What Will Happen to OCE Realms in Season of Discovery?
After the recent Free Character Transfers in Season of Discovery for both NA and EU realms, OCE players have been stuck wondering what's going to happen to their servers? While Blizzard is continuing to listen to player feedback on the matter, there appear to be 3 options on the table: 1) characters on the Penance realm will receive transfers to Wild Growth, 2) Shadowstrike will be converted into a PvE realm and transfers will open from Penance to Shadowstrike, or 3) transfers from OCE servers to NA.
Free Character Transfers in Season of Discovery
This is sadly one of the options that is not possible, “we know you have the technology” yes, we do, it’s utilizing Modern World of Warcrafts sharding infrastructure. Unfortunately a lot of changes made to support Vanilla like gameplay with Classic World of Warcrafts launch changed a lot of functionality to re-create “Realm” based eco-systems.
Being completely transparent with you, it is an insurmountable amount of code changes to make for Season of Discovery to be able to support cross-region style sharding. It sounds like it should be so easy because Modern already does it, that code doesn’t exist in Classic and has actively been developed around to make some Classic content work. It’s a huge amount of interconnected code to unravel and beyond what we have engineering support for right now.
Long term note, we are absolutely talking about making changes to this to better support how Classic flavours of World of Warcraft are actually utilized by you the players. But that doesn’t help this conversation.
As far as this larger topic, our options are few. But we’ll share some of the things that are on the cards for OCE for you to offer thoughts and feedback on.
- Penance, FCMs open to Wild Growth.
a. Lots more players, lots more ping.
b. Doesn’t address Shadowstrike. - Convert Shadowstrike into a PvE realm, open FCMs from Penance to Shadowstrike.
a. Penance is a very small realm, this doesn’t move the meter much.
b. Does this
