Blizzard Answers Your Questions About the Upcoming Realm Consolidation

Hey folks,

We’ve been reading through your feedback and we have some things we’d love to try and clarify as well as some updates on a few things we’re doing to make this as frictionless as we can within the time constraints we have. This may get a little techy in places and introduce you to some terms you’ve never heard before but its all in an effort to help explain some of our moves.

In no particular order!

1. What the heck are Connected Realms?

If you’re joining us for the first time, you may have missed when we performed realm connections in mainline World of Warcraft, and also in Vanilla Era. Connected Realms are a way for us to join realms in such a way that players on multiple realms can exist in the same physical space, they can raid together, join each others guilds, everything! Players on a Connected Realm will see a “-BobsRealm” amended to theirs or others names in the world denoting which realm they are from. The easiest way to think of this is a Surname in WoW.

2. Why aren’t you just doing Connected Realms with our existing realms, what is the point of these new realms?

Great question, we’ve mentioned before that Connected Realms would be the ideal solve here, but that it is just not a possibility for us. In full transparency mode, the reason is time, Connected Realms is a massive endeavor for us. It is something we’ve done …3? times in WoWs history and it is a massive task that involves a ton of bespoke work by our Database Engineers and usually months of QA testing time as we go through rounds of internal test connections and data validation. It is one of the most expensive (in terms of raw man hours) things we’ve ever done so while it does solve the problem of not having to move characters and guilds yourselves, it is just a massive chunk of work that the Server team cannot pick up as we are very busy with the largest most database heavy feature in WoWs history (hello Player Housing!) I understand this isn’t likely the answer you would like to hear but hopefully some transparency as to why helps.

So how can you connect these new realms then? Connected Realms to players is one thing, to the development team Connected Realms is a project that involves moving around and manipulating a massive amount of player data, but the other part of Connected Realms involves something we haven’t actually spoken about publicly which is Virtual Realms. As part of Connected Realms, the old realms become “Virtual” and are now hosted by a “Native” realm, this means they no longer run on their own hardware, they run on the Native realms hardware (Pagle in the US for example). These Virtual Realms behave just like a normal realm, you can see them in the Realm List, you can make characters on them, you can make Guilds on them, but since they are all sharing one parent Native Realm, all of them can talk to one another, group, raid, join guilds across the realms. So to solve the issue with players losing their character names during this realm consolidation process, by utilizing multiple new Virtual Realms, we can achieve a Connected Realm like state, give everyone an empty realm that has no blocked player or guild names on it, but without the crazy time consuming part involving the database moves.

We dropped a lot of new terms and tech names there you’ve not heard before, so the shorter recap is –

These new realms are pre-connected, and importantly, totally empty of players! This means we can avoid the large chunk of work that we can’t facilitate for you (the actual realm moves of your characters and guilds) but still give each of the larger realms a new realm to Free Transfer to that will have all of your character names and guild names available to you on.

3. Are you still going to be ‘freeing’ names up as mentioned earlier before the Connected/Virtual realm news?

Yes! We will still be bringing in the date that we consider accounts to be inactive and any names they have on them become eligible to be used by other players instead. Normally this date is several expansions ago as we do not like the shock it can cause to lose a name you have had for a long time, but for Classic Mists of Pandaria we will use a much more recent time to give maximum chance everyone still playing can get the names they desire. This will apply to all the existing realms such as Pagle, Grobbulus as well as the closing realms.

4. When exactly are the servers going live so I can secure my names?

Since it is a patch day, we won’t have a concrete answer on this, as you know we tend to post maintenance windows for patch days at 8 hours, but that can vary significantly depending on how the deploy goes. We’re very aware that this means a lot of uncertainty around when people need to be available to try and ensure they secure their names, also in Europe the patch time is significantly earlier in the morning than the US posing other problems.

We’re taking this seriously as everyone has strong connections to their names they have often had for the entire lifetime of Classic, so we are going to do our best to ensure that you are as close to as possible guaranteed your name on your servers destination realm. To do that, we are going to be closing character creation entirely on the destination realms for at least one week, likely two, depending how fast we see everyone moving. What does this mean in practice? If you try and create a new character on these realms, well, you can’t. The only way to get onto the destination realms is by performing a Free Character Transfer, which means you must already have the name you want on the character you are moving on your original realm. No one can take your name from you on the destination until we re-enable free-for-all character creation again.

We do not want to keep this lock in place any longer than we have to as it does create an impenetrable barrier to any new players coming in during this window, but we feel like this solution will ensure we can preserve your names for you for at least the first week. During this time we will continue to allow new and existing players to create characters on the original source realms, after we have finished with this character creation block on the destination realms, we will close the old realms to new players.

5. What are you doing about the Australian realms?

We mentioned previously but for now we are leaving the AU realms out of this process as a move to the US realms does result in a significant increase in latency, as such we want to ensure that the AU community overwhelmingly wants to move before we take action here.

6. Will you open transfers off Grobbulus?

At this time no, Grobbulus has a stable but relatively small population (by comparison, it would be a queued OG Vanilla realm!) and we would like to see how many people take the chance to join this unique environment first. If Grobbulus reaches a state where no one is having fun anymore, we will take action and offer free transfers off but we would like to wait and see how things settle first.

7. Re-creating a Guild is incredibly painful and expensive with bank tabs and achievements, reputation etc.

We definitely feel that, we are going to be making some temporary changes to try and make this transition a little less painful for everyone! With this weeks restarts the following changes will go live.

• Removed achievement requirements for heirlooms.
• Removed achievement requirements for purchasing the banner.
• Removed achievement requirements for purchasing 8th bank tab.
• Removed reputation requirement to buy a renown guild tabard
• Temporary buff to guild reputation (100% increase).
• Temporary reduced cost for guild bank tabs.

We were not able to find a solution to persisting Guild Achievements through characters moves in the time available, but hopefully removing some of the requirements to some of the player power/cosmetics that were attached to them will help make this less painful

We hope that this has helped address some of your concerns, but we appreciate that ultimately this change is not without a lot of friction. We are confident that the end result will be nothing but net positive for the rest of Mists of Pandaria.

Have a great weekend and we’ll see you on Tuesday!