Season of Discovery Realm Consolidation

Once again, we really appreciate the discourse around this, it’s a topic with no easy single answer depending on your personal preferences for how you play World of Warcraft.

We’ve read through your feedback and debated internally. We are going to move forward with this change. Exact date and details will come soon, but you shouldn’t have to wait long!

I’ve mentioned it a few times but one more time, unfortunately Connected Realms is not a technology we can leverage for Season of Discovery, the amount of time that it takes to plan and implement does not fit with remaining time in the Season. We have some ideas to make sure we can avoid this entire topic for future Classic iterations!

Appreciate the discussion so far, please keep it coming. To answer a few questions I’ve seen that I can answer -

Name Collisions
We understand this is a pain point and was the reason for the Connected Realms technology “back in the day”, it is unfortunately a very expensive process from both time and resources perspective. It is a possibility but the timeline would be far in the future.

When?
Not now? I know that is an awkward answer but some of the timing on this is dependent on feedback and a couple of other external factors. At least a week and we will give several days notice when a date is decided.

When Season of Discovery launched we were excited to leverage some technology improvements that allowed us to achieve significantly higher realm populations than ever before, and we’ve had a goal of seeing all Season of Discovery players of each ruleset playing on the same realm.

To reach that goal, we will soon open Free Character Transfers from all Season of Discovery realms to one single PvP realm and one single PvE realm in each region (where applicable). These free transfers and all origin realms will remain available for the rest of Season of Discovery, but with the origin realms closed to new players.

Most of the origin realms currently still have healthy populations, and we recognize that moving characters can be disruptive to player communities, so this is not a decision we take lightly. Faction balance on the PvP realms is also a concern for many players, and we’re pleased to note that daily active players across all PvP realms has been a near perfect 50/50 split. This consolidation should not impact faction balance. Ultimately we believe, and have seen from player movement, that people want to be with as many others as possible.

Thank you all for joining us in this journey through Season of Discovery. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone take on the final phases together!

–The WoW Classic Development and Server Teams