Should there be a CRZ opt out?

[Wondercrab]

I've always felt like it should be optional. LFD and LFR are optional ways to group with a larger pool of players from beyond your own realm, and CRZs are effectively the same thing for open-world play. Yet, for some unfathomable reason, they're treated as a baseline part of the game rather than a feature you can toggle on or off. There's no other area of the game that's had the option to only group with players from your realm removed from it. We can form raids, queue for dungeons, and organise BGs on our own terms. But for some reason we can't play in zones that aren't full of people from other realms.

And it's almost certainly not to do with the technical issues of creating an opt-out switch -- players were able to block their client from being CRZd from the start by using various bits of software to prevent connections to other servers. If players can manage to escape CRZs on their end with a few minutes of work, I'm pretty sure it's not an unreasonable request for Blizzard to implement an option in the UI that does the same thing.

I think the CRZ technology is awesome, and it's a great feature for WoW to have -- provided it's a feature. Right now it's not a feature, it's the way you have to play the game whether you like it or not.
Options are a good thing.

[Ifeanychukwu]

CRZ was never intended to fix dead realms. Why farm mats on a dead realm anyway? You can't sell shit on a dead AH.

Rares like TLPD/Aeonaxx were always intended to be subject to fierce competition and hard to get. In a way, being able to farm them easily because nobody was in the zone anymore was an exploit. The game is back the way it was originally intended. The fact you don't like the way it was intended isn't CRZ's fault. And I'm not saying it's unreasonable to dislike the way the game is designed, maybe competing with hundreds of people for mats or rares DOES suck, and maybe the way ganking works IS crap. All I'm saying is, CRZ isn't the cause of those issues and getting rid of it is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you don't like those things, complain about them - not CRZ.

Why farm mats on a dead realm? Seriously? Hah! It's not like people on dead servers level professions or anything right? Pssh. CRZ is the cause of some of these problems. Before, if there weren't mats for whatever I needed to get to the next level of whatever I was making with my profession I could just go farm it myself. Now even that takes hours to. If you're not farming for the majority of your play time you're spending thousands of gold on mats. Low level mats can reach, or exceed the price of end game mats on my server. I sometimes see stacks of Green Tea Leaf on the auction house for 200g per stack, 100g + is the usual price. Now multiply that a couple of times, maybe a few times for some of the lower level mats and things get ridiculous. It can be hard enough being on a dead server as it is. Blizzard obviously doesn't have any plans on attempting to fix these issues... not any time soon anyway. It's also absurd that the only other option I have is to transfer. I have 10 characters, all of which function together. I have almost every crafting profession as well as every gathering profession so that I can always make for myself whatever I may need. As well as all of that, I have guildies who I've been with for nearly 6 years and friends who I've known for ages. It's beyond ridiculous that I should have to pay a hundred or more dollars just to be able to enjoy the game properly.

---------- Post added 2013-03-13 at 12:41 AM ----------

Options are a good thing.

Thank you! This is what I've been trying to say this entire time, I've let myself become a little frustrated though =3 Options are great. I love the idea of CRZ, but not the way it was implemented.

[Commander]

I never had any problems farming mats on my realm because of CRZ. And I have every single profession in the game at 600 except for Engineering.

In fact, I never had any problems with CRZ at all. Ganking and corpse-camping is working as intended.

[Talen]

PvP is player versus player in any manner. You only want PvP on your own terms however.

Without trying to get involved in a deep argument over this....Blizzards PvP system is currently heavily flawed. Technically...yes. Ganking is PvP in that one player fights another. The problem is that in too many cases the other player can't fight back at all. That lack of involvement is hugely detrimental to making PvP a more integral part of the game....which is why most of it is instanced off in BGs and arenas, and is what is causing a huge amount of problems for CRZ.

Its a game, games have rules and accepted standards of behaviour and the sorry rationale of "it's a PvP server" that is used to jsutify the extreme levels of douchebagery and anti-social behavor does the game and most players no favors. The rush of a power trip that players get from wiping out every lowbie in the zone is not a good thing for PvP.

Having said that - for the OP, no. CRZ should NOT get an opt out. It has problems...sure. The issues with ganking is just one of them. But the CRZ is one of those systems that has a lot of potential to improve the game. And it is also a system that wouldn't work if CRZ was optional.

That potential CRZ brings is too valuable to just give up. It should be grasped with both hands and act as a centrepiece for improvements in the game system. But there are issues with it and those issues do need to be addressed. Revamping the PvP system would be one such needed improvement.

CRZ needs to be improved so the potential is used and the problems dealt with. An opt-out is not a solution.

EJL

[MoanaLisa]

If Blizzard wants to create a few realms that don't have CRZ--apart from the two they already have--that would be fine. You can opt out that way via realm transfer if you're so excited about doing that.

A personal opt out while staying in a realm that is plugged into the CRZ system is a profound misunderstanding of what CRZ actually is. So no in that case.

I think a great many people do not understand that many realms no longer have actual zones that belong to the realm any longer. They simply don't exist in the way that people imagine they do. It's not really a game feature no matter what Blizzard says. It's a scalable network technology for managing zone populations.

