Cross Realm Zones: All the downsides of a high pop server with none of the benefits?

[Conscious]

there are no people in the world: people complain about how the world is empty and it used to be so much better because you actually met people outside of citys back in the days
there are people in the world: people complain about how there are too many people and you cant play properly

You really can't play properly.

I would be all for this, if it actually had full functionality, was bug free, and optional.

However, as it stands, it's a giant cluster-fuck.

[LordRayken]

Wanting to play on a deserted server is basically SWTOR logic.

You cannot have an MMO without tons of people in your shit.

If you can't deal with it, you need to quit.

Plain and simple.

[Deleted]

For anyone who says people that don't like it are shortsighted here is my argument:
As long as i can't trade, raid, join their guild or slay them i don't want them on my map. Yes it might be future MMO technology but as it is right now it's noway near that future. People already mentioned the Rare spawn snipes, i myself am not an archievment hunter so whatever but the same thing could be said about ore and herb spawns and this actually affects my server. So now we have bots from multiple worlds on the map and CRPlayer the economy from the lower pop server are going even more in the gutter when the nodes are "stolen" from CRPlayers.

If Blizzard wants the people to be happy let horde & aliance in the same dungeon/raid if they are real friends. Allow cross realm trading. Auction houses not bound on the server. THEN we can talk about CRZ but right now they are doing step 2 while completly ignoring step 1.

[Zharradan]

just pvp'd with some dudes from illidan and mannoroth in nagrand. all zones have players, this is fucking great for world pvp, don't care about farming, more people = less bots, since peoples are smarter than bots and bots will starve to death

[LordRayken]

If Blizzard wants the people to be happy let horde & aliance in the same dungeon/raid if they are real friends. Allow cross realm trading. Auction houses not bound on the server. THEN we can talk about CRZ but right now they are doing step 2 while completly ignoring step 1.

These are all pretty awesome steps, honestly. I really like the idea of being able to do Dungeons with Real ID friends regardless of Faction.

[Aqua]

I was happy with CRZ until I saw Aeonaxx get mounted the moment he spawned, by someone not on my server.

Hopefully this drives them to develop the system further to phase nodes/rares/etc to only appear to those from the server they're from.
Remember this all still testing period still more or less...

I think they're aware of these major issues and want to sort it out a.s.a.p

[Deleted]

I think for levlinga new char and see loads of horde and alliance pvp again will be great. But i dont like that there will be like crazy amount of bots camping rares so there will be no point for normal ppl to even try if they dont do anything about it.

And i think they should still merg servers becouse ppl still need a working AH and guilds to be fun. should still have CRZ becouse of levling alts etc (even the fullest servers dont have meny at lowlevel)

[banyentertainment]

Hopefully this drives them to develop the system further to phase nodes/rares/etc to only appear to those from the server they're from.
Remember this all still testing period still more or less...

I think they're aware of these major issues and want to sort it out a.s.a.p

exactly.
It`s all carebear tears.
You can do that and all the other people would see is you making the mining animation, they cant actually mine your nod..can still attack you though.
Iam thick as fuck and even i could come up with a solution that doesnt involve taking the fun away or increasing the respawn time by 1000x

[Seegtease]

Wanting to play on a deserted server is basically SWTOR logic.

You cannot have an MMO without tons of people in your shit.

If you can't deal with it, you need to quit.

Plain and simple.

You don't seem to get it. It's a matter of balance.

Before, 3 servers could all have hunters trying to find a rare pet. The pet would spawn on all 3 servers, all 3 hunters would get the pet.

Now, with 3 servers merged, only one rare is spawned, and only one hunter gets the pet. By merging servers, they are decreasing the amount of rares and nodes that exist on each server. That's a pretty massive balance oversight.

[banyentertainment]

You don't seem to get it. It's a matter of balance.

Before, 3 servers could all have hunters trying to find a rare pet. The pet would spawn on all 3 servers, all 3 hunters would get the pet.

Now, with 3 servers merged, only one rare is spawned, and only one hunter gets the pet. By merging servers, they are decreasing the amount of rares and nodes that exist on each server. That's a pretty massive balance oversight.

