Unanounced Feature- You heard it here first!

[Khazaad]

Regional servers merge (EU, US).

EDIT: I'm not sugesting playing from EU on US server and vice versa, you would play on your region's server only, but that would function as one large server with autobalancing phases to avoid over/under population.

Think about it, we allready have CRZs and cross server RealID chats, so the tech behind it is allready in stages of live testing.

The way it will function is you log in to game on youre regional server, EU for example, and youre character gets logged in on one of the physical servers allready in existance. Server which you get logged in is choosen based on current player/faction balance on active servers, and functions only as one phasing of regional server, to avoid overclutter in zones. Regardless of ''server phase'' you're in, at any given time you have full acces to youre guilds chat, and AH is unified for all phased servers.

Major chats (city) are at risk of beeing overcluttered if unified, so one of two solutions will be implemented:
1- There will be tabs (city1, city2, city3...) to switch between different phases chat.
2- There will be /1Trade, /2raid, /3dungeon, /4arena, /4RBG, /5bg, /6guildrecruitment... regional chats. This is in theory better option, but due to nature of community it would all end up in /trade so it might not work.

When you group with someone you all get phased in raid/group leaders phase.


That's it. No more low pop servers, no more imbalanced servers, no more server xfers to find a raiding guild.
Of course, since blizzard makes 20E per server xfer i fully expect faction change to go from 25E to 45E to compensate. They will call it ''Turncloak Tax'' and argue that with the increase in war intensity between Horde and Alliance changing sides gets ever more difficult and expensive endevour

[Ledonn]

I think it's more likely they are allowing any individual character (Horde or Alliance) to play with the opposing faction.

Sometime ago, before Cata as it was suppose to go live with the Expac, they said they were toying with the idea of you abandoning your faction and so you would see Humans rolling in Org or trolls pvping with Nelfs. But it never went live. Now that they tested this with pandas, you get to choose which side you represent, and Wrathion during the legendary dialog talking about an Azeroth coming together to fight what's to come (I can't remember his exact words).

This Expac is themed around togetherness and finding peace within. I'm pretty sure the new thing will be a united faction, choose which side to hero for regardless of race.

[Deleted]

I think it's more likely they are allowing any individual character (Horde or Alliance) to play with the opposing faction.

Sometime ago, before Cata as it was suppose to go live with the Expac, they said they were toying with the idea of you abandoning your faction and so you would see Humans rolling in Org or trolls pvping with Nelfs. But it never went live. Now that they tested this with pandas, you get to choose which side you represent, and Wrathion during the legendary dialog talking about an Azeroth coming together to fight what's to come (I can't remember his exact words).

This Expac is themed around togetherness and finding peace within. I'm pretty sure the new thing will be a united faction, choose which side to hero for regardless of race.

if this goes live... Maaaaaaaaaaaaaan.... I'd be so happy

[Deleted]

I thought this xpack was about being patronised by obese and lazy drunks =( I'd like to be able to say I can't see this happening because it would feel retarded, but that seems to be a pretty strong line of reasoning for it actually being possible.

Eurgh.

Ed: Talking about dissolving factions here. The single EU and single US servers deal just wouldn't work for geographical reasons afaik. If it did, it would be a pretty degraded experience for all concerned most likely, especially for US players.

[Austilias]

Don't think it'd work; not unless they fix the connection issues at least. I've played the US client over here in the EU and my connection is quite a bit worse than on the EU client.

Regardless, it's not something I see them doing, not least due to the risk of overpopulation which is already an issue on EU/US servers respectively alone.

[Dundebuns]

I think the technical limitations that come from the massive distance between data centres would make this a bad feature to implement. Playing with people from the US while you're in the EU? Enjoy a ping of ~200-400ms between what you see and what you do.

I too am leaning towards cross faction. A story with the legion coming back and threatening all of Azeroth, combined with the humbling of Varian and the possible reinstatement of Thrall lends to such a conclusions.

[Kiingy]

Playing with people from the US while you're in the EU? Enjoy a ping of ~200-400ms between what you see and what you do.

Welcome to the life of an Aus/NZ player. It's not that bad for ranged, but it would affect melee significantly.


Must be nice to have local servers.

[mordale]

more likely they're going to use the Ilvl scaling system from challenge modes to allow people to down-level/down-grade themselves and be able to do old raids/dungeons on challenge mode(the raid/dungeon rebalanced around current class mechanics, rewarding unique color transmog gear).

effectively stopping up content leak.

[Killmaim Deathbringer]

Dance Studio.

[pimpeddakota]

1. I would love it as I've played on both and would finally have access to those toons
2. I don't see this happening because as others pointed out tech limits. I don't see them bringing down EU and US for server maintenance on the same day.
3. Man this could possibly fix so many low server populations but it could also max out servers as well if highly populated on both sides

[Khazaad]

Don't think it'd work; not unless they fix the connection issues at least. I've played the US client over here in the EU and my connection is quite a bit worse than on the EU client.

Regardless, it's not something I see them doing, not least due to the risk of overpopulation which is already an issue on EU/US servers respectively alone.

Nah, you missunderstood.
You won't be able to choose between EU/US, you'd play on your regions server only.
And it would directly counter a problem of over/under population. If, for example, you have 3 million people logged in on EU server at a time, and you have 30 servers at the moment in EU, it would create 30 ballanced phases with 10k players each.

[Goreheart]

Regional servers merge (EU, US).

Think about it, we allready have CRZs and cross server RealID chats, so the tech behind it is allready in stages of live testing.

The way it will function is you log in to game on youre regional server, EU for example, and youre character gets logged in on one of the physical servers allready in existance. Server which you get logged in is choosen based on current player/faction balance on active servers, and functions only as one phasing of regional server, to avoid overclutter in zones. Regardless of ''server phase'' you're in, at any given time you have full acces to youre guilds chat, and AH is unified for all phased servers.

