Blizzard Announces Server Merges for World of Warcraft Burning Crusade Classic

gamerant.com:

Blizzard announced in a blue post on its forums that low-population World of Warcraft Classic: The Burning Crusade servers will be merged this summer, in an effort to maintain healthy server populations. This is going to be effecting a large group of both NA and EU based servers.

The first expansion of World of Warcraft Classic was released on June 1, 2021. High population servers such as Faerlina, Herod, and Whitemane were subjected to lengthy queue times. As the expansion progressed, players started leaving the game in droves and certain servers began to die out entirely.

World of Warcraft Classic: Fury of the Sunwell Update is Live

Queue times and heavily populated servers aren't unique to World of Warcraft Classic. Blizzard offered free transfers to low population realms from specific realms, but it didn't help. Instead, it inflated already heavily populated servers while driving lower-populated servers to the extreme. There were restrictions based on server type, but those are going to be lifted. Blizzard will be consolidating any characters on the remaining low population servers onto others with higher populations. The consolidation and retiring of realms will be happening on August 9, 2022, during the weekly maintenance. Blizzard has yet to release where characters will be transferred to, but free transfers off low-population realms are still available.

Population issues and faction imbalance in World of Warcraft, both classic and live, have been normal since release. Long-time players tend to go Horde over Alliance because of their advantage in PvE content. This creates huge chasms across many servers. Alliance players experience griefing issues in the open world (especially on PvP servers). Horde players are in