WarcraftRealms.com

I don't know if we are all interested in looking at how connected realms are working...
But it is great to see how they are censused.
These realms now have the tracking to really see population levels at nearly any time of day!

So having been out of the loop for quite some time now, give me a quick run down on what the connected realms actually do?

They're merged-but-not-quite-merged; people get to keep their original names, and are shown as "Name-Realm" in UI if they're not from the same realm as you, but in other respects it behaves as though they're same realm; can group, trade, join guilds, the lot. And, of course, with it acting like one realm, running a census there covers all connected realms as well (thanks to some heavy rewriting of the addon from BOYD ), which makes censusing lesser-covered realms way easier, as you get several for the price of one.

Blizzard are slowly rolling it out, mainly with the smallest realms, the idea is to get the smaller realms up to similar population to high or high end of medium pop realms, although with some room so they don't get too queued. I'm predicting with the small size of a lot of realms, that there'll be some pretty big groups in the end, largest announced so far is 6 but I can see it getting higher!

It's certainly had a good effect on censusing; several realms which were only previously getting done maybe once a month by people like me or ER are now getting covered regularly by people on a realm they joined with - I was a bit shocked to spot three previously 0-0 realms with several hundred on each side the other day; I guess there was an active censuser on the 4th realm they merged with recently

Aha, sounds like a win all around, with the possible exception being Blizzard in expecting those low pop servers to have actually filled up healthy populations at some point.

Thanks for the clarification!

Yeah, it's seeming good so far, a few realms I cover have much improved population now, big bonus for the smaller realms. I'm hoping it may even eventually have a knock-on bonus effect for the overpopulated realms, as maybe the constant stream of people transferring to the highest pop realms will stop if the smaller realms become not-so-small; my own realm is one of the highest pop in Europe these days and it's seriously annoying when you'd like to actually play WoW, and not play "look at the queue sloooowly going down for an hour"