Falling Warcraft Numbers Result In Connected Realms

[Karloff]

Falling Warcraft Numbers Result In Connected Realms

Welcome, tourist! Now you have more chances to group up, compete and connect with other players.

It's no great secret that World of Warcraft - though it still has a hefty player base and is the premier subscription MMO - is losing subscribers [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/126362-World-of-Warcraft-Numbers-Down-Again]. Plus, players being the flighty little weasels that they are, folks tend to migrate from one realm to another in their search for a perfect home, but that can lead to some realms being virtual ghost towns while others are a little overpopulated. This doesn't just have an effect on the immediate will-someone-group-with-my-rouge-no-wait-rogue experience; the knock-on cripples the auction house, and has a significant effect on realm economy. Thus Blizzard is introducing Connected Realms in patch 5.4, a system in which two or more standard realms are seamlessly linked. Welcome, tourist from underdeveloped realm A! Say hello to the shiny consumer goods found in realm B, and by the way, would you like to group with a rouge?

"These linked realms will behave as if they were one cohesive realm," says Blizzard, "meaning you'll be able to join the same guilds, access a single Auction House, run the same Raids and Dungeons, and join other adventurers to complete quests." Blizzard doesn't want this to be any more disruptive than it absolutely has to be, and merging realms has its own complications. Suppose someone went on hiatus, and wants to come back because the latest expansion - Kingdom of the Penguin Goddess, say - is out. If that player's realm got merged, there's no home to return to. Or suppose two or more players in the merged realms share the same character name; how does that work? Thus Connected seems the better bet, from Blizzard's point of view. Players, it's hoped, won't notice a thing. They won't even see a home realm indicator, except in chat; as far as the users are concerned, everyone's in the same Azeroth.

As to exactly when this will happen, Blizzard hasn't said. Sometime after patch 5.4, is the ETA. "We want the experience to be seamless," says Blizzard, "and we expect it work as if you're suddenly part of a much more active realm." So if you should notice a bunch of tourists hanging around the local inn, now you know why.

Source: Battle.net [http://us.battle.net//wow/en/blog/10551009]


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[Fappy]

I read "Kingdom of the Penguin Goddess" as the "Kingdom of Penguin Goodness" at first >.>

I think I'd consider going back to WoW for that!

 

[PuckFuppet]

They should have done this a few years ago but its good to see that they're working to manage the mass-migration issue.

 

[Chessrook44]

Why not just do what Guild Wars 2 did and have the Auction House, Dungeons, Parties, and Guild be able to connect across all servers? Does the architecture not work with that?

 

[Steven Bogos]

If you asked me five years ago, I would much rather they merged the realms.

That was because five years ago, WoW was still actually an MMO, as in, MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER. As you quested through the zones you'd meet hundreds of different players. There was no avoiding other people, and that was part of the fun.

These days, WoW is a singleplayer game. You play by yourself as you level, in your own private little phased bubble. Shared quest mobs means you never need to make groups, or even talk to the people you meet in the overworld, and when it's time for an instance or a raid, you just pop in the dungeon queue, wait a while, then zerg the entire instance with nothing more than a complimentary "hello" and "goodbye."

In it's quest for convenience, WoW lost the point of what makes an MMO. Getting ganked in STV. Grouping up with strangers to try and bring down some group quests in the Hellfire peninsula. Sitting in Org trying to organize a PuG for an Instance. The constant, massive War that took place at Blackrock mountain on raid night. These are my fondest memories of WoW. Not getting Shiny Sword of Shinies +2 from a boss with some faceless, mute strangers that might as well be bots.

So they stitch the realms together "seamlessly" in a last-ditch attempt to keep their playerbase together, but ironically, the entire concept of "playing together" has been all but ripped out of World of Warraft.

 

[Rblade]

Why not just do what Guild Wars 2 did and have the Auction House, Dungeons, Parties, and Guild be able to connect across all servers? Does the architecture not work with that?

If I'm not mistaken Queus for instances and battlegrounds where already across several servers for a while. And I stopped playing years ago

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

This is actually a great idea that many MMOs may implement in the future. I'm curious how similar this may be to Elder Scrolls Online's single Mega-Server.

 

[Fappy]

If you asked me five years ago, I would much rather they merged the realms.

That was because five years ago, WoW was still actually an MMO, as in, MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER. As you quested through the zones you'd meet hundreds of different players. There was no avoiding other people, and that was part of the fun.

These days, WoW is a singleplayer game. You play by yourself as you level, in your own private little phased bubble. Shared quest mobs means you never need to make groups, or even talk to the people you meet in the overworld, and when it's time for an instance or a raid, you just pop in the dungeon queue, wait a while, then zerg the entire instance with nothing more than a complimentary "hello" and "goodbye."

In it's quest for convenience, WoW lost the point of what makes an MMO. Getting ganked in STV. Grouping up with strangers to try and bring down some group quests in the Hellfire peninsula. Sitting in Org trying to organize a PuG for an Instance. The constant, massive War that took place at Blackrock mountain on raid night. These are my fondest memories of WoW. Not getting Shiny Sword of Shinies +2 from a boss with some faceless, mute strangers that might as well be bots.

So they stitch the realms together "seamlessly" in a last-ditch attempt to keep their playerbase together, but ironically, the entire concept of "playing together" has been all but ripped out of World of Warraft.

STV was the most dangerous zone in the game. No fucking joke. I seem to remember a lot of PvP went on in... was it Arathi Highlands? I seem to remember Alliance and Horde villages being really close to each other there.

