Our Plea To Blizzard

Dragonblight EU has been around since the launch of vanilla, and Ghostlands EU went live on January 15th 2007 at 23:00 GMT, just one hour before The Burning Crusade was launched. They are both established servers with a long history, and hold some of the original players that helped make WoW a thing. There are still even some of the original guilds around!

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However, over the years, the Horde population has diminished, especially since the introduction of Faction Change in WotLK. The current state of Ghostlands/Dragonblight Server is dire for Horde (and not much better for Alliance I presume!) Just finding players to keep guilds going is getting harder every week, with people constantly trickling off to Draenor, Tarren Mill and more, faction changing, or just leaving the game completely.

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Guilds raiding here have dropped, with 79 in AtBT of which 20 were Horde, 64 in Uldir of which 19 Horde, 43 in BoD of which 10 are Horde, and only 21 in CoS of which 6 are Horde, it is clear that numbers able to field raiding teams are dropping to an all time low when compared to earlier expansions. Even just comparing to HM and BRF in WoD, there were 143 guilds, of which 43 were Horde. Imagine what it was like in WotLK?

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Getting accurate figures is hard, but you have access to any metrics needed so you will know the TRUE state of the server. We have done a survey recently though, and discovered that out of 1,010 guilds found 3 sources, wowprogress.com, wowrealmpopulation.com, and primarily, the games own guild finder. Only 167 have more than 30 characters in them. These 167 guilds comprise of 26,184 members, however we believe that 6,226 characters are what YOU consider inactive, ie, not logged on in between 2.5 and 3 years. That is over 1/4 of the population who are inactive!!! However, we can see from guild rosters that many more are ACTUALLY inactive.  Only 4,375 characters are 111 - 120 ie. playing BfA content, with 1,339 not yet 120. This means that the number of characters in a position to assist guilds with raiding, pvp and Mythic+ is only about 1/10 of the servers population.

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We found out of 1,009 Horde guilds there are:

- 29,801 characters,

- 7,698 inactive (or under level 10),

- 140 GM's inactive,

- 3,169 level 120,

- 1,448 level 111-119,

- 5,835 level 101-110,

-  4,606 level 91-100,

-  2,559 level 86-90,

-  1,449 level 81-85,

-  1,270 level 71-80,

-  1,539 level 61-70,

-  7,967 level 1-60.

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When I took the raw numbers from the games guild  finder in January 2019, there were 31,242 characters on our servers. Now I have finished in April 2019, there are only 29,801. That means that since I started this research, 1,441 characters have left the server or gone guildless, most likely the former.

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You can see by these numbers that guilds dont have a pool of active players to choose from, and if you look at the other 843 guilds armories you can actually see WHEN they "died". A guild with the majority of its characters at 100, or 85, you know that it was at this moment (WoD or Cata respectively) that the players of those guilds quit the game, and they have not been replaced here. Also, you can look at the guild finder description for guilds. When people created them, they were hoping for it to become an active guild. It wasn't created to be a 1 toon bank guild. Another indicator that a guild has died, is that it is fairly hard to get more than about 150 guild achievement points on your own. There are guilds which now only have 1 toon which have several hundred or even thousand achievements points. This WAS an active guild at some point, but is now dead.

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Ghostlands and Dragonblight is dying. There are only 6 guilds left raiding in this tier (CoS). We need a fresh source of players to bolster the guilds that we have, and to hopefully renew others. And remember, even though we theoretically have access to 3,147 level 120's, there will be many characters who belong to the one player! While battlenet and lfg gives us access to all players across the EU, it does NOT help keep the health of guilds in check. We will keep losing players who leave the server or quit the game fully, until there will be only 1 or 2 guilds AT ALL here, at which point, they will probably also disband.. So please don't take our own plans laid out on the home page as the remedy to this problem, we need YOU blizzard, to do something.

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Ghostlands and Dragonblight are NOT the only servers in this position. many of the low population servers will be able to relate to these issues, and even most of the medium population servers. 

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Blizzard, please review the situation here as you are killing the guilds on Ghostlands and Dragonblight.