A few observations and a question to the community
Hello.
As a new player to Warmane's Tbc realms, I spent last two days talking to various people in the game (from guilds that cleared at least karazhan and tried other aspects of the game) and on several discords in an attempt to gauge which one of the two realms would be the one for me. These are my findings.
1. Both realms (technically, just one since Medivh is a copy-paste of Outland with locked 1x leveling) weren't developed specifically for Tbc, but instead are using Wotlk cores that have been downgraded to Tbc expansion and locked there, meaning a lot of both big and small problems, including raid content heavily nerfed not only on 2.4.3 measurements, but on Wotlk scale, enabling not even full groups in green gear to steamroll the available raids (as seen on numerous twitch streams).
2. As previously mentioned, other then the leveling rate and the cash shop, there are no differences between the two realms, since it was officially stated by mods here that they don't want to repeat what happened on Lord. It was not excluded that, in the future, there might be a basic boss health/damage tweak to make the content more challenging, however due to the smaller population numbers at the moment, that is unlikely to happen for now.
3. Aside from general preference (racials, looks, etc), due to lower population on Medivh, players started to gravitate towards one side more and more during the last week. While numbers were somewhat equal at start, now during peak times the difference is almost 500 players, steadily rising and becoming more and more of a problem. Without a doubt, soon this will become a huge issue, much larger then on a overly crowded realm like Outland. By trying both sides, I noticed leveling/dungeon groups are formed much faster on Horde and the playerbase is much more responsive then when I tried the other side. Also, I formed a couple quest groups in the early areas and quite a few players mentioned they started as ally, but are now moving to horde due to the population differences and to avoid lone-wolf leveling experience.
4. Due to the queuing annoyance on Outland, current Medivh players are expecting that more will visit this realm in the future. But the issue everyone is mentioning, other then 1x leveling rates, there isn't really anything blizzlike here since the content is set on the same values like on Outland (wotlk exp. overnerf). Hence why players I spoke to on Medivh are concerned about realms stagnation or even decrease in numbers.
5. Due to drop rate issues/vein overspawn at start, players that rushed ahead at start gained a huge monetary/material advantages that were never corrected. A player I talked to confirmed he filled not only his bank, but his guilds bank as well with so many profession mats that his guildies will never need to buy another jewel/essence (example) from auction house ever again. Also, due to insane drop rates at the very start, many players that rushed ahead to outland regions purchased epic flying mounts the moment they hit 70 with a lot of gold left to spare.
After this was corrected, drop rates were so severely adjusted that following players are now barely ever seeing a green item, not to mention a blue drop, probably in an attempt to salvage the economy. I noticed new players being disgruntled them having to pay the price for a starting error they haven't either participated in or caused themselves. Will this ever be normalized?
With this said, I'm curious what other players (other then the ones I talked to) think of what is Medivh's goal/appeal, as an alternate realm to the primary Outland, in form of raiding content/pvp?