Makes them all the more rare and unique
<3 that in mmos, i dont like socialism in mmos

[LordRayken]

You don't seem to get it. It's a matter of balance.

Before, 3 servers could all have hunters trying to find a rare pet. The pet would spawn on all 3 servers, all 3 hunters would get the pet.

Now, with 3 servers merged, only one rare is spawned, and only one hunter gets the pet. By merging servers, they are decreasing the amount of rares and nodes that exist on each server. That's a pretty massive balance oversight.

Too bad. Guess you'll have to spend more time online, because that's what the server would be if that amount of people were playing together in the first place. Remember, this merging is due to the fact too many servers do not have the initially considered "balance" in the first place.

I'll take too many people versus too little.

[Dispersedshadow]

Hopefully this drives them to develop the system further to phase nodes/rares/etc to only appear to those from the server they're from.
Remember this all still testing period still more or less...

I think they're aware of these major issues and want to sort it out a.s.a.p

They don't even need to phase nodes, they already have the tech to increase mob respawns based on zone pop, they just need to do that to nodes. Rares probably don't need to be phased either, just decrease the time between spawns based on zone traffic.

[LordRayken]

They don't even need to phase nodes, they already have the tech to increase mob respawns based on zone pop, they just need to do that to nodes. Rares probably don't need to be phased either, just decrease the time between spawns based on zone traffic.

How many people are we talking in these zones?

Most of the zones in WoW were designed for like 45 or 50 people or more to be in at once. Are we talking 100's of people in these zones now, or what?

Because if its just like 50 or 60 people per zone thats how its supposed to be in the first place.

[Conscious]

Wanting to play on a deserted server is basically SWTOR logic.

You cannot have an MMO without tons of people in your shit.

If you can't deal with it, you need to quit.

Plain and simple.

There is more than just, 'there's too many people' going on here.

Go look at the 60+ page thread, and the compendium of issues that are occurring because of and with the system.

[Seranthor]

I'm surprised that Icecrown is even a part of CRZ. That almost makes it sound like any zone in the game is eligible for being CRZ regardless.

That kind of defeats the entire point of farming things like that.. because no one else is around. If half the server's at a farming location, then it's not really a farming location anymore, is it? Not if it takes you hours to get a few stacks of cloth. You'd do far better running dungeons for cloth at that point. High population and easy groups are worse than pointless when you're trying to do something that requires you to be alone.

I'm also wondering what their criteria is for CRZ.. My server (Burning Legion-US) is a Medium population server. If it really is smack in the middle, we should (in theory) see almost no CRZ at all. It should (again, in theory) never be "too high" or "too low". And yet Durotar/Orgrimmar is now hosting even more players from other realms. As if lag and framerate wasn't bad enough with only our own server's population crowding the city, now we've got at least one or two other realms joining in.

I've seen CRZ in every northrend zone... every EK zone... even Elywynn... hell.. even Dalaran is CRZ.

---------- Post added 2012-09-08 at 10:35 PM ----------

While it's been a messy start--a messy start with something majorly new from Blizzard...who knew?--they are apparently going to clarify some things soon and when we know more, people will be able to complain more intelligently. It's correct that this is being beta tested on live--I'm not sure how else you could do it properly--but most of what I've seen are more like bugs and adjustments than reasons to think that CRZ's are going to be catastrophic events in player's lives.

I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to opt out though. That's the equivalent of more or less asking for a phased solo zone and that river is definitely running the other direction. The primary thing to me is fixing the time zone business which really is annoying.

A 'messy start'? they've been screwing around with it for MONTHS... yes... MONTHS... on beta... in fact... there are MORE BUGS. than there were with CRZ on beta.

[Twotonsteak]

So I logged on the other day to farm some frostweave for my alt, maybe check around for some rare spawns. I arrived in Icecrown and was a bit shocked to see nothing but piles of corpses, and players from different servers flying over head like vultures waiting to swoop down and steal kills(and I'm sure they were just as happy to see me). I was a bit upset as this was one of the few upsides to playing on a server that had been deserted. Instead of competing with one person for that rare mount, or the crafting materials I needed to level my professions, I now found myself competing with several.

