"world" of warcraft and the regions that divide us

[Deleted]

hey guys (this is repost from my official forums post, but i thought id post here too to see what the mmo-champ community thought)

the recent developments of cross realm zones and cross realm raiding, and the introduction of realid/battletags got me thinking -

why do we have the game divided into regions? eu, kr, us etc

I realise connection issues, ping and lag, time differences, and the language barrier may get in the way, but arent the oceanic servers based in the usa? those are pretty far away and are still playable.

Wouldn't it be great if we could group up, raid finder, do some old school raids, and play with everyone no matter where they are? a true "world" of warcraft.

will it be possible for blizzard to stick together the different regions at some point in the future?

I think its in the direction we are going, but I dont know how far away it is.

[Chrno]

well it's abit like living in shanhai or living in a little village with 500 people.

In the village you get a sense of community but it can be quiet at times ...
In shanhai it's allways crowed but you wont know 99% of the people that live there so there is allot less social control.

Personally i would still prefer a server wide community even tho that had it's downsides aswell

ps: The lag issue is actually gamebreaking esp for PvP cross regions.

[yjmark]

I also think that is the direction Blizz is moving. Separate server communities will become a thing of the past.

Timeframe? I have no idea. But I would bet that Titan is going to be set up that way.

[Deleted]

i didnt mean no seperate realms - its good to know which realm you are on. I meant the seperate regions as a whole - USA/europe etc

[Kevyne-Shandris]

They probably are thinking about it. But the language and cultural differences will give them headaches.

We can't even get players to get along with Spanish speaking realms in dungeons, I doubt we'll be ready for any other language (or even cultural mores).

Can you imagine the stink if Korean raiders came over? They're much more hardcore, and the already "WE ARE HARDCORE!!!" types will have a jealous streak to no end.

Naw, keep it by region, at least for the sanity of the game.

[Arkenaw]

No it definitely wouldn't be great if they merged all the servers. It's bad enough when I have to deal with the Brazilians in LFD/LFR that can't speak english and have no idea what to do.

[Phuongvi]

with different time zone, server first or raid progression will be an issue to some people
Plus, the language barrier

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Too many conflicts would arise from such changes. Imagine you suddenly stick 2000 American tourists in groups of 100 in various towns and cities in Europe and Asia, then you tell the residents of those cities that these people are now their new neighbors. The cultural differences alone would lead to many problems needing to be solved, then you bring in language differences and it becomes an even larger mess.

In short this is not a well-thought out idea on your part OP.

[Evil Inside]

Different time zones, Different culture, Language barrier mostly.

[stuck4cash]

I realise connection issues, ping and lag, time differences, and the language barrier may get in the way, but arent the oceanic servers based in the usa? those are pretty far away and are still playable.

I (and lots of other members of oceania) would argue very strongly about that. We've been complaining for years that the ping makes it unbearable to play melee in PvP properly and that the shutdown for maintenance is during our prime time.

I think we've had one world first ever but actually make a reasonable amount of the servers. This is largely due to our sub-par latency (200ms is absolute minimum for an Australian, and it's improved on what it was in the wotlk days).

The QQ from Europe would grind the forums to a halt.

[dokilar]

i think it will happen before too long. maybe not in WoW but id be surprised if newer mmos launching in the future will probably have several giant servers rather than numerous smaller servers.

ive said this in several threads discussing all the cross server stuff, that when they introduced cross server bg queues that it would be a matter of time before just about everything is cross server. when the lfd was released i remember talking to some guild members wondering when they would do the same thing for raids. theyre slowly but surely merging cross server things with everything.

id be surprised if we dont see a cross server auction house before this expansion is over. ok well maybe not in this expansion but possibly in the next one. assuming they like how all the cross server features pan out throughout MoP.

i was about 50/50 when they started all the cross server stuff. all we basically did back during vanilla was pvp, on some nights our guild would unfortunately clear out the ab/wsg queues and we'd be stuck trying to get into av all night. im not saying we were gods gift to pvp but on our medium-low pop server if the alliance guild (whom we had a pretty good relationship with) wasnt queueing, or didnt have some of their main guys, people would stop queueing for ab/wsg. so it was a warm welcome to be able to not sit in a queue for 30 mins or sometimes an hour or more to get into some pvp action. it was somewhat sad though that the server community and the server rivalrly we had going on with the alliance guild was basically dead.

halaa, terrokar towers, hellfire towers and zangarmarsh towers brought some of that back during BC, as well as WG in WOTLK and to a lesser extent TB during Cata but those fights were really dwarfed in comparison to some of the epic hour+ wsg matches we had in vanilla or some of those nail biting ab wins.

[Radoria]

The lag alone would keep me from ever wanting this to happen. Not to mention the language barrier. I just don't see any good coming out of this. Things are fine just the way they are. The only way this could be cool is if they found a way to make it no more laggy than it is now, and an automatic translation for anything someone might say.

Blizzard's trying to do too many things at once for something like this to come to fruition anytime soon.