Poll: Is CRZ a mistake?

Page 1 of 3
1
2
3
LastLast
  1. #1
    The Patient Strun's Avatar
    7+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Apr 2014
    Location
    The Ninth Circle of Hell
    Posts
    211

    Was merging realms a mistake? (including Cross-Realm Zones)

    I've always been kind of pessimistic about the implementation of CRZ and realm merges. I like my low-pop servers and not having people swarming over rare spawns like ants on a snickers bar, but I'd like to hear from you guys. When they first discussed CRZ I thought it meant your friends could invite you and it'd yank you over to the group leader's server (which I was actually pretty excited for).

    If you think these systems were a mistake or even if you don't, please reply and tell us why.

    Thanks!
    Lock rocks, made to order.

  2. #2
    Titan MerinPally's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Location
    Chemistry block.
    Posts
    13,372
    Couldn't tell you, I'm in Europe so I'm still waiting for even a hint of connection let alone the arduous wait after announcement for it to actually occur. From hearing what friends say I imagine it could be potentially good but if servers go into their own little cliques then it could be a pain. It's not going to be an instant solving of the problem but a way forward. Getting connected is one thing, the several months for communication and cooperation to occur is going to be just as painful.
    http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...nicus/advanced
    Quote Originally Posted by goblinpaladin View Post
    Also a vegetable is a person.
    Quote Originally Posted by Orlong View Post
    I dont care if they [gays] are allowed to donate [blood], but I think we should have an option to refuse gay blood if we need to receive blood.

  3. #3
    Crz and realm merging was one of the primary reasons i quit wow.
    Yes its an mmo and you arent supposed to play alone. But having people from all over that you will never see again. There will be problems. there was so much shit going on from players from other servers. Mob stealing. griefing, name calling and so on.

  4. #4
    Deleted
    People like you should stick with games like Skyrim. After all what is the point in an MMORPG if you want no interaction with fellow adventurers? Low pop servers are a disease and Blizzard are slowly but surely eradicating them.

  5. #5
    The Undying Lochton's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Apr 2010
    Location
    FEEL THE WRATH OF MY SPANNER!!
    Posts
    37,512
    Loving the CRZ system, making life come out in zones.

    When it was added, I started smiling as I saw people levelling in Westfall on one of my alt servers, suddenly there was life.

    And the merging is needed, really. Do you rather just wish to be moved to a random server just because, or merge together with servers of your type and not lose your name or guild?
    FOMO: "Fear Of Missing Out", also commonly known as people with a mental issue of managing time and activities, many expecting others to fit into their schedule so they don't miss out on things to come. If FOMO becomes a problem for you, do seek help, it can be a very unhealthy lifestyle..

  6. #6
    Deleted
    CRZ and server merges are a good idea in principle, but the way they have done them is kinda sub optimal.

    Having a healthy population in each zone is an awesome idea, unfortunately someone at blizzard seems to think that a healthy population means "like the first new levelling zone on an expansion launch day".

    Server mergers were a great idea, but just randomly shoving realms together seems to have been the order of the day. They could have balanced alliance versus horde, merged servers with established guilds and communities with ones with less or more established/successful communities depending on the effect they wanted. Instead it seems that which realms they bang together have been picked by manatees. I'm not even going to mention the AH issues.

    Edit - world pvp only works if you can build rivalries and hate on specific people who gank. The CRZ version sucks balls, randomly being ganked by random people you'll never be able to get revenge on is rubbish.

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Injin View Post
    CRZ and server merges are a good idea in principle, but the way they have done them is kinda sub optimal.

    Having a healthy population in each zone is an awesome idea, unfortunately someone at blizzard seems to think that a healthy population means "like the first new levelling zone on an expansion launch day".

    Server mergers were a great idea, but just randomly shoving realms together seems to have been the order of the day. They could have balanced alliance versus horde, merged servers with established guilds and communities with ones with less or more established/successful communities depending on the effect they wanted. Instead it seems that which realms they bang together have been picked by manatees. I'm not even going to mention the AH issues.

    Edit - world pvp only works if you can build rivalries and hate on specific people who gank. The CRZ version sucks balls, randomly being ganked by random people you'll never be able to get revenge on is rubbish.
    I call bulshit on "suboptimal".

