groups consist of role-playing servers, which have traditionally been less populated. According to wowprogress, each of these realms alone has fewer than 2,000 players and is among the smallest in Europe. For comparison: The largest German realm alone (Antonidas) has 13,026 players.
What exactly will happen with these realms? On Thursday, August 27, the realms will be merged – in time for the presentation of the new cinematics. This means players from the respective realms can:
- play together in mythic raids
- use the auction house together
- trade
- join guilds and invite other players from the respective realms
All of this seemingly serves as preparation for the upcoming expansion Shadowlands, to help the otherwise sparsely populated realms become a bit fuller again.
Some of the realms have already played together using phasing and cross-realm features, especially for war mode. The biggest difference now is that players can trade with each other and raid mythically together.
New links – advantages and problems
Why is this important? More players are important for a healthy climate in pretty much all activities. They mean more activity in the auction house and more choice of players for guilds.
This allows for more raid groups to be formed and maintained for mythic raids, as they could not team up across servers for a long time. It also saves you a server transfer if you were planning to switch anyway.
If a realm has too few players, the tendency for remaining players to leave also increases. In WoW Classic, for example, too few players on the RP realm quickly led to frustration.
Consequently, many players are glad that this link is now happening. Some even wish that all RP realms were linked together since they would harmonize well anyway.
They might actually connect the two links and set them together. I’m already praying to everything that listens.
Nayden in the WoW forum
However, some role-players see this critically. They are satisfied with smaller groups and the people they already know.
What should I pay attention to? If the linking occurs, you should keep some things in mind. Forum user Oryczy has put together a useful list in the forum. The key points from it are:
- don’t create auctions until the switch to avoid duplicated or lost items
- avoid using the guild bank until the switch. As an officer, take gold and important items into your inventory and store them there until after the transfer
- it may happen that you can’t participate in mythic raids this week because the same rules apply as during character transfers
The merger is likely happening now so that no major problems arise at the release of the new expansion and shortly thereafter. There is no concrete date for this yet, but there are already several reasons that point to November 10 as the release of Shadowlands.
