Patch 5.4 Feature Preview: Connected Realms

[Deleted]

Not with 5.4 and no announcement which servers yet.

Annoying. My raidgroup is basically waiting for this to get a bigger playerpool to recruit people from. I was really hoping to be able to go to the to-be-connected realms and start recruitment early.

[Deleted]

Damn its about time they link some servers. Im on a very low populated realm and I cant find any guild or like today... Galleon was up for the whole day, lol. There are just no people wanting to kill it (I dont know any ppl from others realms).
Cant wait for it!

[Shudder]

There is nothing that states it being permanent.
That is a huge part of why it is virtual rather than a traditional and irreversible merge.

Giant realms are simply not a good option given how the economy in the game is driven.
There is already stupid amounts of competition and undercutting due to the supply of many items, imagine making it 10 or 20 times worse.
There have to be individual realms, and a fair number of them.

"a Connected Realm is a set of two or more standard realms that have been permanently and seamless “linked.”

kthxbai

[Verain]

Exactly my thought when I saw this feature coming. Should be no problem to transfer BoA items between your "off server alts" with this new tech, although I suspect that the answer is "nope sorry, can't do that, until some unspecified future date, that is probably never coming" (because paid transfers with chars full of BoA items is just good money?!).

No, it will work. You will be able to mail people on your merged servers, so you will obviously be able to mail your own alts.

- - - Updated - - -

Not with 5.4 and no announcement which servers yet.

Annoying. My raidgroup is basically waiting for this to get a bigger playerpool to recruit people from. I was really hoping to be able to go to the to-be-connected realms and start recruitment early.

Are you 10s and on PvP? We should all group up and be a 25. Of course, we can't meaningfully do this until we learn who merges with what.

[ZehGeek]

CRZ will still exist pretty sure, those CRZ zones could be even more populated after this depending on how they choose which servers to merge.

As far as I understand, This CR..or VR..or whatever..is completely different then CRZ. CRZ is ment to make old zones still be populated..and this is the actual fix people expected with CRZ so

[Deleted]

Looking forward to this new feature, hopefully it will save the dying realms

[Alantor]

this is huge, im really excited and dont even play wow anymore xD

[Karnige]

This is blizzards desperate attempt to not look bad with server merges and instead do it this way. merge 3 low pop servers. solved. can't look weak blizzard huh

[Soulfròst]

I really don't think it's an intentional avoidance of "looking bad" as much as it's just a smart solution to a prominent problem. They can see that the numbers of raids completed each week have likely steeply declined. Guilds have probably vanished or become idle. So, with virtualization tech, they innovated a fix. I'm betting it was in the cards while CRZ was being developed and deployed, as a "test bed" or trial. So if it's being implemented as a long-term solution to help the low-pop realms, it's not going to hurt high-pop realms. They wouldn't implement something that counteracts the very goal it was created to achieve.

[Balo]

I wonder how the "Blizzard are greedy to charge for realm transfer" - trolls will argue and complain about this one

(Im sure they will find a way of course)

very simple this is only going to effect servers that are low pop. they said NOTHING about servers that have huge server imbalances. So is your on a server that is like 99% horde or alliance and your not on the dominate side your still screwed and will have to give blizzard money to play on a server that is more balanced.

[Soulfròst]

very simple this is only going to effect servers that are low pop. they said NOTHING about servers that have huge server imbalances. So is your on a server that is like 99% horde or alliance and your not on the dominate side your still screwed and will have to give blizzard money to play on a server that is more balanced.

This may or may not be the case. It would depend on what demographics they're using to determine the population status of the realm. If faction balance is worked into the equation, then it could potentially fix that as well. At least, that would be what makes sense. Matching a high-pop, horde dominant realm with a high-pop, alliance dominated realm. It all really depends on how the background infrastructure is setup. If its just a virtual tunnel they're creating to bind the two realms together, then it may cause problems. If there's a "middleman" or mediary server that mediates between the two realms and combines them into a cluster, then it would work out provided that mediary hardware is upgraded to handle that larger load.

[Sarevokcz]

So, they are merging servers and keep player names through unique identificators other than the actual name... well its not like I saw that suggested atleast 3 years ago, took you long enough Blizzard.