    I've seen little occurrence of this "expansion day level" amounts of population in zones, and anything close to that is actually healthy. The AH issues stemming from dead to low realms is even worse than having populated connected ones. (which are problems we're supposed to have in a healthy server, like in years before). Just because people got used to taking advantage of low pop AH's doenst mean the system was wrong to change, it means they have to adapt to the new system.

    A lot of effort has gone into choosing which realms to merge, the only thing is blizz aren't going to share the details because that sort of transparency is going to attract hate no matter HOW justified or logical they were. They're smarter than that. I don't see any "random banging together". Plus theres the fact that no realm mergers are going to be ideal. There is no ideal combinations of al those factors you mentioned (and the others not mentioned). They can only find what is optimally ideal, as per the limitations present in each server.

    when it comes down to it, your statement is bull because it assumes things you simply cannot know. nothing can be derived to tell you that the mergers were random, except your hating. The whole "world pvp" being built around "rivalries and hate on specific people" is even more bull. You're just making stuff up now.

  8. #8
    Not a fan tbh. I hate leveling to start with so having more competition for mobs/rares while leveling is just an annoyance. It's largely because of CRZ I tend to do dungeons for as long as I have quests in them. Not to mention how impossible they made it to get TLPD, among other things, without finding specific server subsets or exploiting the servers with ip blockers and so on. There's as many people killing mobs like Skarr, Loque and Krush as there are tamers as well, so taming them on highly active PvP servers is a nightmare.

  9. #9
    Deleted
    Realm merges are great, but they aren't going as fast as needed. At least not in EU.

    CRZ is crap. Unlike realm merges CRZ just puts random players from different realms in same zone. Players cannot trade with each other, join same guilds and the only thing players can do is compete over resources. There are no consequences for bad behavior because you are unlikely to ever see those players again.

    Quote Originally Posted by Injin View Post
    They could have balanced alliance versus horde, merged servers with established guilds and communities with ones with less or more established/successful communities depending on the effect they wanted. Instead it seems that which realms they bang together have been picked by manatees. I'm not even going to mention the AH issues.
    Nonsense.

    Alliance/horde balance is impossible because almost all PvP realms have high horde population and almost all PvE realms have high alliance population. The only PvP realms with high number of alliance are already heavily populated, same goes for Draenor (the only PvE realm with lot of horde). Unless they mix PvP and PvE realms there is no way to achieve balanced realms.

    Established/successful communities is a matter of opinion. It changes depending on what guild you are in. The only number Blizzard can see is number of active players.

    AH issues? You mean turning empty auction houses dominated by few AH players into striving healthy auction houses? Unless you are one of those selfish players who thinks his ability to earn gold should matter more than ability of the rest of realm to purchase useful stuff at reasonable prices, merges are good thing.

  10. #10
    Deleted
    With you there are no shades of grey.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Romandix View Post
    People like you should stick with games like Skyrim. After all what is the point in an MMORPG if you want no interaction with fellow adventurers? Low pop servers are a disease and Blizzard are slowly but surely eradicating them.
    Maybe if blizzard fixed their levelling content to work with large amounts of players it'd be bearable. It's fun having to give up questing in barrens because 20 people are trying to get 12x a mob of which there are only 6 spawns, with minutes between spawns. At 2 am.
    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    which is kind of like saying "of COURSE you can't see the unicorns, unicorns are invisible, silly."

  12. #12
    Fluffy Kitten Dyra's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Oct 2009
    Location
    Fording the Ox
    Posts
    1,641
    My opinion varies. I think it was a good idea in principle, however, they really haven't done it well imo (especially the EU servers).

    The things I don't like:

    - World PvP: Don't get me wrong, I don't mind getting attacked and then fighting back. I don't mind instigating myself if I see a fellow Hordie getting attacked. And, while it's true annoyance, I don't mind getting ganked while levelling (griefing/corpse camping is not OK though). What I do mind is getting ganked, fetching the main and then never, ever finding them again to get my revenge purely because I'm now in a different CRZ. So frustrating.

