The hardware part I can believe.
But they have no excuse for not handling it as soon as it became a problem. The could have easily picked 3-4 low-medium servers as destination realms and open FCM for pools of other 7-8 low for each of them, basically merging them but not forcibly. But noooooo, Bobby needed a new yacht.
Thank God we have a new book to pack all the lore into. Otherwise, we'd have to play the game to figure out what's going on in the game.
Next to no one watches the cinematics in-game or reads the lore in quests (If they did the latter 90% of the questions in the lore section would be answered already). This isn't even a new thing. One of the earliest mods in vanilla was the instantly accept quests mod where people would just click the quest giver then run off to do the quest without looking and back then all the lore (what's little there is) was 100% in the quest book with 0 cinematics.
The vast majority just clicks escape, skip, whatever, wants their loots for their epeen and continue on. Putting lore in the game at even 40% of that in FFXIV would cause a player revolt.
The characters in that mobile Marvel game deffo were made using Blizzards new diversity tool.
"The game is much more fun if you’re actually playing it, even on a smaller realm" - This is a meme right? They understand that for classic, TBC and now WotLK, you need a high population to do content because of the lack of cross realm dungeon finder. Right?
So the hardware can't handle it yet Blizzard NEVER locked paid transfers to Firemaw. Not a good look.
I wouldn't call it purposeful incompetence, realms dying off also hurts Blizzards bottomline because not everyone is willing to transfer, meaning that those people will highly likely unsub.
The issue is that you're basically repeating history at an accelerated pace, that also happened in Retail with people moving towards more populated realms, which largely happens because people have the freedom to transfer to any realm.
Except it happened more slowly and by the time it became noticeable, you already CRZ, DF and LFR to keep things reasonable for most players.
I think at the end of the day, there are only two ways as far as this whole Server thing is concerned:
1. Go the Retail route and basically eliminate Servers as much as possible
2. Control the fuck out of Realm population to ensure not a handful of realms gains extraordinary amount of players
Right now Blizzard basically just hopes that the players will spread themselves evenly, while history has shown that this doesn't happen.
Of course, Blizzard will not do 1. for Classic because it's Classic and they're not going to do 2. because Blizzard doesn't want to restrict players that much, so the situation is basically a complete deadlock.
How much of that is a chicken & egg problem? Clearly a heavy in-game lore focus has worked wonders for Final Fantasy, with it being one of the primary selling points of current players promoting the game to new players. So is this not possible because of WoW players are what they are or is it because WoW cultivates the game to push WoW players into being that way?
Blizzard knows that it just doesn't work like that. That's why they added LFD, crz, sharding and all that in retail.
Unfortunately though, a lot of people dislike that and blame these features on why they think the game sucks or perceive the community is dead. That was in fact one of the main arguments back then why people were asking for Vanilla servers with "real" servers and communities.
Basically: Blizzard cannot make it quite right for everyone, so they just stick with how things worked back then even when they know that it sucks.
You do know that the in-game lore is still there for you to replay it with an alt after you reach max level and get your Cutting Edge achievement, right? Why should others who take their time to read the quest text and NPC chatter suffer because of a handful of people who just want to rush to max level and not read anything?
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Not the poster, but I don't think it's a bad sign, per se, although it can be misused. For example, we have no in-game connection between the end of MoP and the beginning of WoD.
If you don't read the books, you wouldn't know that Garrosh escaped the trial, was taken to an alternate past, killed his savior and created the Iron Horde. Hell, you don't even know Garrosh was even alive until you meet him in alternate Nagrand! And even then you still don't know how he got there unless you read the book.
Hopefully the book will be about the Dragons inheriting the Dragon Isles and how they became enemies with the Djarin, rather than anything modern and important to our characters.
Backstory for an expansion's continent is fine for a novel, IMO, because they usually cover the necessary backstory during the leveling processes too. It would just be extra details for those interested. But expansion bridging books really need to stop, or be much better conveyed in-game, too.
Prologue books for expansions since the end of MoP have been a particularly bad practice for Blizzard considering important events that bridge expansions that occur in them could just as easily be represented in-game as well as have the book exist to further flesh them out but they'd rather exclude them while keeping the extra dime and the ability to freely retcon whatever because they don't consider the events of the books canon most of the time.
Now it's not clear yet if the Dragonflight book is meant to be a prologue book or pequel in the sense it's covering the Dragon Isles before they were hidden but just be aware they'll likely retcon it's content during the expansion.
This isn't written with you in mind.
This is written towards toxic positive people who follow other lemings and feels superior than you for being obedient and "part of the solution"
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The real solution is to bite the bullet and have what Korean grinders have as a baseline feature: server channels.
Of course that would require them to say goodbye to paid transfers and that's a no no.
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Why would they?
Lets assume that hiring a writer and making in-game cutscenes costs the same.
They cant really charge you extra for viewing cutscenes in the game just yet.
They can charge you extra for a book.
It's that simple.
Last edited by Dzonathan; 2022-05-19 at 06:48 PM.
You're completely misrepresenting what the books did in the past and what the books do today. In the past, the books were supplemental and not really required to understand what was going on the game. Today, the books are required reading because many events/actions in the main story just don't make sense without it.
In the beginning of WoW, a good chunk of the lore was based upon what happened in Warcraft 3, and there was a bit of assumption that you had played that game to understand who was who. However, there were in-game lore books you could find all over the world that actually explained characters and past events, many covering what happened in Warcraft 3. Furthermore, quests tended to give people some idea what was going on, and we generally didn't have our characters doing a completely reversal in thought or action without an in-game explanation that made sense. If you wanted some extra details that weren't necessary to understand the story in the game, you could get the external books.
Unfortunately, the current story makes zero sense without the context provided by the books. The jump from MoP to WoD makes zero sense and barely any reference to what happened, because it all happened in a book. From then on, it got much worse, culminating in the Shadowlands in-game story being completely devoid of motivations and explanations necessary to wonder what the hell is going on. The end result is that many people who like lore or like some sort of lore/story to follow even if it's not their main driver were confused at best, annoyed at worst.
The standard we should expect from Blizz is to make a story that works within the confines of the games without needing to shell out more cash so you can understand what's going on the game. If you can't make that sort of story without requiring external novels, make another story.
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