Honestly, I have NO idea how this is gonna work anyway in practical world, decent chunk of realms are pretty much single/double nation realms that are used to have chat in their language for years, one bad merge and they are gonna loose more people from those realms that they would get by the merge. I saw that like half a year ago, our server got some FCT and couple dozen people transferred, saw trade and general filled with something else that english and started flaming everyone and demanded the 2 thousand players to use strictly english in chat for those maybe 50 people, if course they pretty much got flamed back and told to not expect it any time soon. In the end they eihter stopped playing or transferred elsewhere for cash since I havent seen them since. Now imagine it on a much larger scale when most of the people on the internet are unreasonably stubborn, put into it the fact, that lots of people dont actually know english very well and chat is gonna be a mess thats gonna make loads of people leave. This HAS to be done properly and Blizzard really needs to do serious research of communities on the realms targeted for the merge.

[jazzyy]

very simple this is only going to effect servers that are low pop. they said NOTHING about servers that have huge server imbalances. So is your on a server that is like 99% horde or alliance and your not on the dominate side your still screwed and will have to give blizzard money to play on a server that is more balanced.

fun fact: nobody wants to play on evenly sided realms

imagine 1:1 ratios on a High/Full pop server. Want to do Oondasta? Galleon? Nalak? Sha? Good luck. Dailies? Good luck. Leveling 85-90? Node farming?

server imbalances were created by the players on purpose to stack their odds and make their life easier. if a majority of people actually want blizzard to force all realms attempt to be as 1:1 as possible then more people would complain simply because the game would actually be HARD in WPVP again

it's funny because I wouldn't mind trying it but I know I would immediately regret it because it's such a fucked concept.

our server got some FCT and couple dozen people transferred, saw trade and general filled with something else that english and started flaming everyone and demanded the 2 thousand players to use strictly english in chat for those maybe 50 people, if course they pretty much got flamed back and told to not expect it any time soon.

further proving how absolutely toxic the wow community is

[Deleted]

It'll be interesting to see how it's implemented; though I hope they don't do it as they did with Battlegroups, and ignore/largely ignore language barriers between realms.

[Verain]

I doubt very much they will bring over non-English into English realms. That is super annoying just for CRZ, but they backed out on that mostly.

[Soulfròst]

fun fact: nobody wants to play on evenly sided realms

imagine 1:1 ratios on a High/Full pop server. Want to do Oondasta? Galleon? Nalak? Sha? Good luck. Dailies? Good luck. Leveling 85-90? Node farming?

server imbalances were created by the players on purpose to stack their odds and make their life easier. if a majority of people actually want blizzard to force all realms attempt to be as 1:1 as possible then more people would complain simply because the game would actually be HARD in WPVP again

it's funny because I wouldn't mind trying it but I know I would immediately regret it because it's such a fucked concept.



further proving how absolutely toxic the wow community is

I have no idea where you got this idea from. There's no illuminati group of players. There's no player conspiracy to skew the ratio.

[Tribunal]

Yeah, I have been excited for this to come in patch 5.4 since they hinted at it. I have actually been putting off a guild choice (hoping for more attractive options without x-fering AGAIN) because of it.

Now... this "maybbbeee one or two realms and mayyyybeeee after 5.4" backtrack is really disappointing. The original hint seemed like it would be launch day, and that most realms would already be coalesced and ready to go.

Still going to wait and see, but much less hopefully that it will actually fix my problems. Heck, the way they're talking my ghost-town-but-still-technically-still-lowend-medium pop server might not even get the treatment :/

[Deleted]

I wouldn't be suprised to see them go live a few weeks post 5.4. They will spend a couple weeks hotfixing any bugs in the lost isle, 5.4 raid, flexraid tech and new arena team functionality before they jump headfirst into connected realms.

By which time my guild will have quit.

Up until now we've been holding onto the hope that we'd be able to recruit to do SoO because of Virtual Realms. Now today they announce they don't actually know when it's coming. Heh. My sub is currently not active, and I won't be activating it at all if they don't drop this on the first week. It's already too little too late. Asking us to wait even longer after all of this "it's coming in 5.4" spiel is just the final slap in the face.

[soulinger]

(Blizzard Stalls on V-Realms and calls it something else )
We haven’t yet determined when we’ll be creating the first Connected Realms, but we expect it will be some time after the launch of Patch 5.4.

(and they are still using the name change factor an excuse to not do a real merge)
Other alternatives such as merging realms would require us to force character name changes if there were conflicts, and could lead to confusion for returning players who’d log in to find their realm missing from the realm list. Some players also feel strong ties to their realm’s name or history, and we don’t want to erase that.

[Airwaves]

Hmm. Now that my brothers realm is going to be high pop I might move a toon there to play with him. Nice!