Falling Warcraft Numbers Result In Connected Realms

[Gromril]

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.

Ah yes, the tarren mill/south shore tug of war that could crash a server when it got going.

Then Burning crusade killed off world pvp by giving towns and cities ever spawning elite guards. Cant have those dastardly pvpers acting like the enemy faction now can we?

 

[suitepee7]

at this point well it doesn't even make sense you go into BG's without at least 5 heirloom items, you'll get one-shotted the first step you take otherwise. But then again this is the point is it not? To always have players that spent the extra dosh have the better stuff and always trump players that didn't thusly motivating players to spend more money so they too can have the awesome...

Wow by accident of design became a game that you have to play through once before you can actually play it. When they decide to step away from this paradigm then they will start regaining users. Which is why they're losing to games like Skyrim. Skyrim offers just about everything you can get out of WoW but at least you can play SKyrim *your* way.

yeah, i'm not sure you're talking about WoW. you can't buy heirlooms with money, only with ingame currency which isn't really that expensive. in low level BGs there is no class balance anyway, some abilities have ridiculous scaling which means some classes can 1-shot anybody, regardless of heirlooms or not.

as to your second point that i quoted, there's two key things skyrim doesn't have, both involving other people:
1. PvP
2. Group content (raids, dungeons, scenarios etc)

i really enjoy PvP anyway, and fighting AI is never the same as fighting people. as for the group content, raids are just fun, and its fun to be part of something much larger than yourself. i still remember the first time our guild downed the lich king for the very first time, that feeling of accomplishment was pretty intense.

OT: this was kinda needed. CRZ was a good start, but this is considerably better and will help dead realms without a realm change being needed. also it should be a nice boost to world PvP, so all good

 

[Colt47]

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.

Ah yes, the tarren mill/south shore tug of war that could crash a server when it got going.

Then Burning crusade killed off world pvp by giving towns and cities ever spawning elite guards. Cant have those dastardly pvpers acting like the enemy faction now can we?

That was one of the changes I absolutely disliked to the core. Having an opposing faction take over a town by rushing in and killing everything in sight was part of the charm of the game. What they should have done is just have the quest NPCs change to some hill or something until the town cleared out and returned to normal.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Seamless link they say... in the trade this is known as server merge so you can start shutting down your declining MMO and stop money hemorrhaging.
Obviously all this is done to improve the experience...

 

[Sectan]

You know what the sad thing is? Watching some guy's videos of a private vanilla server (Which I know is a naughty no no!). You see more player interaction, more pvp and more players in the world in general. When I was still subbed and was questing in low lvl areas I never saw anyone. I would /who and I'd be alone in an entire zone... That says something when a 2 bit private server with a lower population has a higher sense of community than an enormous blizzard server.

 

[enriquetnt]

Well this will be a neat coping method but what plans does Blzz have to actually halt or *gasp* reverse the subscription slide?

You think maybe rushing people to the endgame may have resulted it people i dunno completing the end game stuff that much faster and getting bored all the sooner? Think maybe, having a game where roughly 90% doesn't matter after a month or two of playing may have been a miss-step? You think that maybe in focusing on casual gamers you may have gotten a large but non-committed player base. a player base that doesn't particularly care if they're playing WoW, TL2 or TF2? Or Marvel Superheros?

But the thing is and I pose this to all of y'all. How does Blizzard stop and maybe regain some of their lost player base. And don't say Free to play since given the way they're running it, they'll have you paying real money for bank slots and guild bank tabs.

EASY they DONT, the answer is simple... "WOW 2" then a few years down the line kill off WOW servers or offer those that have not already upgraded a easy cheap way in, and forget about Warcraft 4 that is just a dream now (unless they put warcraft 4 INSIDE wow 2 as an side activity or "mini game" sans the "mini" that really would be beyond amazing

 

[VodkaKnight]

When I played it, most people moved from some of the servers I was on moved to higher populated servers.
The problem is, lower populated servers stay low, but higher populated ones just get higher.
If they offered free server changes to servers with under 1000 players, and introduced a cap on the amount of players that could be on a server, that'd fix that problem.

 

[Elate]

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?

Considering GW2 was built with that in mind, I imagine not. Coupled with the fact, that to suddenly merge every Auction House across all servers would likely tank the economy too.

 

[Korskarn]

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.

There's plenty of MMOs that create/remove/merge multiple instances based on player activity - Guild Wars 1 has been doing it in towns for 8 years, for example, and Secret World doing exactly what Bethesda describes.

 

[J Tyran]

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.

There's plenty of MMOs that create/remove/merge multiple instances based on player activity - Guild Wars 1 has been doing it in towns for 8 years, for example, and Secret World doing exactly what Bethesda describes.

Exactly, just as I said in the first sentence "They already do, TESO's mega server is just a fancy name for something that's already done".

Bethesda are talking out their arses about it being a new standard in MMOs.