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"There's no single-right answer for this issue, because different people want different things, and lots of apparently obvious solutions have non-obvious consequences," Aggrend writes.
Server imbalances are not new to Burning Crusade Classic or WoW Classic. Stories have long circulated about certain servers in the old school MMORPGs being populated by nearly 90% Horde players or vice versa. Oftentimes when a server looks to become dominated by one particular faction, guilds on the opposing faction, rather than continuing to suffer through it, will pay to transfer to a server with a healthier population balance. This is particularly important for PvP servers, where a healthy struggle between the factions is key to the server's appeal.
Aggrend goes on to give an example of how attempting to "fix" issues for certain groups of players in regards to server balance could unintentionally hurt the experience of more players than it helps. He writes to imagine a scenario where one PvP server has a population that is 40% Alliance and 60% Horde. While most players might be happy, a subset of Alliance players aren't thrilled about being outnumbered. https://serverlist101.com/ to enable free character transfers on that realm, those unhappy Alliance players would transfer to a server with a healthier population balance. But the side effect would be that the server those players once lived on would become a 75% Horde server, making the experience worse for players who were content with the previous server balance.
"In the above example, doing something well-intentioned to benefit the unhappy 20% would have actually hurt more people than it helped," Aggrend writes. "This is part of the dilemma and what causes us to take a lot of time to analyze things before taking actions that affects realm populations and faction balance."
While Blizzard did eventually enable free character transfers for certain Burning Crusade Classic servers in November 2021, Aggrend goes on to admit that the situation could have been communicated more clearly, and that Blizzard should have enabled free character transfers on certain servers sooner.
Other players have called for low population servers to be merged together, but while it sounds simple on paper, Aggrend writes that WoW has historically almost never merged servers together. That's for a number of reasons, ranging from players losing their unique names to merges destroying a server's unique community. Blizzard, Aggrend writes, doesn't like any solution that would force a large number of players to do something they might not want to, as would be the case with server merges.
Aggrend writes that the subject is a big one, and that it might be too big for a forum discussion. It's for that reason the team is planning to host a live chat discussion with the WoW Classic community to talk server imbalance and other issues. Aggrend writes that more details on the community chat will be revealed in the coming weeks.
The issue of server imbalance and merges isn't unique to WoW Classic. Amazon's MMO New World has also struggled with the issue, with the game recently beginning to merge low population servers into one another.