 

[LetalisK]

Why not just do what Guild Wars 2 did and have the Auction House, Dungeons, Parties, and Guild be able to connect across all servers? Does the architecture not work with that?

According to their lead designer, who came on after the initial release, he commented that the game was made in a way that he doesn't think they expected it to be such a huge hit and to change so much. It was very rigid and a big part of his job since then has been slowly and steadily changing the architecture.

 

[Demandred20]

STV was the most dangerous zone in the game. No fucking joke. I seem to remember a lot of PvP went on in... was it Arathi Highlands? I seem to remember Alliance and Horde villages being really close to each other there.

Ahh the memories of Nesingwarys hunting camp where you could get lost for hours just fighting the other side. And ganking going on in Booty Bay until the guards bugged out.

 

[synobal]

Party with a rouge huh? I dunno sounds fishy, I'll group with this rogue over here instead.

 

[CJ1145]

As someone who plays WoW, most of this stuff is already in the game, so I don't know why it's news? Same guilds and auction houses might be a new feature, but there are already cross-realm questing areas, and dungeon and raid finder can group you up with people from any realm.

 

[Negatempest]

Personally hope World of Warcraft starts losing subscriptions. Not be all trendy in the "Wow is lame, blah, blah, blah." But I REALLY wanna play Warcraft 4 before I die of old age.

 

[Sku1c]

In it's quest for convenience, WoW lost the point of what makes an MMO. mute strangers that might as well be bots.

This is my main gripe with the more recent A3 mmo's, they're stupidly easy. A good player can solo nearly all the content and the rest can just zerg their way to victory, GW2 is an excellent example of this.

I make more 'friends' playing non mmo's, how screwed up is that? The social aspect of an mmo should be present at all times, right now it's lacking in several.

Bit more of a rant then I intended..

 

[Aeshi]

I seem to remember a lot of PvP went on in... was it Arathi Highlands? I seem to remember Alliance and Horde villages being really close to each other there.

I think the zone you're thinking of is (was? maybe Cataclysm changed it) Hillsbrad Foothills, the Horde & Alliance outposts are/were a few minutes walk away from each other, back when I played the towns there would sometimes be sieged for days on end.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Note that Connected Realms isn't the same as merging the realms. Players from realm x will be able to interact with connected realm y, join guilds on either realm, have a shared auction house and the like. Cross-realm Zones didn't allow for this because it wasn't a full on connection. They aren't shutting down the servers, they're just letting players have more interaction than before cross-realm.
While some people pine for the halcyon days of Vanilla wow, they always forget the hassle that 40man raiding was. 2 gear drops per boss, horrible rep grinds for essential gear (ok, the new rep grind is horrible due to being locked to daily quests), and the ever present invincible (yet still somehow visible) RNG boss. Stratholme, Scholomance, BRD and UBRS/LBRS runs, Dire Maul tribute runs... All in all it was hell on players and consumed a crapload of time.
There's a lot to do in WoW, but the player burnout of "veteran" players has less to do with ease-of-access content and more to do with the fact that we've been playing WoW for a long damn time.
LFR makes it easier to group for content especially for players who don't have time to raid regularly with a guild. But its not essential. Guilds can still run heroics for that uber-hard challenge and there's still content that's for the hardcore players only. I personally find it sad that the elitists boo-hoo over casual players having access to raid content. Heroic raids are still pretty exclusive and difficult, and some of the newest content isn't easy on LFR.

 

[J Tyran]

This is actually a great idea that many MMOs may implement in the future. I'm curious how similar this may be to Elder Scrolls Online's single Mega-Server.

They already do, TESO's mega server is just a fancy name for something that's already done. Its a server cluster with groups of players occupying "instances", this way everyone is sort of in the same world regarding auctions, guild adverts and PvP and dungeon queues and so on but the amount of players and things going on is limited by a separate instance that's aimed at preventing that single little slice of the world from becoming overloaded.

Some games you can swap between each instance manually, automatically or both. Joining an advertised group for example might shunt the player into another instance, the player might decide a specific region is too crowded or the chat is annoying (or any other reason) and want to change instance in games that allow it.

On a certain level TESO system is probably a bit more like EVE Online's super cluster Tranquility that aims to be as dynamic as possible and try and prevent the limitations this kind of system can have, Star Trek Online for example can have as few as 50 players per instance which can have a horribly jarring effect on the players and makes the world feel empty.

Taken from the Bethesda website they say "When you want to enter the game no server list appears. You just click -Play- and you are in Tamriel. All players are housed on one -mega server- but in several separated worlds. These worlds are not stable. The system can add new players to the existing worlds or can merge several worlds with few players. It is a great technology that sets new MMO standard." which isn't exactly true, CCP have been striving towards (and mostly achieved) that for a decade now.

Tranquility is constantly trying to balance everything out, a really busy star system will run on a single server but out in the middle of nowhere a single server would run many mostly empty systems. It adjusts as the players move around, the server team will also monitor events in game and listen to feedback from the players to see if there is likely to be a very large fight and if so dedicate that area to some of their heavily reinforced super servers. It doesn't always work in a game where a single miss-click can start a battle involving several thousand players though.

 

[Micalas]

STV was the most dangerous zone in the game. No fucking joke. I seem to remember a lot of PvP went on in... was it Arathi Highlands? I seem to remember Alliance and Horde villages being really close to each other there.

Hillsbrad Foothills. This was before there was organized PvP. The Tarren Mill vs Southshore wars was rage on for weeks at a time. Good times.