If you can send gold and raid cross-realm, what's the point of realms anymore?

[Deleted]

Just curious because there doesn't seem to be a point to realms anymore

[Svad]

Im pretty sure you cant send gold cross realm?

Edit. Unless its merged realm.

[Splenda]

Im pretty sure you cant send gold cross realm?

Edit. Unless its merged realm.

This is what I thought, too.

[Shuji V2]

Im pretty sure you cant send gold cross realm?

Edit. Unless its merged realm.

But you still can't trade gold/items with merged realms? Then why would a transfer be any different? =/

[Jewsco]

Im pretty sure you cant send gold cross realm?

Edit. Unless its merged realm.

You cannot send gold cross realm or cross faction. The kinda loop hole is battle pets since they are account bound. Even that can be risky as pets sell differently between realms and the ah gets its cut.

[Deleted]

the tech seems to be moving to phasing out realms if you ask me. especially if you look at how cities and invasions are phased into shards now, with shards being generated on a per need basis. wouldn't surprise me if all zonees eventually went that way. after that all that is left is crossrealm guilds and region wide AH, but that's still years off if they are even considering it.

[imoom]

There is stuff that you cant do crossrealm at the moment.
But the point of realms? none imho.

Im hoping that blizzard will merge it down to one big glorious server. (with nice tech to reglate how many instances of each zone/area there should be etc) maybe still have difference for language, and ofc PvP, PvE

[3DTyrant]

There is stuff that you cant do crossrealm at the moment.
But the point of realms? none imho.

Im hoping that blizzard will merge it down to one big glorious server. (with nice tech to reglate how many instances of each zone/area there should be etc) maybe still have difference for language, and ofc PvP, PvE

Wouldn't that maybe screw RP servers over though?

[the boar]

multiple realms were started because having 5million players on one mega-realm in 2005 would've been horrific.

technology has moved on, and the sense of community among realmsters that existed years ago has dwindled - not just because of group finder, it is a generational thing as well. realm transfers started it before group finder was implemented, and that is what started the snowball really. before that, if you ruined your rep on your realm you just had to start over somewhere else. transfer enabled you to take your character with you, and if you could easily flag yourself for a free rename when you did it to completely disappear, websites that tracked characters were not as sophisticated as today.

well that went a bit off-topic, but anyway. one mega-realm and todays many realms sharded together are almost the same idea, except instead of being "bobthesmasher69" you get to be "bobthesmasher-someotherrealm." the trading restrictions are somewhat eroding with the ability to trade non-ilvl upgrade loot to people within your group, but i think each realm (or group of realms in merge cases) will retain their individual economies for a while yet.

i can only see the economic cataclysm (merging of auction houses and enabling trade, effectively merging every realm together) occurring if the player-base fell below 1million.. and to be honest i don't see wow dying off any time soon, so this isn't even worth thinking about this decade.

so the tl;dr version,
the point of realms: technology did not exist to provide a fun environment for millions of people to play on one server 11 years ago.

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edit: i am not really anti- or pro- merging. i think cross-realm is a cool thing. my realm died years ago population-wise, so cross-realm has enabled me to have fun playing all my alts without spending hundreds of pounds to transfer them all to another realm which could also potentially die at some point.

[Lochton]

Just curious because there doesn't seem to be a point to realms anymore

But you can't do any of these things, unless it is a merged server cluster. Else, no.

[Deleted]

the next step is making guilds cross-realm too;
then they should just remove realms or merge most of them