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

[mvaliz]

Then everyone (bar leveling characters) opts out and the entire implementation of the feature would have been largely useless.

If everybody opts out... then obviously it's pretty useless now, isn't it? :P

Look - it's great for world PVP (which sadly translates to jackass-ganing most of the time)... but I've been sighting the other MAJOR problems of this for a while now. Here's a thread I started when they first announced it sighting these EXACT problems:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...why-we-need-it

Somebody on the forums said it best: "So, the idea is you want to take these people who want to escape their normal social lives and force them all together and be social?"

---------- Post added 2012-09-09 at 03:59 PM ----------

Fact one: if you don't like people in your MMORPG, don't play mmorpg's

Fact: MMORPG =/= perpetually grouped up with thousands of people all the damn time

Fact: MMORPG = a virtual world of varying playstyles that make up a community... part of which are those loners who like to farm, fish, and play their game THEIR way and eventually contribute to the community by selling their wares.

Fact: WoW has been successful for the past 7 years WITHOUT this stupid feature... why is it needed now?

---------- Post added 2012-09-09 at 04:00 PM ----------

Hmmm... Is it possible to trade with people on the other zones? Because it seems to me there's a lot of potential there. Make a second account on one of those low pop realms, buy mats on your high pop/low AH cost realm, trade them over and post them on the low pop realm.

Or does it work like LFD?

Nope - you cannot trade with them. It works like cross-realm Battlegrounds and LFD.

[Morogrim]

I wish they updated their servers and software and just merge all those dying/dead realms to let people play socially again. LFR/LFD took a lot out of the social aspect of WoW. 1 BG = ~8 servers, if they could merge all of them into a single big server, that would be awesome.

People complain the world is empty, in my old server even SW was empty. So, yeah, there is definitely a problem that needs urgent fixing. Declining realm populations made the game much less fun and sitting in an empty city and clicking an interface button to teleport into an instance with strangers is not fun at all. There is no world in world of warcraft as has been said many times before.

[mvaliz]

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.

The past 2 years of WoW have been proving that this is, indeed, the case. :P

EDIT: And I think you're smart enough to know that SWTOR wasn't designed to have deserted servers. People left the game because endgame sucked, basically there WAS no endgame... NOT because there weren't enough people. Stop making stuff up.

[BenBos]

If everybody opts out... then obviously it's pretty useless now, isn't it? :P

Look - it's great for world PVP (which sadly translates to jackass-ganing most of the time)... but I've been sighting the other MAJOR problems of this for a while now. Here's a thread I started when they first announced it sighting these EXACT problems:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...why-we-need-it

Somebody on the forums said it best: "So, the idea is you want to take these people who want to escape their normal social lives and force them all together and be social?"

---------- Post added 2012-09-09 at 03:59 PM ----------



Fact: MMORPG =/= perpetually grouped up with thousands of people all the damn time

Fact: MMORPG = a virtual world of varying playstyles that make up a community... part of which are those loners who like to farm, fish, and play their game THEIR way and eventually contribute to the community by selling their wares.

Fact: WoW has been successful for the past 7 years WITHOUT this stupid feature... why is it needed now?

Your 3 points of concern are already answered.

The cross server AH is coming, you know it.

------ >. And WHY is it needed ?

Because the single realm play was and always has been the DEATH KNELL for all single server MMO's.

Going cross server is the only solution....


Because .... No single realm can populate all the content of WoW 2012 on a schedule of 24/7.

That's why. Is that too simple to understand ?

[Quincey]

I don't think that CRZ has reached my realm yet... Is there a list somewhere of which realms have it and which don't?

[mvaliz]

Your 3 points of concern are already answered.

The cross server AH is coming, you know it.

------ >. And WHY is it needed ?

Because the single realm play was and always has been the DEATH KNELL for all single server MMO's.

Going cross server is the only solution....


Because .... No single realm can populate all the content of WoW 2012 on a schedule of 24/7.

That's why. Is that too simple to understand ?

Until they announce cross-realm AH - the problem still remains. And when it comes to Blizz recently, i've taken a "Show me... don't tell me" philosophy.

If they wanted to solve these problems, they should've implemented Cross-realm AHs together WITH this feature. Isn't that the whole "we don't release things until we feel they're ready" philosophy?

EDIT: And where, exactly, are you getting this guff that "single play realms are the death knell of MMORPGs?" The two most successful RPGs next to WoW (UO and Star Wars: Galaxies) both died due to constant perpetual changes... not people being upset because they weren't constantly competing with people over quest mobs and resources. In fact, wasn't that the biggest PROBLEM with BC launch (aside from server crashes?). EQ1 died when EQ2 happened... and EQ2 died VERY quickly due to sloppy poor design. They didn't die because of people leaving... they died because the game initially sucked and players didn't bother coming back remembering how badly designed it was back then.

