Do you think they gave up on virtual realms for 5.4?

[Redpanda]

just because they dont update you on every step they make dosent mean its been given up on.

[Superchief]

They have to implement virtual realms they have no other choice, or they'll lose players on dead realms. It's less damaging than merging realms (force changing names and guild names) using the CRZ and phasing tech they have available. If they merged realms instead it would raise red flags to stockholders. It's basically the same as merging realms just a different method instead of being blatant about it.

[Sentess]

Concerning CRZ. I swear I have never seen it for it's intended use populating low populated zones.
The server I played on was high on the server list, but some zones were still not populated for that reason.

[Count Zero]

Look -- I absolutely hate that competition for rare spawns is stiffer with CRZ, and will be even worse with VR.

But, you know what -- it's more than worth it. VR will be one of the best things to ever happen to this game, for the overwhelming majority of players. This is going to help the leveling experience, this is going to help friends play together, this is going to help most raid guilds (as it will increase the potential raider pool), same for pvp guilds

[Xargoth6634]

Look -- I absolutely hate that competition for rare spawns is stiffer with CRZ, and will be even worse with VR.

But, you know what -- it's more than worth it. VR will be one of the best things to ever happen to this game, for the overwhelming majority of players. This is going to help the leveling experience, this is going to help friends play together, this is going to help most raid guilds (as it will increase the potential raider pool), same for pvp guilds

Gonna respectfully disagree with you, here. It really all depends on your reasons for playing. As a mount/pet collector, the fact that I'm basically never going to see specific mounts because of CRZ (which will now be made exponentially worse in all likelihood) sucks. And the tradeoff is that I can level with a friend if s/he's too lazy to roll on my server, or vice versa?

I mean, shit, I'm ok with virtual realms, but that's basically because I'm resigned to the fact that things are never going to go back to the way they were and I'd rather have an expanded economy if I have to deal with people snatching up all the rarespawns anyway.

[trinetgrinch]

Just wanted to make sure no one had responded properly before posting.

People like me view this as a bad thing because it's a bandaid solution to a problem blizz made themselves out of their unwillingness to simply let go off server transfer fees. They just go leaf and bounds to figure out some akward clunky systems instead of just stop screwing around and do it like a K.I.S.S ( Keep it simple stupid). How? Simple login server and change realms into channels like any decent F2P MMO these days. And NO... dont give me the "not enough resources" or "It's hard-coded" bullturd. Do you really expect me to believe that after how they changed other seemingly "hard-coded" features like looting? or better yet. Do they expect people to believe that they cant deal with something in their own creation they had been working on for almost a decade?

People are mad because they are fed up with this bullturd.

Dzudzadzo (nice name, btw), I'm a programmer by trade who typically makes a living from maintaining old code bases and trying to update them with features that go "against the grain." I know it may seem like it should be simple to make changes, but when the changes require redefining something that was built with some very specific assumptions AND those assumptions are littered throughout the code (including places you didn't even consider), it becomes a very seriously non-trivial challenge to just swap stuff out and hope that the world doesn't break.

In WoW's case, the entire world was based on the idea of a single server with X users. They've expanded that now via the interfaces to battle.net and <Name>-<Server> aliases to assist with instances like LFR and Cross-Realm Raiding, and so one would think that the next stage in progression of this idea would simply be things like cross-realm mail and virtualizing servers while somehow keeping track of the central server identity for certain activities.

In some cases you can just throw more hardware at a problem. But at a certain point, it's the underlying code that needs to change and building, testing, and deploying that new code is almost always more expensive in terms of time and investment costs. And since hardware doesn't scale infinitely, if you started with some code that made some non-scalable assumptions, then you have to rethink what you're doing, otherwise you're going to be trying to solve the same problem again over and over and over...

Bottom line for the TLDR crowd: Yes, it is that hard. It's about juggling a gazillion cats in the air while keeping track of all changes that are being made in the meantime, and hoping that everything works when you merge the code on the other side. The longer it takes to do, the more potential there is for bad things happening, and it's not sustainable for folks to say, "Hey rest of Blizzard! STOP ALL DEVELOPMENT until we figure this particular thing out."

And also remember, that it's not as if all the developers at Blizzard have stayed. Someone writes an obscure piece of undocumented code and someone else gets to try and figure out what the hell is going on, etc. Granted programming tools and version control help a great deal with this stuff, but it's never perfect. Something always breaks no matter how much effort you put into making sure it doesn't.

