Attrition, Regression and Nazjatar

Nazjatar is a bit on an oddity. It was started just a few days before the Burning Crusade (January 4th, 2007) to transfers only from: Illidan, Spinebreaker, Daggerspine, Destromath, and Mal'Ganis. It then opened its doors to new characters the day TBC was released (January 16th, 2007). So most of its players left from high population servers to get a fresh start or wanted to reroll a new character on a new server for a fresh start. Either way you have people who deemed their former situation as unpleasant and wanted to start a new on what they assumed would be greener pastures.

Since the day it opened and saw an influx of player transfers and rerolls it has slowly been losing those players. At one point it was the least populated US realm in WoW and has since shifted to the top 20 least populated. It is bad on the Horde side (5,974), but even worse for the Alliance (1,546). It is tough to keep guilds together, even harder to get a 25 man raid guild together and harder still to actually make 25 man progress. Two horde and recently one alliance guild have had success in doing so. Nascent seems to be the golden child of the realm, WTF seems to have broken up with a large number of their members going to Nascent and Demise have only recently found success.

The rest of the guilds, FBD included, are left to rinse and repeat the recruitment cycle. If and when we hit a wall in our progress we will inevitably lose members. When we do we have to feed from the 10 man guilds and start to gear a new generation of 25 man raiders. This starts the process over for the 10 man guilds and the cycle continues to repeat it self. With the current population we face a limited resource, which only allows for one or two guilds to progress. It is on the guilds to fix the problem (mergers or stealing players) or on Blizzard (free transfers or realm mergers). I don't see either happening any time soon, so we will be stuck in the cycle for the foreseeable future.

Nazjatar's population issues seem to carry over to the battleground (Shadowburn) as well. We are significantly under represented in the top 100 of three brackets. Currently we field no teams in the top 100 for 2v2, one team in the top 100 for 3v3 and one team in the top 100 for 5v5. With our player pool so small it can only lead to a select few excelling, just like the realms raiding scene.