There's the downside, but what about the upside? Sure I can do a few quests here and there with friends from another server, but that's about it. Honestly, it's not a trade-off I would make. It's not like I get access to a larger pool of guilds to choose from. Am I missing something? Is there more to it than what I'm seeing? If they did it just to make servers seem less empty, then they should just bite the bullet and merge a few.

Earlier today one of my guildies was in Sholozar trying to do quests when someone from another server came in and started killing everything off, then skinning it. A little later the guildies wife was accused of "kill stealing" people people from a different server.

As for me, I was trying to level an alt through Northern Barrens (haven't done those quests yet) and had to stop. Every where I went there was someone from a different server killing and farming what I needed.

So far I have yet to see the benefits of cross-server realms.

[Seranthor]

And I bet my right hand that IF this new technology works, one of the first things you'll see is cross realm guilds or cross realm AH's.

I understand it is fustrating, but this stuff is still being tested on live realms right now. It could work, it could fail. Either way, we just have to play, give Blizzard usefull feedback, and see how it plays out.

Also, I hope you people realise that if Blizzard deals with the flaws and pulls this off this could be something revolutionary and greatly improve MMO's in general.

here... let me help you with this... its NOT going to happen... its DS all over again, just at the start of an expansion instead of the end.
they've had several months of it on Beta and they've got it looking worse than it was on beta.

[Conscious]

here... let me help you with this... its NOT going to happen... its DS all over again, just at the start of an expansion instead of the end.
they've had several months of it on Beta and they've got it looking worse than it was on beta.

I still can't believe they let this off of beta, knowing full well it still had a lot of kinds left.

Maybe they were in a rush to drop the patch with GW2, but for the love of the game, stop sacrificing people's game experience for your mediocre attempt at cock-blocking another title.

[GhostSkull]

I was happy with CRZ until I saw Aeonaxx get mounted the moment he spawned, by someone not on my server.

It would be fair to match the spawn rate to the number of realms sharing the zone.

[Goldfingaz]

There were a million AP holders out there. 500,000 assumes 50% of those on beta servers. That seems reasonable to me although of course there wouldn't necessarily be that many on at once all the time. Pick whatever number you like.

When I first hit Pandaria I had never seen so many toons around in my entire life and that includes a stretch on Illidan on live. And there was very little in the way of persistent lag. This seemed rather astonishing to me and to anyone else who thought about it for more than 10 seconds.

At the end of the day here are some simple facts: For all of beta there are exactly two (2) realms for North America: one for PvP (Gilneas), one for PvE (Lost Isles). There's another for EU (Mekkatorque) and one for Korea (Hamuul) to make four total. But for AP holders in Beta that's it for realms. So consider it exaggerated if you like. If it was a simple matter to 'add more hardware' I would think the current realm schema of Full/Medium/Low would be highly irrelevant.

P.S. You'll whisper to them via Battletag. Their realm won't matter.

The current Full/Medium/Low, is actually relative to the highest population's current population and the lowest's current population for the region. There are times where my realm (US-Daggerspine) are marked at medium population with roughly 200 people online, this is based on a very low populated time (~5am EST).

Hardware is the end all be all for realms, more hardware = more players and NPCs in one zone at any time. There was a time when Darkspear crashed recently due to too many people in one zone at a time, all it had to do with was the limitation of hardware.

Also, whispering people might be as easy as Battletag, however that's assuming you have everyone's battle tag and not factoring multiple accounts attached to that one battle tag logged in at the same time, which I'm assuming you haven't tried to do yet. A Friend of mine currently has two accounts (They wanted the raf mount). They were on both of their accounts at the same time, both being attached to one Bnet account. When you go to whisper them, the game automatically chooses which character of theirs your whisper will be sent to and gives you no option to choose, so currently "battletag" isn't the answer for that whispering system.

Also note: I was on the beta and logged in the first day they introduced CRZ, it wasn't nearly as bad as you're making it seem. Unless Org was highly under populated for some reason.