Cross-Realm Zones Update

As promised, we wanted to give you all an update on what we’ve been working on with regards to the cross-realm zone feature. Just to recap, cross-realm zones are meant to improve the leveling experience by increasing the amount of people in the same zone together, while also allowing you to quest with your Real ID or BattleTag friends. It’s a complex feature, and there are still some technical issues that we’re continuing to work to address. We’re committed to further refining the system so that it provides the best possible gameplay experience.

This is an update on the technical issues we’ve been working on and some of the progress we’ve made.

Time Zone Jumps

Right now we have a three-hour time zone differential limit on which realms can be mixed together. This is intended to reduce day/night jumps from occurring when crossing CRZ zones, as well as time zone jumps that may cause world events to end earlier than intended. We agree that the day/night jump can be jarring, and planning for last minute turn-ins for events can be difficult and frustrating.

We’re still discussing how to best approach this situation. One of the ideas being floated around is potentially changing how regional time zones work on a very fundamental level. It’s a change we’ve been discussing for quite a while, and perhaps the CRZ system provides the catalyst to go ahead and make it. We’ll keep you updated as we consider the best solution.

CRZ Transition Lag and Performance

There are still some tech-related quirks that are being hashed out, including framerate hitching when crossing into a CRZ zone, reports of performance issues, and resource nodes/NPCs/players disappearing. We’re still investigating each specific cause and working to smooth these types of issues out.

We also continue to see some reports that people are being dismounted when crossing borders. Single-player mounts should not being doing this, so please post any details in the Bug Report forum if it continues happening. There are technical limitations preventing multi-passenger mounts from holding separate characters when crossing a zone boundary. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that we can quickly or easily fix.

Despite a few lingering technical issues, we’re happy with how CRZ is populating the leveling areas with other players, and helping to once again foster MMO social experiences in the 1-85 content. The process for tuning CRZ is of course one that’s ongoing, and we’re committed to continuing to work on it and iron out any remaining issues as quickly as possible. If you do have bugs to report, please provide details and the reproduction steps (if possible) on the Bug Report forum. Providing detailed information helps tremendously, and when possible, add your report to a relevant thread before creating your own.

Thank you again for your feedback. We’re continuing to monitor reports and we’ll provide updates as they become available.

Reference: This is an update to the initial thread discussing how Cross-Realm Zones work.