greatannouncements, great to see timelines, look forward to most ofthis.
not to nitpick but i would like to point out theres only 21 raidingguilds atm (me me da, onslaught, friend, friends, memento mori,synced, doomhaus, gulch trotters, risen, bohemia, kairos, blacklabel,control, u&v, agony, lost in sauce, redemption, hotline, orgrim,vanguard, and crimson)
ifi am mistaken, let me know
Are there really that many guilds? Do any of them do anything besidesraid log? Or is it just 5 guilds that have made other guilds to raidon their alts with?
Certainlynot representative of the 5 to 20 people I see in Org or If at anygiven time.
P.S.Vinnylee afk in Org for 25 hours a day doesn't count as highpopulation.
His list is quite correct. Hotline has stopped raiding, but he forgot Irae, who are still taking down C’Thun.
All these raiding guilds are active and the majority have cleared AQ40 or are progressing it. There is a bit of crossover, but I think no guild, aside from, perhaps, Gulch Trotters, has more than half a dozen players who are raiding with multiple guilds. As to hosting, Onslaught takes in a few Fireborn Clan-tagged players for some raids, Irae has some War Sole left, and KairoS brings in randoms to make up numbers, but that’s about it.
Reasons behind the grumbling towards Game Master statements like the one Davros made earlier primarily stem from the fact that, as officers in various raiding guilds, we actually monitor everything closely, so when we are told about "active characters/active IP" statistics, it seems obvious to us why relying solely on these parameters is somewhat misleading the staff. Plus, the population is now fragmented by time zone to a larger extent and players in established guilds raid log more. This is how it actually breaks down:
Alliance
SEA: Me Me Da, Friend
RU: Outplayed
EU: Memento Mori, Synced, Irae, Vanguard, KairoS, Doomhaus, Bohemia
NA: Risen, Unite and Vanquish, Control
AU: Gulch Trotters
Horde
EU: Agony, Orgrim, Friends, Redemption, Crimson, Lost in Sauce
NA: Onslaught, BlackLabel
If you think about K1 Alliance December 2015 you will notice that instead of Memento Mori, KairoS, Doomhaus and Outplayed were Horizon, Rebirth, Invictus and Blackwater. However, the latter were all active International guilds, while now Outplayed is a closed-in Russian enclave and some core players in Memento Mori and KairoS, like similar players in Synced, Irae, Vanguard and even the Czech Bohemia, have limited their in-game activity to raiding to a large degree.
The fact that the overall raiding population still remains, perhaps, slightly larger than it was a year ago, matters little, because these small bumps are split by timezone.
Kronos used to be an active, heavily EU Realm with a symbolic NA presence. With almost the same number of players and with many veterans limiting themselves to raiding, it is now also somewhat more balanced, time zone-wise, the effect of it being that there is not a single part of the day when Kronos looks crowded anymore, even during the Thursday & Sunday EU prime time, everyone being locked in instances at the time.
This is mainly
a consequence of the timeline imposed by Twinstar. We were promised a BWL release after enough guilds cleared MC, AQ40 after enough guilds cleared BWL, Naxxramas after enough guilds cleared AQ40. While the release of BWL was only slightly delayed, these promises were broken afterwards.
Instead of a healthy 4-5 months between MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxxramas, which would’ve had us killing KT sometime in July 2016, i.e. an almost perfect replica of the original 2005-2006 release, both timeline-wise and gearing-wise, we have been forced into this exhausting schedule which will have had us playing this patch for 2.5 years - a quarter of a decade - before we will be given the opportunity to engage KT.
Imagine Blizzard released Naxxramas in August 2007, as Kronos will likely release it now in August 2017, and think about the fact that this WoW is, not to put too fine a point, a bit less fresh than it was 11 years ago.
I do understand that Twinstar, in order to remain afloat, relies in large part on hundreds of characters being leveled, geared and abandoned over and over and over and over, but I do not see how launching a new Kronos after this one would’ve ended progress in summer 2016, a new Kronos which would’ve been
pristine, thoroughly “PTR-tested” during the previous release, with a committed 18 months timeline, would not have made for an even more financially successful decision, having captured the imagination of the thousands upon thousands of players flocking wherever else despite the high likelihood of another crash & burn and without even an inkling as to when or if Naxxramas will be out there.
EDIT: @Fei, as to your question, he wrote:
Today, the population on Kronos as a whole in comparison toearlier has more than doubled, going from twenty to more than fiftyactive raiding guilds. It has therefore taken some imagination tounderstand the argument parts of certain members of the community whohave expressed that Kronos as a whole is somehow is ‘dying’.
We do however recognize that a few months ago the population waseven higher than it currently is today (more so on Kronos I).
"as a whole"; K1+K2.