    - What's happened to my server: OK, so this is anecdotal evidence here, but it is the reason I've stopped playing and is contributing to why I might not return. My server (Burning Blade) was merged about 2 months ago. While our server was low/medium population, it was Alliance heavy and a PvP server, which meant it could have been used to help balance faction imbalance for pretty much any other PvP server. But it wasn't. Instead we were used on Drak'thul. Now Drak'thul is a very much Horde dominated server, with a population such that our Alliance population is a drop in the bucket to them, and is also the unofficial Czech/Slovak realm. The Drak'thlians only want fellow Czech speakers to play with them, since it's what they're used to, which is fair enough. What isn't fair is that the Horde from my server were not welcome, and we were so vastly outnumbered that speaking English in trade just gets us shouted down in a torrent of abuse. The Czechs are welcome to their own realm, but since the language of my realm has changed from English to Czech, I (and any other Hordie from BB) can no longer play.

    On the Alliance side, it's just as bad. While they are mostly Czech speakers, English is allowed in trade, but now they are badly outnumbered by the Horde. What's worse, is that a good chunk of them had PAID to come to Burning Blade from Drak'thul (Burning Blade was very much Horde dominated until WotLK). So now they're back where they started having paid real currency to go full circle.

    Given that this merge was going to be seriously detrimental to both sides of Burning Blade, we argued against the merge in the weeks between its announcement and its implementation, but got no response. Since the merge, we have been told that Blizzard are 'aware' of this issue, but nothing since. Since then, most of my guild have cancelled their sub and might well not be returning. This merge was the final fatal stroke that has killed my server, and unless I'm willing to pay £17 per character (atm - we have asked for a FCM to an English speaking realm. Also, we're waiting to see if any other realms get merged with ours before we take this drastic and expensive step) to fix something that should never have been broken in this way.

    TL;DR: My server was merged. It's awful.

    - Speed and lack of transparency: Progress for the EU realm merges makes a sloth look like Usain Bolt. And they won't give any reason why they're going so slow or the reasons for some of the frankly bizarre merges they've done already. It's frustrating for the majority on the EU servers (merged or un-merged) as they simply cannot plan for the future.

    The things I do like:

    - Populations: Again anecdotal, but I am confident that for other merged servers, it is the same experience for others.

    Having gone from <800 auctions on the Auction house and a complete inability to gather a group together to kill the Celestials or Ordos without OQueue, to what it is now is amazing. If the language barrier wasn't firmly in place, then I could take advantage of the Flex, Normal and Heroic PuGs advertised on trade chat (acronyms are mostly the same - Otherwise, Google Translate is a wonderful thing).

    - Cross realm raids: While it won't be available for Mythic raids (which is what I'm aiming for if I were to return for WoD), the combination of this and OQueue is amazing atm.

    A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

  13. #13
    I hate how CRZ were implemented. It is impossible to farm a rare mob, because - unlike on a full realm - there are infinite people camping the same rare, farming the same nodes. When one logs out, another one will take his place in the "world".

    But merged realms are the best idea Blizzard ever had. This way they can easily control the population on the realms. If only they would merge them faster, or in a more foreseeable pattern. We as one of the few EU PVE servers got merged. But according to wowprogress we are in the lower half of server population - and we got merged with a realm who had less than half of players than we did. This week, again two PVE realms are to be merged, and both are larger than we are. Where is the logic?

  14. #14
    Deleted
    Very polarized poll options, bleh.
    At last make a "I don't mind the system" option, as the players over the pond in the EU havn't seen much of this "connected realm" stuff.

    As for outdoor CRZ, I'm very indifferent. I havn't seen that many rares since I transfered to a high pop realm, but that is not an issue to me. It helps me get world boss groups, so that's a definite plus.
    The biggest issue with low pop realms is the low amount of skilled players. If you per MoP definition "play the game at any serious level", you need to find either 9 or 24 good raiders, or 1-2 exceptional arena partners. Back on our low pop realm, I didn't even dare do arena because I knew everyone on trade were bad and I chose to not even give the benefit of the doubt. Our guild was falling apart because every player who had even done a single heroic boss were already bolted to their guild. We did not get any new guys for 6 months before a rivaling guild fell apart, and 2 of their main team members wanted to carry on. Those 2 guys have now quit the game, approx a month after they joined our guild.