[Deleted]

A simple solution I thought of was that what if the toggle to flag yourself for PvP (that is on a PvE realm) would be available on on all realms. If you flicked the switch from PvP you would be CRZ to a PVE battlegroup and vice-versa. Then those who wants to PvP can PvP (even if rolled on a PvE server) but anyone who is ganked can escape for a while.

[Ifeanychukwu]

I do agree that CRZ has great potential, it just needs to be polished. I like the idea of being able to flag yourself, although that may defeat the purpose of being on a PvP server. Perhaps if someone on a PvP server toggles it off it only lasts for a certain while after which it'll be on a CD. It'll give people a break from being ganked and still allow for the usual "PvP" once you're flagged again.

As I've already said multiple times as well, I have commitments on my server. Mostly to my guild, also to my friends who I still play with. Not willing to spend however much money it would cost to transfer 10 characters.

[AnotherInternetOpinion]

So I've been having a great time leveling my hunter solely through questing. I usually level almost completely through dungeons as I'm usually playing healers, I rarely play any pure dps classes. Now that I'm level 80 though I've hit a roadblock. I went to Hyjal to start questing and was immediately killed by a level 90. I wasn't bothered by it because I'm on a PvP server and it's to be expected but upon rezzing I was immediately killed once again. This happens about 3 or 4 more times before I finally decide to just log off and find something else to do. A little while later I decide to try again and of course, I'm immediately ganked. There was at least 5 level 90s all in the same area just ganking lowbies, it's impossible to even mount up and fly off somewhere else.

Now I know I'm probably going to be getting the "lol PvP realm, deal with it or gtfo" replies but I shouldn't have to fork over nearly $100 just so I can level without worry of being ganked endlessly. When I first started playing in 06 I didn't even know what an MMO was, it was my first online game. I had no idea what PvP went and just selected a server and began to play. I made friends and joined a guild that I'm still in today. If I had known then what PvP meant I would have rolled on a PvE server. Even so, I like my server. It's practically dead and there's hardly anything going on but I know almost everyone on my server and the community is as good as I could expect it to be anymore. I liked being able to go out into the world and do quests without being bothered, or if I was I would be able to at least defend myself because most of the time people of the opposite faction that I ran into in the world weren't there solely for the purpose of killing people who have no chance at even defending themselves. I liked being able to level professions quickly without spending gobs and gobs of gold on mats or having to deal with hours of farming scarce resource nodes because of the countless people from other servers taking all of the nodes. Especially being on a dead server this is terrible as there's hardly any mats on the AH as it is.

There's also an issue with shitbags that you'll likely never run into again so you can camp them into oblivion. For example, I was trying to farm for Loque'nahak earlier on my hunter and as I was making my usual circle of Sholazar my npcscan went off. I was so excited I dropped off my mount in mid-air and targeted him to being taming him. I soon realized though that I couldn't tame him... because he was level 85. Some hunter had posted his Loque at one of the spawn points so that people's npcscan would go off. Besides all that, apparently he had also been flying all over Northrend looking for other popular hunter pets and killing them. Usually someone like this on my server would be put on a KoS list by my guild and anyone who was told about him, now though, it's pretty unlikely people will run into him. This may be a bad example but you get the idea.

I just feel like CRZ should be optional. Sure, I wouldn't mind it sometimes while other times I'd just want to be on my own without anyone else to bother me. I know that's almost certain to never happen though. So maybe at the very least there could be phasing that separated all of the people in a zone by their combat level so that people of the appropriate level for the zone could go on questing/farming or whatever and PvP with others of their own level while the 90s and other higher level players could go about their world PvP'ing as usual. Although I'm sure a good majority of the people that claim to love CRZ for the PvP aspects are the people that sit at the Dark Portal killing lowbies before they've even finished loading into the zone.

Suppose this is mostly a rant, sorry for the wall of text. Just wanted express my feelings for CRZ.

There is. Its called a PVE server.

[Azerox]

Imo there should be a option that u can use to enable or disable CRZ.

I dont like it at all, all of the people i wanna play with are on my server, and CRZ is just plain annoying to me.

[Deleted]

Id gladly give my battletag to anyone being ganked for a CRZ to my safe cuddly PvE world. Maybe start a thread of volunteers?

[Itisamuh]

No, because nobody would use it for leveling then. Whether we agree or not, they insist on having a lot of players in the world.

Plus, without them, who would be left to gank?

[Ifeanychukwu]

Id gladly give my battletag to anyone being ganked for a CRZ to my safe cuddly PvE world. Maybe start a thread of volunteers?

That'd be fun ^__^ been trying for the last few days to tame Loque'nahak in Sholazar on my level 80 hunter. So far, just other hunters trolling with a Loque they've already tamed, a whole lot of flying in circles and being shot out of the air =3

[Raugnaut]

Rather then having an option to opt OUT of CRZ, I would prefer if they reverted CRZ entirely. It's only "boon" affects PvP servers only (More old world pvp). It actually exaggerates griefing (Rather then having 1 90 ganking lowbies on his realm, you now have 1 90 ganking lowbies on 10 different realms, effectively stopping the questing experience as was stated earlier, and they can run away into a different CRZ should others try to retaliate- essentially adding to griefing).

It also added A) increased competition to farming. While this isn't that bad in most zone, lets take Fel Iron/Cobalt Ore. Before CRZ, I was able to farm those 2 ores, about 8 stacks/hour. Keep in mind that both these ores, especially Fel Iron, were done in a time when Blizz didnt like saturating the area with nodes, making these 2 ores significantly rarer. Now, due to the greatly increased population of CRZ, I'm lucky to make 1 stack an hour of Fel Iron. On my small-time server, there is NO fel iron on the AH, nor are there any crafting mats made from Fel Iron (Bars, Bolts, Felsteel, ect). Essentally, CRZ really screwed the lower pop realms, not only is there more competition on the same number of nodes, but most of these nodes are going to different realms.

B) Griefers. Now, a person can easily grief a larger number of players. For instance, during the holiday event, there was a hunter that, every single time the Greench was up, would kite him into the alliance AV cave. He did this for about 4 hours straight. It elongated the time required to complete the daily from about 5 mins to around 40 mins, given that this hunter just let his pet wail on the boss while he healed it. He probably got suspended for it, but, hey, thats 4 hours of griefing. Had he have been on his own realm, he probably woulda done it for the 40 mins, realized that nobody on his small realm gave a fuck about it, and called it quits (Or kept griefing for 4 hours, who knows?). But CRZ REALLY adds to the anonymous asshole theory of the internet. It's extremely easy to grief people now, and most of the people you grief, you'll never hear from them again.

Theres a few other parts, such as CRZ not really helping other issues small realms have, such as raiding (Did you know that over 50% of US realms never got farther then 13/16 heroic? The realm im on is ranked exactly in the middle in terms of progression during T14, and around there during previous tiers), auction house economies (Theres a few realms that have less then 20 TOTAL pages on the AH, both sides. Dead economy there) and a few others. CRZ also killed a few things- my realm USED to host very nice world PvP battles- it was RP-PvP. Objectives were set up, ect, ect, lots of fun. CRZ killed that though- you have 4 raid groups fly into a zone to PvP, and all 4 of them get shunted into 4 different zones, rather then the same zone.

CRZ pretty much killed anything that was left of small realms, in terms of community. All it added was players who you probably never talk to, and wont give a fuck about ever again. So yea, revert CRZ. If anything, Blizzard should merge the smaller realms together, so many benefits to them as a company. A) They would make a killing off of name changes following the patch. B) They would be able to cease operating a number of servers, saving on operating costs, however small that is. C) They would actually fix a large number of problems plagueing small realms- bigger the player base, the bigger the AH will be, and the bigger the pool of raiders.

So, yea. Remove CRZ entirely.

[YouAreAllWrong]

If there is a CRZ opt out "option", then there is no point in having CRZ in the first place.

[Ifeanychukwu]

I'd be fine with removal as well. My server may not have been great before it was implemented but it was still better off than it is now. CRZ only made things worse for us. Speaking of old world PvP, my guild used to do this thing every Sunday called Gank Squad. We'd all get together and head to the Booty Bay fishing tournament and start killing horde. We did it so regularly that we actually ended up becoming with most of the horde that usually participated, we even gave them their own channel in our Ventrilo.

---------- Post added 2013-03-13 at 03:38 AM ----------

If there is a CRZ opt out "option", then there is no point in having CRZ in the first place.

Well if everyone opted out then it would be obvious that CRZ should have never been implemented in the first place.

[xindralol]

as much as I dislike crz, I think an opt-out feature would be harmful to the game.

[YouAreAllWrong]

Well if everyone opted out then it would be obvious that CRZ should have never been implemented in the first place.

There is no option in this situation. CRZ is meant to be persistent. People who like CRZ will be FORCED to opt out too.

[Niku]

All CRZ did was make it harder for me to get a kill on rare mobs while leveing. Luckely, I have nothing under 67 now so I will never do that low leveling again unless a new class arrives... but it sure sucked in every aspect for me and I just wanted out of it. I love this expansion but that's not a feature I cared for at all.

[Xeraxis]

I do agree that CRZ has great potential, it just needs to be polished. I like the idea of being able to flag yourself, although that may defeat the purpose of being on a PvP server. Perhaps if someone on a PvP server toggles it off it only lasts for a certain while after which it'll be on a CD. It'll give people a break from being ganked and still allow for the usual "PvP" once you're flagged again.

As I've already said multiple times as well, I have commitments on my server. Mostly to my guild, also to my friends who I still play with. Not willing to spend however much money it would cost to transfer 10 characters.

PvP servers already have that ability. Tired of being ganked on a low alt? Log to your max level main or log to another alt until the gankers tire of waiting and move on.

[Rexxr]

What blizzard really should do is have the CRZ only be pvp with pvp if it is not. Also the should have free transfers for a month. Lastly i really feel that if a player is grey to you, that you should be unable to attack unless they try and attack you.