There are free realm transfers for those who want to take the coward’s way out. Just know when the war is won, you will beg Blizzard for paid transfers back to where you once called home, and they will deny you.

Continuing off Donut’s Classic WoW Realms: By The Numbers, we are taking a look at two realms in particular today. We “took the coward’s way out” and have left Herod in favor of Heartseeker. Donut has been spending nearly all day sitting on a character running the classiccensusplus addon, collecting data on our new home.

Including inactive players, Herod and Heartseeker have populations of 78,038 and 18,944 respectively. Herod is more than four times the size of Heartseeker.

I can feel the total population difference in queue times and auction house only. The amount of players I see out in the world or in major cities has not changed insofar as I can see on my screen.

Economy

In the first hours after our transfer, the first wave of buyers remorse came over in the form of auction house scanning. The number of auctions posted was significantly smaller than what Herod presented, and the prices of the listed auctions were all over the place. It felt like we were on a brand new server…and we were. Realm data for Heartseeker showed that transfers to the realm more than doubled the total population, and the active player count during peak hours had almost tripled.

Less than one-week post-transfer and prices on materials are approaching similar ranges to that of Herod. There are still markets with volatility (crafted gear, leveling epics), but the sticker price of a 12 slot bag is barely more than that of market value for cloth.

PvP

My experience is limited to zones ranging between 33 and 40.

• Do Horde attack Alliance? Far less aggressively, as a whole.
• Do Alliance attack Horde? Nope, apparently we’re all still scared pansies who rarely help allies.
• Is the density of Alliance to Horde balanced? No, you can tell Alliance slightly outnumbers Horde.
• Is questing as a group still required in Stranglethorn Vale? Yup.

Dungeons

At first, finding a group for Scarlet Monastary was not the instant invite environment as before. Buyers remorse set in quickly for many of us. LookingForGroup (/4 or /5, depending on your participation in WorldDefense) was dead in comparison to Herod and the area outside the Monastary held only two or three groups.

Now, a few days later, finding dungeon groups is almost at the speed it was on Herod.

Questing

• Targeted single kill quest mobs may require waiting for a spawn. No change from Herod.
• Group quests are still easy to coordinate and fill.
• Zones feel full and active.

Life at 60

There is no sugar-coating it, Alliance dominates the scene at 60.

I have encountered (and killed, with help) a number of level 60 Horde, so they do exist outside of major cities, however, low their number may be. Our hope is the current Horde do not get discouraged from the slightly less than favorable population ratio and do stick it out to 60. The last thing we want is “I told you so” when waiting in extended BG queues in the coming phases of Classic.

tl;dr:

Heartseeker is basically a new server and is growing accordingly. There is concern over faction balance at end game, but the general attitude of our community members appears to be more positive than what Herod was regarded with. The general trend appears to be following that of a new server. More people are leveling from scratch or have transferred from a low level and zones are bottle-necking in the 25 to 45 range.

Whether this realm survives long term still remains to be seen.

Note: All numbers and napkin-math™ are based entirely on the relative accuracy provided by https://wowpop.appspot.com/. These numbers are NOT up to date at the time of posting.