Vaneras on the merging of high-pop realms
As we reported the other day, connected realms will soon be coming to WoW's EU servers. As expected, there have been a bevy of questions regarding the upcoming changes, and the EU community managers been busy keeping on top of updates. Connected realms represent a number of potential benefits that have many folks hopeful that their servers might get an injection of vitality, so Vaneras took some time to give a clarification of what the current intentions are behind the use of connected realms.
Some players on high-population realms, particularly high-pop realms with an enormous faction imbalance, have been looking toward connected realms as a potential way to correct that imbalance. Alas, Vaneras explains in his post that this functionality is not currently a way in which Blizzard intends to use connected realms technology. Connected realms are specifically focused on improving the situation of small-population servers. If you play on a small server, you're likely familiar with many of the problems they face: few guild options, stagnant economy, very high prices for essential raiding supplements such as gems, glyphs, and enchants, as well as increased difficulty in tackling group content. These are the types of problems connected realms are intended to alleviate.
Vaneras further explains that, because of the limitations of the existing technology, merging very high population servers just is not physically possible at the moment. The technology may expand or evolve in the future in ways that may make it possible, but for now, it's not an option. The full blue post is under the break.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but Connected Realms are only targeted for low populated servers, and Kazzak is high/full server... so it won't be connected. At least not in the near future.
The primary purpose of the connected realms feature is indeed to improve the situation on low population realms, to reinvigorate said realms. Currently that means that some of the highest population realms will not be connected with other realms, but it is a possibility that this may change in the future.
We are very much aware that we have some high population realms that have a less than optimal faction balance, but the situation on those particular realms is a harder one to resolve exactly because the population is already at(or close to) capacity there. The Connected Realms technology implemented with the latest patch will allow us to do some great things to improve the population on many realms, but there are still technical limitations on how high a population the system can manage, and this means that it is very hard to improve things like faction balance on realms that have a very high population. Perhaps we will be able to expand or evolve the connected realms technology in the future so that it can help improve faction balance on all realms, but although this is something we can look into for sure, it is not certain that this will be possible.
Saying this doesn't mean that we are just going to ignore the situation on those high population realms, it just means that it may be a while longer before we have a proper solution that can resolve that particular issue... it is not an option to make players change faction or transfer to another realm against their will, and that means a proper solution will have to be one that doesn't involve forcing people.
Once realms have been connected and the populations on currently low and medium realms are healthy again, then perhaps things like FCMs from current very high population realms to the connected realms will become more attractive.