Don't know if this changes the way you feel about your situation, but just wanted to put that out there.

[Nnyco]

Gonna respectfully disagree with you, here. It really all depends on your reasons for playing. As a mount/pet collector, the fact that I'm basically never going to see specific mounts because of CRZ (which will now be made exponentially worse in all likelihood) sucks. And the tradeoff is that I can level with a friend if s/he's too lazy to roll on my server, or vice versa?

I mean, shit, I'm ok with virtual realms, but that's basically because I'm resigned to the fact that things are never going to go back to the way they were and I'd rather have an expanded economy if I have to deal with people snatching up all the rarespawns anyway.

not sure if you understand the word "rare", in my oppinion its one of the best features ever added to wow

[MoanaLisa]

Concerning CRZ. I swear I have never seen it for it's intended use populating low populated zones.
The server I played on was high on the server list, but some zones were still not populated for that reason.

True story: I recently started a mage with a friend new to the game to level up with them. We started in the Draenei starting zone and when we got to Azure Watch there were five other toons there. This on a medium pop RP realm. No, not a huge thing but something nonetheless.

[dope_danny]

I doubt they can afford to. EU side at least like a full 2 3rd's of servers are ghost towns, Not a situation to keep people on those dying realms subbed. It is meant to be massively multiplayer after all.

[Count Zero]

Gonna respectfully disagree with you, here. It really all depends on your reasons for playing. As a mount/pet collector, the fact that I'm basically never going to see specific mounts because of CRZ (which will now be made exponentially worse in all likelihood) sucks. And the tradeoff is that I can level with a friend if s/he's too lazy to roll on my server, or vice versa?

I mean, shit, I'm ok with virtual realms, but that's basically because I'm resigned to the fact that things are never going to go back to the way they were and I'd rather have an expanded economy if I have to deal with people snatching up all the rarespawns anyway.

Well, they have said they adjusted rare spawn rates when they implemented CRZ. I have noticed some things seem to spawn faster, but I don't think the spawn rates kept up with the increased competition. I imagine there will be a similar re-tuning for VR, but we'll of course have to see.

And in any event, WoW is at about 75% or so of what it was at its peak, in terms of overall population. VR is pretty much just going to go a long way toward re-filling realms that bled out the worst during the sub losses.

But the true bottom line -- if there are fewer paying customers, there is less incentive for them to add things like the mounts and pets you collect. And ghost town realms certainly contributes to declining population, in a feedback loop manner -- people stop playing, folks to play with become harder to find, and people stop trying to find others to play with, and on, and on, and on.

Don't get me wrong -- again, I'll never be quite cool with how the one time I've seen Aeonaxx (or however it's spelled) that someone else from a different server picked him up right in front of me, but the overall health of the game is more important.

[Eroginous]

Of course it can be tested on the PTR. What about it couldn't ? There are multiple realms on the PTR.

Also I know plenty of folks who would argue that xmog was THE feature of Cata :P

The PTR realms are all housed on one server in one data center. Linking them is child's play. Live realms are spread out between servers in different data centers in different locations in the US.

The logistics of merging realms is much different on Live, and will have much different effects on things like connection stability, lag, and server performance. Not to mention the way certain in game features work (the AH, mail system, trading with players) was 'not possible' to have across realms before due to how the system was designed.

Now all of a sudden they are looking at a completely new system implementation in order to facilitate those features. How do they test them on the PTR? Have you seen the PTR AH?

True story: I recently started a mage with a friend new to the game to level up with them. We started in the Draenei starting zone and when we got to Azure Watch there were five other toons there. This on a medium pop RP realm. No, not a huge thing but something nonetheless.

That's because realms are CRZ'd according to their realm type and data center.

For instance, The Venture Co is the only RP-PVP server in the entire New York data center, and is not merged with any other servers. You can still force CRZ with it when you join groups, but it is not forced CRZ like say, Ursin and Gorgonnash (both low pop pvp servers in the Chicago Data center).

[jettzypher]

People like me view this as a bad thing because it's a bandaid solution to a problem blizz made themselves out of their unwillingness to simply let go off server transfer fees.

One little thing to comment regarding this part (as I don't think it was mentioned). Free server transfers would be great, yes. However, all that does is further the issue of low population servers as some people do not want to transfer servers for various reasons. This situation is a better fix because you (the random player) don't have to do anything but continue playing and enjoying the effects of a fuller population.