World of Warcraft → Are you on an imbalanced server?

After learning that the battle groups have been merged in the U.S. killing my PvP test but having already rolled a minority faction toon on the single most imbalanced server, I think I still want to level him to 90 here.

So I would like to here people's experiences with leveling, queue pops, economy and general feelings about being vastly outnumbered on a server.

Maybe it is because I am coming from a very large evenly split server, but the idea of really being outnumbered is appealing.

So how good or bad is it and what should I expect?

Imagine the chaos of merging these two servers (from Reddit):

WoW cannot merge servers!!!!!!

I have toons on both servers. One of the best things about the higher pop is that the AH is wonderful for making gold and selling. Stormrage is PVE though, so the possibility of the merge is around 0.

I play on Sargeras, which is very heavily Alliance leaning. I'm often surprised to see a single horde player out in the world in a non CRZ zone. Here's my thoughts:

1. Economy is great. AH has plenty of stuff to buy and prices hold pretty well in general. Some items face deflation, such as gatherables and potions. This isn't necessarily bad unless you make your living on them.

2. There are always groups to join for pug raids / rbgs. Tons of them almost every night.

3. Maintaining a guild roster seems to be harder than on some other servers I've played. With the large number of successful guilds, some people seem less dedicated to their guild, knowing that if needed they can find another progressing guild or pug the content moderately well.

4. There's massive availability of arena partners, be it for points or for rating. Constant trade spam for arena/rbg seems to dominate all other trade spam on Sargeras.

5. There's very little "recognition" on the server. If you aren't Midwinter (World Rank #17) then you're just another guild in the pool. It's not like smaller servers where the handful of top guilds are well known or even respected.

yes... intentionally. server balance only matters on PvP servers... and I spit on PvP... so server balance means nothing to me.

oh ok

I started on Azeroth in vanilla, which back then I couldnt tell you the server A/H ratio. I moved to Mug'thol PvP server for BC and stayed through WotLK.
When I started on Mug'thol it was a brand new server and the move was free. From it's opening it went from balanced to becoming so heavily Horde populated that all of the big raiding guilds left and mine followed. Mug'thol is almost as bad as Malgainis.
For Cata I went to Stormrage and have been there every since (well technically my toons live in the nether of Stormrage since I quit in October).

When I left the economy was awesome. I did (and still do) miss the PvP server and open world PvP though.

Imbalanced server... What about Mal'Ganis? (holy crap)

The two servers I've experienced are Eredar and Altar of Storms; both pretty equally balanced. Both medium to low populations. You'd think the experience would be the same also but it hasn't been. On Altar of Storms, there were always PuG calls every night. It occurs on Eredar, but not nearly as frequently. (LFM Sha excluded). Same thing with guild recruitment. Myself and two other guilds are the only three guilds actively recruiting on Eredar. Seems to me that the population is more established and raid with their guilds more than PuGs. Both servers have seen a huge loss in player base transferring to other servers though.

AH experience has been about the same. I'm sure world PvP in CRZ areas would be the same (because it takes the server out of the equation essentially) but I don't see the same level of ganking in Pandaria on Eredar that I experienced in AoS. I was Horde on AoS and not a day went by that I didn't get ganked by a lvl 90 Alliance player on my journey to max level. On Eredar, I rarely had that problem. Although I'm Alliance on Eredar so maybe it creates a theory that Alliance is where all the ganking occurs (counter-intuitive).

That server would have like 295k toons on it.

Talk about login queues.

agreed. I moved to a high pop server once... and immediately regretted it after my first login queue. Login queues are more infuriating than "extended maintenance"... and pvp.

Log in queues - I started off in Dalaran, and every year, like clockwork, between Christmas and New Years, you could plan on waiting anywhere from a few seconds to 15 minutes just to log in; the free character transfers to less populated servers were offered many times. Honestly, I have not run into queues in a couple years, so must be that they got something right

(Granted, I hardly ever visit my toons in Dalaran, so maybe ignorance is bliss. Anyone else on Dalaran??)

Hordeforlife - what is your infatuation with statistics and wacky surveys?

It is literally all you post about.

Just curious...

If the last three posts qualify as "literally all" then I guess...

As stated in the post, I had originally planned to test some PVP on imbalanced servers. Since I learned that Battle groupings have gone the way of the Dodo, I decided to find out more about life on severely imbalanced servers since I plan to go ahead and level.

/shrug

Last three?

You've been doing this for over a year...

Someone used to troll you about an old blog post/claim - I don't even remember who it was or what it was about...

Either way, I'm not picking on you - just an observation.

I like satistics myself, unfortunately this site is really not any sort of reasonable sample size to indicate much in most cases.

Maybe using the poll feature would be helpful?

Hey Vin,

ESO is going to kill WoW

/endthread

/endWoW

Thrall. I'm Alliance. But I have a couple horde monkeys.

Obvious troll is being too obvious.

Also 2/10

Dude, are you trying to get your fifth account banned?

Queues on Kil'Jaeden on MoP release were 2+ hours. I'd literally queue when I got home from work around 5 and it'd be ready when my son went to bed at 7.

^ This guy.... spelling out the complete word "queues".

Has WoW taught you nothing?