I am one of those players who left during cata and came back for WoD so there are many features of Wow which are new to me. I guess im lucky that i have all of MoP to play through as well as WoD, two expansions for the price of one
Now, im starting to notice something which concerns me... thats using xrealm phasing to realm hop.
The new Group Finder is great, i like it. Being able to find groups for almost every part of the game is cool and works nicely. But more and more people are seeing the potential to use xrealm phasing as a way to simplify all sorts of activities out in the openworld. All you do is go to the location of what u want then get on the Group Finder and join any group u find, u phase onto the leaders realm, check if what u need is there, then leave the group if its not there.
The obvious activity to take advantage of this Xrealm phasing is rare spawn hunting, for rare mounts etc. Ive quickly realised that i can use Xrealm phasing to get loads of ingame activities done easier and quicker.
1. Rare spawns.
2. Fishing, just find a safe school node and once u have fished it out phase realms and u can fish node after node without even moving.
3. Achievements. Plenty of achievements can be simplified with clever use of Xrealm phasing.
4. Rep farming. Killed all the adds on your realm? Simply phase onto another realm and they all reappear!
(im sure there are more uses of phasing but cant think atm)
The other sad part of this new ingame habit is the poor guy who starts a group to get something done and endlessly gets a whole load of players joining and leaving his group... Its antisocial, its rude and does nothing to add to the ingame community. This all promotes totally the wrong community attitude in my opinion
Can this new ingame activity be called exploiting?
Does it trivialise openworld content even more?
Does it reduce community relations even more?