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Blizzard to merge less-populated WoW servers with more popular ones

Blizzard to merge less-populated WoW servers with more popular ones

Games developer and publisher Blizzard has outlined its plans to merge less popular World of Warcraft servers with ones that have more players.

In a forum postas spotted by PCGamer - community manager Randy "Kaivax" Jordan said that the firm had been looking into the populations of every server and would be linking those with lower player counts to those with more users.

"We’ve now completed a comprehensive study of realm populations for every realm in the world. Over the next two-to-three months, we’re going to connect the low-population realms to other existing realms," Jordan wrote.

"This process will take place during scheduled maintenance, connecting a few realms each week, until we’ve connected every low-population realm in every region to a substantially larger population of players.

"As this project unfolds, we will post notices in advance of each week’s connections in the appropriate regions and languages. During each maintenance period, everything will be automatically combined for the affected realms. When maintenance is complete, players on affected realms will log into Battle for Azeroth and find that they’re now part of a larger connected-realm community. At the same time, we’ll merge the appropriate realm discussion forums."

Blizzard recently announced that it had banned more than 74,000 accounts from the retro World of Warcraft Classic for using cheats such as bots in the game.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.