I can't think of a SINGLE MMORPG who went from millions of players to dead sighting the main reason was "There's not enough players to compete with".

[GhostSkull]

Let's take a theoretical and simplified look at the economy of a zone:

Before CRZ: ... => 10 nodes per farmer... With CRZ:... => 1 node per farmer- Fun

I get the message that farmers from low population servers benefit from a lack of competition, but their lower demand means that they get less for their surplus. A high-pop farmer fights harder for that node, but gets more for it. Low-pop farmers will become discouraged and won't farm anymore than she needs too. There will be little surplus of goods, and that realm will suffer persistent shortages of mats and discourage the "craft" part of "Warcraft."

---------- Post added 2012-09-09 at 04:28 PM ----------

I don't think that CRZ has reached my realm yet... Is there a list somewhere of which realms have it and which don't?

My medium pop. server has it throughout Outland and Northrend. Kinda nice to see people in Dalaran again. Even if we aren't talking to each other.

[Littleraven]

People will NEVER be happy about anything EVER. Its a fact that we just kind of need to get use to.

Ive only had good experiences so far, ive been invited to raid Honor Hold and other places with a grp that one of my IRL friends makes weekly and its amazingly fun beeing able to group up out in the world and raids without actually haveing to transfer. Beeing able to participate in world pvp and other activites its more than enough trade-off.

This....blizzard just cant win. people will ALWAYS find something to cry about. WoW is an MMO. if you dont want to have to deal with other people i think people are playing the wrong game.

OT: ive been on my server since 2006 and over the years it has become a ghost town. i LOVE going out in the world and seeing people again. it makes it even better that if you are in a real id group it takes you to your real id friends server. i went into elwynn with my friend on tichondrius and loved seeing so many people outside dueling. felt like how WoW was when i first started playing.

[BenBos]

@mvallas Actually ... ALL single realm play servers went almost dead as a subscription based mmo x months after launch.

All except 2: WoW and EvE

These were ALSO the only ones ... to put a server cluster OR cross server in play in time to combat this single ream play..

Without cross server play you can't man the dozens of bracketed BG', the hundred + leveling dungeons etc...

Now Blizzard introduces this technique to open world play without loading screens to populate open worlds.

As for the global AH: it is already in D3.

Simple.

[SunspotAnims]

It's implied here that some people see more players as a bad thing, rather than considering the positive potential of a larger community.

[jimbojonez]

Fact: WoW has been successful for the past 7 years WITHOUT this stupid feature... why is it needed now?

It's testing a feature for the next mmo. Isn't this obvious?

FWIW, I'm not looking forward to this. I've always hated the first few weeks of an expansion when everything is crammed with people, and I've always enjoyed a year later when is quieter. This isn't a good change, IMO.

[Seegtease]

lol, off peak time doesn't ruin anything. Off peak time is artificial. It only exists because you play on a server separated from the rest of the player base. You guys are just whining, whining, whining because you want to get all the veins and all the goody pets, and now you have to compete.

It was a part of many people's gameplay. Yeah, we don't like that the game was changed and now we enjoy it less. Go figure!

[Deleted]

If WoW still had a thing for group quests (remember Alterac City in Vanilla? Stormgarde?) I could see the appeal of the whole cross-server system, but since the devs have said they've gotten rid of them completely... I just don't see the point aside from giving an impression the world isn't dead.

I mean it's not... bad. It's just... sort of meh.

[Dch48]

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.

If you are seeing people from other realms in your main cities, you have to be on a very low population server. The only ones I have seen so far have been in Hellfire Peninsula in Outland which formerly was completely deserted except for my Druid alt. There hasn't been a single one in Stormwind or Goldshire.

[UnderworldSoup]

Looked at the thread in the link. Apparently a lot of people had a good time with the DMF bunny. The realms I saw mentioned [Sargeras, Firetree, Scilla] are all PvP realms. So what's the problem with this again?

The differences in population between Sargeras and Scilla is a huge concern -- Scilla would have trouble attempting to retaliate against Sargeras in a case like this (if I'm understanding what they did correctly, of course).

I'm fine with them using the system for more people out in the world - heck, I love seeing more people in Dalaran again. I'd be lying if I wasn't concerned about how it'll be handled in Mists of Pandaria however, since it's incredibly tedious already having nodes or rares taken by users from other realms; if this also applies to the world bosses in Mists, that's.. kinda ill thought out, honestly.

The Darkmoon Rabbit is a rare spawn on the island but simply drops a pet. If they're able to abuse the mechanics to get that rabbit 34 times then what does that say about the world bosses? It's a fair complaint, PvP realm or not.

[Deleted]

When they announced this I asked everyone why don't they merge the servers. People said CRZ would bring great stuff, populated zones again and stuff. To be honest... I don't think you got what you wanted from all the complaining I keep hearing.

