Crossrealm Battlegrounds

[clownpenisfart]

15 minute queue times prior to implementation of cross realm? On my server it was a couple hour queue on Alliance side.

Quite frankly, I don't really remember. But let me try another angle:

"2h queues were good because then BGs really meant something!!!"

[FelPlague]

Hi guys,

In the Tipsout's interview with the developers they confirmed that the battlegrounds in Classic WoW will be cross-realm. How do you guys feel about this. Don't you think it will take away a lot of the Horde vs Alliance atmosphere on each realm?

Essentially, in Vanilla WoW back in the day people could misbehave, under preform and all the toxicity was born with that patch. That's where it started to go downwards with the WoW Community.

Cross realm Bg's were in at the end of vanilla, so it makes sense, it will still prefer to put you with people on your server, but if there is not enough it will put you with other servers.

[Drosul]

Cross realm BGs were in Vanilla. You can whine that it was a beta test for TBC if you want but they were in 1.12 so I guess you really just didn't want authentic vanilla.

- - - Updated - - -



This argument is being touted a bit so I'm interested what the practical solution is. Don't roll a character for the first 6 months of Classic until the emergent server populations have stabilised? How are you supposed to know at the point of character creation and server selection which is going to be the "right" one for keen PVPers. And how can you ensure it remains that way?

"You picked the wrong server so suck it up" is one of the most pathetic lines of reasoning I've seen; especially considering the rate at which you get to 60 compared to retail.

It's not whining about anything, it's pointing out that xrealm tech was designed and implimented specifically for TBC, and was only ever in the game for a tiny fraction of the time. You interpreting as whining is just an intelligence problem.


As for the "practical solution"... How about actually making an effort to establish reasonably faction balanced realms? There are a number of fully automated or nearly fully automated scripts that could help encourage better population disbursement. You know, like actually trying to address population balance concerns, rather than taping a poster over the hole in the wall and acting like it's fixed.

We now know from the game's history that Xrealm bgs where the first and most significant step towards the largely anonymous trash that retail has become, where the people you group with are entirely disposable, replaceable, and not at all worth remembering for longer than the duration of the game you happen to be stuck with them for. The "practical solution" is not going down that particularly stupid and community destructive rabbit hole a second time, particularly when arguably the single biggest advantage classic has over retail is that sense of server community.

[Vyomesh2]

Not too happy with it but it was in Vanilla. Even if at the end.
I'll live.

[AeneasBK]

It's not whining about anything, it's pointing out that xrealm tech was designed and implimented specifically for TBC, and was only ever in the game for a tiny fraction of the time. You interpreting as whining is just an intelligence problem.

If it wasn't implemented in Vanilla the underlined would be so much more true than it is Which is "not".

Pat pat pat.

As for the "practical solution"... How about actually making an effort to establish reasonably faction balanced realms? There are a number of fully automated or nearly fully automated scripts that could help encourage better population disbursement. You know, like actually trying to address population balance concerns, rather than taping a poster over the hole in the wall and acting like it's fixed.

You seem to struggle with the word "practical". Saying "They should just do 'X course of action" isn't really practical unless you can show that X course of action is actually implementable. How do you plan on enforcing the faction balanced realms? Gonna stop people making toons on servers with their friends?

Explain again how that is good for community - because if you stop people playing with their friends they'll go out and make new ones?

Last bit of subjective stuff

Funny because I think you'll find the popular consensus was the cross realm dungeon finder that actually made a significant difference. Cross realm BGs only affected the (relatively) tiny proportion who did BGs enough to recognise other players regularly; and even then its a false assumption that if affected them negatively (afterall, look that the thread, more people are praising the decision for its effect on queue times than decrying it for its effect on player identity).

So by all means whine that cross realm BGs ruined World of Warcraft for you.

[Drosul]

If it wasn't implemented in Vanilla the underlined would be so much more true than it is Which is "not".

Pat pat pat.



You seem to struggle with the word "practical". Saying "They should just do 'X course of action" isn't really practical unless you can show that X course of action is actually implementable. How do you plan on enforcing the faction balanced realms? Gonna stop people making toons on servers with their friends?

Explain again how that is good for community - because if you stop people playing with their friends they'll go out and make new ones?



Funny because I think you'll find the popular consensus was the cross realm dungeon finder that actually made a significant difference. Cross realm BGs only affected the (relatively) tiny proportion who did BGs enough to recognise other players regularly; and even then its a false assumption that if affected them negatively (afterall, look that the thread, more people are praising the decision for its effect on queue times than decrying it for its effect on player identity).

So by all means whine that cross realm BGs ruined World of Warcraft for you.

Your outright pathetic attempts at refutation would work better if you actually provided any logical basis behind them, but you can't because you know you're wrong, and just shilling because you WANT xrealm tech in, and are willing to sabotage the community aspect of the game to get it.

You couldn't beta test the xrealm tech during TBC, because TBC pvp system needed it functional to even operate, with the 7 player divisions (4bgs, 3 arena brackets) being larger than a single server could manage. The only time to test the system was at the end of vanilla, when you still only had 3 bgs and where still able to toggle the system back off without consequence. And before you say something else stupid, like mentioning a PTR, and asking why they didn't test xrealm tech on that, the answer is because the entire point was connecting MULTIPLE REALMS, and a very large volume of players, something you weren't going to be able to get on PTR.


Regarding PRACTICAL solutions..... automated scripting solutions are about as practical as it gets for addressing this potential problem. They require little-no human maintenance, save extreme imbalance situations where a single human might have to authorize specific realm-faction transfers to specific realm-faction destinations to better balance out those specific populations....Even that part COULD be entirely automated if need be. I get it, you know absolutely nothing about programming or game development and think such a solution is some high level computer space voodoo, when really it's remedial enough coding that the intern could probably write it in a day. It's hard to get much more practical than that.... particularly when you have 14 years of evidence showing why the Xrealm BG solution not only doesn't solve the population imbalance problem (it actually directly encourages it, and makes it worse), but also comes with pretty disastrous social and game play consequences in those bgs, something I've almost assuredly had more experience doing per era (each expansion but also counting vanilla) than you have in your entire career.

[AeneasBK]

Regarding PRACTICAL solutions..... automated scripting solutions are about as practical as it gets for addressing this potential problem. They require little-no human maintenance, save extreme imbalance situations where a single human might have to authorize specific realm-faction transfers to specific realm-faction destinations to better balance out those specific populations....Even that part COULD be entirely automated if need be.

The issue is there is no way at character creation that they can predict anything about how that toon is going to play from getting above level 10 to wanting to 16 hour-a-day to Grand Marshall. So even if it puts the same number of players on each faction on each server; the imbalances are still going to emerge. Servers will get reputations and later joiners will head to the ones that most suit them and you end up with a bunch of players who through no fault of their own are stuck on "dead" realms and having to queue for hours as a result.

The practical solutions some people have offered were "reroll" which is a bit crap. You talk about scripting without actually saying much about it, other than how easy it would be to do. So your solution is to just transfer players?

Incidentally the only "community" aspect I want to sabotage is the dumb win-trading ranking mafias that can exist only when you have single server queues; so I'll certainly concede that I want this tech in to sabotage that

[Drosul]

You talk about scripting without actually saying much about it, other than how easy it would be to do. So your solution is to just transfer players?

Transfers is part of the solution, but far from the only required method to attack the problem... I had a fairly lengthy write up on this topic on the official forums something like 8 months ago, sadly I post there far too frequently to be able to find it.... So an incredibly rough idea of what the outline was, with example numbers:


Basically you set ideal population numbers.

Vanilla realms reportedly had 2500 caps, let's say your ideal classic realm PEAK is a little heavier at 3k, but you don't want 3500+.

Now you talk halves of those numbers for per faction totals....

You also need to set server minimums... Say 1500 or less is a problem, 1k is a major issue.

Finally, you need to look at actual ratios between the factions and decide on an acceptable deviation between the two factions... 2.5 % is an issue, 5% is a problem, 10% is an emergency


Realms get a status meter that Blizzard gets to see... hit a problem area for 2 weeks it's on probation, it stays in that zone it can escalate to a higher consideration for intervention.... it gets too high measures are taken, it hits a critical threshold, emergency measures are taken.


Now you've got your baselines, and you've got a basis for a system of when action needs to be taken, but we haven't defined actions yet.


So your primary "Go to move"

-Specific realm/faction--->realm/faction xfers. This is going to be pretty universally too high of a population ---> too low of a population transfers... but could involve minor movements from realms that are in the population norms, but imbalanced by ratio (like the server might only have 2500 people, but say 2000 of them where one faction... It'd open up transfers off that 2000 faction to another realm that needed people, and take on transfers from some other realm to their weak faction)

Now, the above is a voluntary system... so now we get into the more forceful "nudging" to get players to make the desired choices

-popups on character creation, based on the realm/faction's status meter we talked about above.

You go to join a midly overpopulated faction: You get a dialog box explaining that vanilla faction balance is important for server health and stability and you have to confirm that you understand it could result in things like longer than desired BG queus... Confirmation box if you accept and wish to continue, other option directs you to better balanced realms.

That same popup on a more serious problem status might have (and warn you about) potential logon queus

That same popup on a dangerously overpopulated realm might require an "invite" from an active player on that realm to create a character there (ie you can still make a character to play with your friends, but if you're just some random you can find somewhere else).... That "invite" power would be limited and require a specific level (minimum of 10) that would also increase by 10 levels every month post launch until it requires a 60.


Now, that incentivizes people to not faction stack like morons, and makes them take personal responsibility for their choice to roll on a overpopulated/imbalanced realm, but it didn't address dying realms, so let's do that right now and kill them. If a realm can't sustain a viable population, it gets culled and FORCE TRANSFERRED (NOT MERGED) to a destination realm that can sustain the influx of players. No merges, no doppelganger guilds/players running around with the same name, outright server removal from the pool and consolidation with the bigger server eating the smaller server.


Real, proactive population controls.



As far as your rank mafia conundrum, those still exist with xrealm bgs and I genuinely don't see how they are even impacted at all by the inclusion or removal of xrealm tech. You can't intentionally xrealm group, even with xrealm bgs so you still have to out compete them from an efficiency standpoint to stand a chance, something that is irrelevant to whether xrealm is there or not. If anything, I'd say it might even favor the premade farm team, since they're pretty much guaranteed 6min AB/WSG wins for as long as they can churn games per day, where you won't be without your own group (and if you have your own group, again it simply comes down to actually just farming more than they do).... any lowering of their queu times just lets them churn more games, when they're already doing it more efficiently than you are. That's not a recipe that pushes you further up the ranks.

That being said, my server saw very little of the honor "unions" being very competitive, and when it did rear it's head I must admit it was a problem, helping undeserving people get ranks they shouldn't have. I think it's a problem that should be handled by GM intervention and GM action for win trading however.

The "grey area" I'm less concerned with is premade vs premade games, most specifically in WSG... Our server's custom for those games was essentially "first cap wins" to avoid getting 3+ hours games and ruining both alliance and horde premade group's honor/hour metrics, since it wasn't helping either of us sitting in that game for so long. It did depend a bit on the specific groups making those kinds of deals, however..... The HWL farm team at the time made the deal, but my guild at the time was considered the server's top pvp guild, and defending that reputation was considered more important if we where all running together.... That being said, that guild was also churning out 6 min wins for something like 16 hours a day against everyone but the top 2-3 alliance guilds, so those games where almost like a refreshing break from the monotony as well.

[Gatto]

Even if I can understand the fact that somebody would like this to be like the old days ( an internal challenge among groups of the same sarvers ) when you think about:

- BG queues way lower
- Less chances to manipulate games

Wouldn't this be a fair trade?

[AeneasBK]

<redacted simply to save space>

Firstly, thank you for the response.

The measures to implement at character creation don't seem too far removed from what has (always?) been there before - "you can't make a new toon on a full realm". Although the "invite from a friend already there" sounds fair. If any tinkering was to be done at that point I'd probably do something like have the option to choose realm both opt-in, and come *after* faction/class is chosen, but before naming the character (presuming they won't allow two players to be named the same per server still). This way if you're rolling eg. a horde damage dealer and you don't choose a specific realm it can put you on a realm with statistically fewer horde damage dealers etc. Wouldn't really fix the issue of not knowing whether said horde damage dealer was gonna quit at level 10 or become GM of the main raiding guild on the server; but might mitigate it very slightly.

The next part seems to be a very heavy handed approach to solve the issue of "individual identity" in BGs; involving 'merging' servers (whether one eats the other and has "priority" on character names is kinda neither here nor there, is it not?) to avoid slow queue times - in regards to that, having cross realm BGs does seem to solve more issues than it creates, whereas force transferring a server into another one would raise at least as many valid complaints about server/individuals identity, not least from "everyone who doesn't PvP" (No idea what the actual ratio is but had always been under the impression PvP was popular with less than half the total playerbase). You don't need that many people to have a few raiding guilds or be able to find a dungeon group, but you kinda do need a few thousand in the pool to not have 'longer queues than battles'...

That said I maybe misunderstood precisely what you mean because at face value "force merging" two servers and not having "doppelganger guilds/players" seem exclusive; unless you force every character on the "prey" server to name change and guild change.

The Xrealm tech affects win-trading PVP groups, not any that play the game 'straightforwardly'. The idea you describe where either faction concedes the rest of the game based on who caps the first flag is leagues ahead of the "you win one while we AFK at the GY, then vice versa, 3 minute games max pls" attitude that I personally have encountered*, not least because if you're a random caught up in a BG under your system there's still some point to giving your all up until that first flag is capped. As opposed to getting given a load of shit for wanting to PVP in the BG which is what you get if you're caught up in one of the latter style of games as a random and want to do some PvP. By having Xrealm BG queues you severely limit the individual groups ability to collude with the other faction in this way. It gives more potential to rank to any player who has the time; rather than the ones who spend 6 hours on a Sunday 'playing the system' to earn as much as would be earned in the other 6 days.

I kinda feel at this point I should point out that I was a part of the honor farming group (on a pirate server, I never played Vanilla itself if that wasn't already obvious) as I was a part of the guild that most of them came from and I had a lot of time on my hands. I witnessed the 'blacklisting' players would receive because they were trying to "sabotage" the quick losses, just because they had queued into a BG to do some PVP and not to honor farm (afterall, it can be fun to play PVP it's not ALL about hitting r14 hehe) from a 3rd person perspective (or first person I guess as I was a part of the group) and it really didn't sit well with me which is why I stopped. You won't be able to attain that level of "control" over the PvP scene on your server if the X-realm tech means you will queue up with other people far more often than anyone you know.

*I have very little hope, considering what they have stated about loot trading saving "man hours" that any realistic kind of human intervention in PvP is going to happen; but maybe I'm just being pessimistic. I predict it will be a fully automated (and abusable) report system.

[PavelGolub]

I think its great to reduce the que times , I remember the time before they implemented X-Realms when it was 30 40 minutes ques and its was all premades that controlled the ranking system.
The only thing is that i am not sure how they will implement the Ranking System when its X-Realm how do they decide who gets the R14s ?

[Thunderball]

I feel bad for people trying to do BGs without premades, even AV.

[Speedlance]

things might be fine for solo realms first months but after the initial burst things will cooldown and you will be very sad when the queue are 20 mins for a bg.

[AeneasBK]

I feel bad for people trying to do BGs without premades, even AV.

To be fair I think a certain amount of defining what a premade is makes this clearer. Grabbing 4 guildies and queuing as 5 into WSG is a sort of premade, but others would say unless it's the full team then it's still a PuG.

Do you feel bad for people trying to do BGs as a group of 2, 3 or 4? It's not so bad really... (imo)

[Nnyco]

Unless you like waiting an hour for queue, you want xrealm bg.

[Thunderball]

To be fair I think a certain amount of defining what a premade is makes this clearer. Grabbing 4 guildies and queuing as 5 into WSG is a sort of premade, but others would say unless it's the full team then it's still a PuG.

Do you feel bad for people trying to do BGs as a group of 2, 3 or 4? It's not so bad really... (imo)

That depends on how good your guildies are. If you're good you can easily beat bad premades as 3 man.

[AeneasBK]

That depends on how good your guildies are. If you're good you can easily beat bad premades as 3 man.

Honestly I think if you're 3 or 4 people playing together on discord you don't even have to be that *good* to beat 10 randos with competing egos But then I've been an exponent of "morale is the deciding factor of a BG more often than skill imbalance is" since TBC

[Thunderball]

Honestly I think if you're 3 or 4 people playing together on discord you don't even have to be that *good* to beat 10 randos with competing egos

Well the point of a premade is to have communication, it's really hard to beat that if you dont have it.

[Overdispersion]

What do you mean by cross-realm? I know that in Burning Crusade you had battle-groups, which basically connected realms for battlegrounds. Not sure if this was always the case in vanilla.

Battle groups were introduced in late vanilla (1.12 patch) and worked the same as in tbc. It's what people mean when they talk about cross realm bg's in vanilla.

[Canield]

Battle groups made pvp much better imo. Good decision.