Major chats (city) are at risk of beeing overcluttered if unified, so one of two solutions will be implemented:
1- There will be tabs (city1, city2, city3...) to switch between different phases chat.
2- There will be /1Trade, /2raid, /3dungeon, /4arena, /4RBG, /5bg, /6guildrecruitment... regional chats. This is in theory better option, but due to nature of community it would all end up in /trade so it might not work.

When you group with someone you all get phased in raid/group leaders phase.


That's it. No more low pop servers, no more imbalanced servers, no more server xfers to find a raiding guild.
Of course, since blizzard makes 20E per server xfer i fully expect faction change to go from 25E to 45E to compensate. They will call it ''Turncloak Tax'' and argue that with the increase in war intensity between Horde and Alliance changing sides gets ever more difficult and expensive endevour

you just broke the internet

[Arbs]

I think it's more likely they are allowing any individual character (Horde or Alliance) to play with the opposing faction.

Sometime ago, before Cata as it was suppose to go live with the Expac, they said they were toying with the idea of you abandoning your faction and so you would see Humans rolling in Org or trolls pvping with Nelfs. But it never went live. Now that they tested this with pandas, you get to choose which side you represent, and Wrathion during the legendary dialog talking about an Azeroth coming together to fight what's to come (I can't remember his exact words).

This Expac is themed around togetherness and finding peace within. I'm pretty sure the new thing will be a united faction, choose which side to hero for regardless of race.

No it will not happen, This expansion is about Faction vs Faction. Warcraft is about Alliance Vs Horde, but band together to stop a foe that is even greater threat than each other. Cross-Faction is for games that have huge population issues that even server merging wont fix the problem.

That would be a terrible thing to do and i doubt Dave Kosak or Chris Metzen would even allow such a thing.

Regional servers merge (EU, US).

EDIT: I'm not sugesting playing from EU on US server and vice versa, you would play on your region's server only, but that would function as one large server with autobalancing phases to avoid over/under population.

Think about it, we allready have CRZs and cross server RealID chats, so the tech behind it is allready in stages of live testing.

The way it will function is you log in to game on youre regional server, EU for example, and youre character gets logged in on one of the physical servers allready in existance. Server which you get logged in is choosen based on current player/faction balance on active servers, and functions only as one phasing of regional server, to avoid overclutter in zones. Regardless of ''server phase'' you're in, at any given time you have full acces to youre guilds chat, and AH is unified for all phased servers.

Major chats (city) are at risk of beeing overcluttered if unified, so one of two solutions will be implemented:
1- There will be tabs (city1, city2, city3...) to switch between different phases chat.
2- There will be /1Trade, /2raid, /3dungeon, /4arena, /4RBG, /5bg, /6guildrecruitment... regional chats. This is in theory better option, but due to nature of community it would all end up in /trade so it might not work.

When you group with someone you all get phased in raid/group leaders phase.


That's it. No more low pop servers, no more imbalanced servers, no more server xfers to find a raiding guild.
Of course, since blizzard makes 20E per server xfer i fully expect faction change to go from 25E to 45E to compensate. They will call it ''Turncloak Tax'' and argue that with the increase in war intensity between Horde and Alliance changing sides gets ever more difficult and expensive endevour

I like this idea I had something in mind like this, but also different in ways. I had US & EU still seperate though.

[Itisamuh]

They won't even merge low population servers, or faction imbalanced servers, and we've been asking for that for years.

There's no way they'll do this. Besides, the lag would be so bad for one side or the other that it wouldn't be worth playing.

[Deleted]

Nah, you missunderstood.
You won't be able to choose between EU/US, you'd play on your regions server only.
And it would directly counter a problem of over/under population. If, for example, you have 3 million people logged in on EU server at a time, and you have 30 servers at the moment in EU, it would create 30 ballanced phases with 10k players each.

I think you're underestimating the distance between the east and west coasts, the internal latency in US and moreover the difference in timezones which would have various ill effects, and that's just US. Aren't the EU servers at Frankfurt, Paris and Cork or is that just the major Blizzard offices? Alls I know is my server is at Frankfurt. Anyways yeah, geography is a terrible foe.

[Deleted]

Sometime ago, before Cata as it was suppose to go live with the Expac, they said they were toying with the idea of you abandoning your faction and so you would see Humans rolling in Org or trolls pvping with Nelfs.

Source please, as I clearly remember Blizzard saying exactly the opposite.

OP: I doubt that is the big announcement. They wouldn't implement CRZ only to abandon it for yet another, new, system. I think the big announcement is something that most people will consider pretty minor, like adding a few extra character slots or real ID going worldwide (so you can chat with US friends).

[Khazaad]

Source please, as I clearly remember Blizzard saying exactly the opposite.

OP: I doubt that is the big announcement. They wouldn't implement CRZ only to abandon it for yet another, new, system. I think the big announcement is something that most people will consider pretty minor, like adding a few extra character slots or real ID going worldwide (so you can chat with US friends).

Yeah, I know that that most likely ain't IT, but I'm just having fun speculating while having my morning coffee

On the other hand, you can look at the CRZs as stage one of my idea. It's basically CRZ's on a grander scale.

[pimpeddakota]

Maybe the big secret is they will let you pay a fee to swap toons EU <---> US.

People have asked for that so they might finally copy your toon, zip it up, and email to the server bank you want. Helps them raise money from their player base and increase profits for shareholders.....

[Deleted]

B.Net 3.0, fully integrated with Facebook/Twitter.

Calling it now.

[Banzhe]

It's blizzard, at best it will be something like LFR for old raids, something that takes more away then it gives..