---------- Post added 2012-09-09 at 08:31 PM ----------

Ok, I feel I need to expand a bit on this. In WoW, group quests have almost entirely been removed. Sure there's 1-2 here and there (unless they removed those too) but, in WoW, seeing another player PvE wise, you're not happy. Because you know said player will be competing with you for mobs, nodes, skins, ponds, rares, world bosses and whatever you can think of. And since only one of you can actually tag a mob, mine a nod, skin a beast etc, having too many players is detrimental. This is why mob-tagging instead of mobs that give stuff to everyone who helped kill them is bad. This is why nods not phazed for each player is bad. Now, with CRZ, you get raids jumping servers to kill steal a world boss because theirs is dead. This is jerky behaviour. And you can't even ignore these people as "name not found" because they're from other realms. Also, unless you give someone your RealID or whatever, you also can't really make friends, for they're gone as fast as their appear. This is a sort of fast food friendship or fast dating, you get 5-15 min to know if the other person is trust-worthy enough to get your e-mail to add you to friends. This is a horrible way to meet people for many wouldn't trust others in that time with their e-mail even in the long term they could be a potential good friend.

Now we get to the point of PvP. From one side, it makes PvP better. More people, more fun, right? Well... it depends. As I've heard, more people are organizing realm vs realm PvP rather then faction vs faction. So if your realm is undermanned, another populated realm can bring in a few raids and wipe the floor with you. However it's still more PvP. Except we get to another point. I don't think this CRZ makes the difference between players of each faction. So if a server has 50 Horde and 30 Alliance on a server, PvP one, it's clear who is doing better by sheer superiority, though the undermanned side might still put up a fight. If you get a raid of 40 Horde joining from another server, the undermanned faction, in this case Alliance, has no chance anymore.

Overall, it was a poorly implemented feature. It needed tons more testing, more bug fixing, more input from people.

[Traknel]

So basically it's a great thing if you're idea of fun is running around ganking players 50 levels below you, but if you like doing anything OTHER than being a schoolyard bully it's not so hot.

[MouseD]

I haven't tried a cross-realm trade. I bet they don't allow it. However, if they did, it would make the problem worse since the lower price goods from other realms would bankrupt anyone who did go through the trouble of farming up a surplus.

You can't trade with anyone from another realm.....our Guild Red Storm Rising last Sunday had our anniversary birthday fair....we get together many of our guild and give away free ports to folks....make gear for them free...give away bags....my job on my Mage was to hand out free bags at Northshire starting point....over half the players there were from other realms and I got message "you can't trade conjured items."....when I tried to give some bags to a new player from Echoisles and my Mage is from Cairne....

[Goldfingaz]

As for the global AH: it is already in D3.

Simple.

Two things here, different coded game is amazingly different. It's the old apples to oranges argument. The other thing is, you ever use D3's AH when the game was heavily populated? With that many people, everyone just undercuts the next guy until the item is next to worthless, which will further skew the economy of the game. I really do not believe Blizzard will be implementing this, or even a cross realm auction house. Why do I think this? It will again hurt the economy, you would be hard pressed to know of guy for X realm duplicated those mounts in the AH or gems until they disappear and also the gold sellers/account hackers who take all of your stuff and AH it to transfer it to another real would be hard to keep track of.

So many bad things can and will come of this if they expanded. However I really doubt they were going to expand on it at all.

@Other people hoping it will be one big realm... You people dumb? Cause anyone in their right mind wants to compete for quest mobs with 1mil+ players, not to mention the insane stress it would have even on some newer PCs.

[mvaliz]

When they announced this I asked everyone why don't they merge the servers. People said CRZ would bring great stuff, populated zones again and stuff. To be honest... I don't think you got what you wanted from all the complaining I keep hearing.

I believe this is the Wrath-to-Cata LFD Dungeon design philosophy change all over again.

The people who are complaining about CRZ are probably not the same ones clamoring for it when it was announced.

Basically what has happened is a select % of the PVP population was complaining they don't have world PVP, and the low-pop servers were complaining they needed more people.

The rest of us, however, were perfectly fine with our servers the way it is - and couldn't care LESS that there wasn't masses of people farming Twilight Highlands and we ENJOYED leveling our alts in uninterrupted lowbie zones.

Then they (once again) listened to the wrong sect of people... and pissed off the vast majority of players who were ENJOYING their game the way it was... Again...

This is JUST like Wrath LFD vs Cata LFD. While the far-less-in-number hardcore BC babies were crying on the forums wanting their precious "prestige" back via having hard heroics, the rest of us were having an absolute BLAST with Wrath LFD. Then they make the change to dungeon design in Cata, and BLAM - down goes the subs...

...trust me... it's VERY apparent they're making a lot more people angry than happy with this change.