    I hope that explains a raidleader's viewpoint on "low pop" (read: dead) realms, there's no people left to play with, so you have to play the queue game and do subpar content from what you wanted to do. This might be fine for a casual player who has no interest in "heroic raiding" or the sorts, but it's agonizing for anyone else.
    I think the current realm system is broken. In future MMOs, I hope other companies, or even Blizzard themselves, can create a realm system that doesn't strap anyone to a specific realm. Because the worst thing of all is paying money to start playing the game you want to.

  15. #15
    CRZ was terrible I think. It was just a simple band aid fix honestly, it didn't accomplish fixing any problems with the low pop servers, it just gave the illusion there was more players. Not to mention how buggy it was at first, and sometimes people will still fall off your two person mounts while zone transitioning.

    The actual realm merging though I think is a good move.

  16. #16
    Most low pop realms don't have good options in the ways of PvP or PvE groups, you can try to form one but you'll be ultimately unsuccessful. The people on these realms tend to be long time players that have accepted their realm sucks and just play casually. But there are still people who went to them because of friends or cause that was the suggested realm for good ping, so they are stuck on this realm with either really bad players wanting to group up or no one at all.

    I came from Tanaris a realm that used to have decent options for PvE and PvP on both alliance and horde side, slowly though after the best guild on horde side faction changed and the year long DS tier killed off most guilds who were tired of farming the same 8 bosses, we were left with 2 good guilds and 1 okayish guild. Yet in the course of just this expansion people have been abandoning low-pop servers like sinking ships and now there are no real guilds left. I hopped ship in 5.3 when the last good guild broke up to go their separate ways, I just wish we'd been connected sooner cause if that happened the realm wouldn't have died. There were no more recruiting prospects left on the realm the guilds that wanted to actually do things HAD to leave or be forced to go casual.

    Ultimately I prefer low-pop servers but the benefits for everyone vastly out weigh rare-spawn camping and xpac release leveling.

  17. #17
    Brewmaster Nivena's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Nov 2012
    Location
    Iceblood Garrison
    Posts
    1,309
    Quote Originally Posted by Dyra View Post
    Given that this merge was going to be seriously detrimental to both sides of Burning Blade, we argued against the merge in the weeks between its announcement and its implementation, but got no response. Since the merge, we have been told that Blizzard are 'aware' of this issue, but nothing since. Since then, most of my guild have cancelled their sub and might well not be returning.
    In my battlegroup (which is very populated) a medium server got picked out and merged with another server from a dead battlegroup. They now have 1hour queue time for SoO raidfinder dps...Blizzard did nothing.

    I really hope my server can stay in the same battlegroup, otherwise I have to pay money since I don't want to spend time waiting for so long. That was around two months ago, so something might have changed in the meantime.

    I don't play anymore, really hoping that they get this done before WoD release. 8 months and my already dead server still not connected....when my sub run out at saturday evening around 12 players were in Orgrimmar. I don't even want to know how it looks now in Valley of Strength.

  18. #18
    I am not for or against CRZ, but love the idea of merged realms. However, it is happening much much too slow. I know they needed a few months to work out the kinks, but we're well into things now and they aren't happening any faster (in fact, are they happening at all recently?). My guild is on a server that nowadays shows up as 'Low' more than 'Medium', and my guild is the only reason I stay. I have a few characters on much higher populations servers (Area 52 and Proudmoore, for example) and the difference is night and day. I love having other people around, even when it causes a few annoyances in rare hunting or whatever.

  19. #19
    CRZ and connected realms are two totally different things with different impacts on the game.

    Connected realms has worked wonders for my main server, and can't wait for it to catch up to my other servers. CRZ I'm ok with, but I get annoyed regarding stuff like Wintergrasp status.
    You're not allowed to discuss conspiracy theories on mmo-champion, which makes me wonder what they're trying to hide.

  20. #20
    Elemental Lord Sierra85's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Aug 2010
    Location
    getting a coffee
    Posts
    8,490
    the idea to make the world more active and alive is part of what makes wow good. you want to play with other people in an MMO.

    dead servers are not fun.
    Hi

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •