WoW's Community

[Heldamon]

Do you think that the community of this mmorpg would be better if blizzard instead of grouping servers together was merging them?

[Iseeyou]

I dont see the difference between connected realm and merged realm.

If someone can tell me.

[Heldamon]

Well in with 2 merged realms you have 1 realm where the people you see are the same everyday. It's actually taking the population of each realm and putting them alltogether in 1.
With grouping the servers there is a chance that you will see the same person again and a chance that you won't.

[Iseeyou]

Well in with 2 merged realms you have 1 realm where the people you see are the same everyday. It's actually taking the population of each realm and putting them alltogether in 1.
With grouping the servers there is a chance that you will see the same person again and a chance that you won't.

You mean with connected realm features there's a chance you dont see other players from other realm.?

Did not know about this.

[Deleted]

I think it wouldn't have a lot of impact on the community. Communities aren't formed by just cramming a bunch of people into one room, nor by adding even more people to that room. You need to give these people something to work on - together.

In WoW's case, that would be PvE and PvP, but since the last couple of years all cooperative PvE and PvP has been instanced (save for a few exceptions like MoP's world bosses), and most of it is accessed through queueing mechanics, which group you with random people who often aren't from your own community.

Furthermore, adding more people actually leads to anti-social behaviour. People are more inclined to talk or act when they are in small groups (see the Bystander effect for example. Or ask yourself: where do you find more and more pleasant interaction with other players: 5-man Heroics or 25-man Raid Finder groups?

[Sierra85]

people are pricks because of the anonymity & the likelyhood of never seeing people again.

There should be greater punishments for dungeon deserter / kick etc

[Confirm Deny]

No. I doubt Blizzard can really manage the community in any feasible way now, and wouldn't hold them to it.

People talk all the time about how they made tons of friends in vanilla, and how they quit because their friends slowly quit over the years. Up until MoP (for the most part), though, there were way more WoW players available to make friends with than any time in classic or BC. Yet I've been seeing these posts since late Wrath. Why did people stop making friends when Wrath had almost 12 million subs? (Obviously, going from 8mil to 12 mil doesn't mean "tons more" if most of the original 8 mil stayed. You should know what I'm saying)

So what if there's a chance you won't see the same person again on a grouped realm? How many people out of ten do you add to realID just because you had a pleasant conversation? Blizzard can't do it for you.

[Arbs]

I dont see the difference between connected realm and merged realm.

If someone can tell me.

Merging is forcing people into servers & disgarding the others while there is a good chance you can lose your indentity & Guild Indentity in the process, if someone that server has it even if they are not active.

Connected Realms remove the negative from Server Merging, while all 500+ servers on US & EU will remain they will all be conencted in a web effect into there own groups (Basically what Battlegrounds are) where you remain on your realm & get to keep your identity (Name & Guild) someone else can share the same name with you, but they will be considered (Arbs - Blackrock & you can remain Arbs - Illidan), but also your server will actually feel populated it be another thing that if you have server Qs on 1 server you can just transfer to lower pop server in that same connection & still be with all your friends & guild mate, but no longer have to worry about a Queue, you remain in the same guild & all.

It's basically removes the problems of CRZ aswell as you don't have to phase in & out anymore unless you are on totally different connection.

Think of Connected Realms as a Giant Outlet & the servers are plugged into the them. Everyone in that Outlet is connected as if your on one Big Mega Server.

Short Version: Permanent CRZ between servers

[Deleted]

I dont see the difference between connected realm and merged realm.

If someone can tell me.

two names 4 the same place

[Soth]

You mean with connected realm features there's a chance you dont see other players from other realm.?

Did not know about this.

Maybe OP is confusing connected realms with CRZs? It wouldn't make a lot of sense to go to the extra trouble of creating connected realms if it didn't do anything CRZ didn't.

[Iseeyou]

Allright the diffence is mainly the social aspect then.

[daytonbrown]

I'm not understanding the concern. There is no difference in merged or connected realms other than a realm name stuck to the end of your name.

[Itisamuh]

There is literally no difference between them, except extra character spots and less naming issues.

[Gimlix]

Connected realms is exact same as merging a realm, so there is no 'better' solution then connected realms. Even merging isn't as good.

[Dristereau]

There is no way to 'fix' the WoW Community. Many newer players don't give a crap about anyone else, and there's nothing you can do about it. Same with some of the older ones. I had someone in a Random Dungeon need on something just because it had certain stats, even though they couldn't use that armour type. Then at the end of the dungeon someone else (who had been arguing with this person ever since first boss when the even happened) decided to need on Tank Shield/Helm as a Shaman.

In that case, the two of them started off slagging off each others Realms. Me, the Healer and DPS ignored them and just kept going. But that's a concern of mine. I consider Shadowsong itself a relatively nice realm, maybe because it's fairly quiet. My Horde realm, which is fairly larger, Tarren-Mill has a horrible community IMO. And if two or three Realms are merged with Shadowsong, I wonder if there will be any Realm animosity and each will stick to its own like a Wolf Pack.

However, I think eventually as the Population of WoW gets smaller we'll eventually end up with one PVP Realm, one PVE Realm, one RP PVP and one RP PVE Realm, and that's how these Connected Realms will head.

[Deleted]

The real problem with the current community is simply that there's no real need for a community anymore. In order for a community to develop, there need to be incentives for the players to partake in the community. However today you can pretty much do anything in the game solo. The only thing that you really need a community for today is progression raiding, and it seems that most people don't care for that anymore.

I guess a timeline for how Blizzard step by step made the community obsolete could look like this:

Faction/server change introduced -> a person's server reputation lost it's value. Prior to these changes, a person who ninja'd would find himself on the ignore list of most serious players/guilds, and would as such have a hard time to find dungeon groups, or a raiding guild for that matter. After these changes, a person that was blacklisted by everybody else could just transfer to a new server where people didn't know the character as a ninja.

LFD introduced -> Before the tool was introduced you had to talk to other players to find a dungeon group. It was indeed bothersome to spend half an hour on forming a group. However this situation forced the players to interact with each other, and if you had a great time with the people you ran the dungeon with, chances were that you would add them to your friend list, and ask them for a dungeon the next time you were forming a group. After the LFD, interaction with the other players in the dungeon disappeared. You wouldn't meet them again, as they now often where from other servers, so why talk to each other in the first place? at the same time ninja'ing and abuse grew, as there were no consequenses. It's the same old equation that anonymity on the internet makes otherwise nice people act as idiots. The effect on the server community was that reputation stopped mattering even more, as you know only needed a community if you were on the raid scene.

LFR introduced -> Now you didn't even need to be part of a community to raid anymore. Unless of course you want to do progression raiding.


I'm not going to state that all these changes are what "destroyed wow" or anything. But it would be foolish to not recognized that they had an effect on the community and so forth the game. The game is much more solo friendly than ever before, for the good or worse of it.