People want to play with their friends. What’s more, they want to play on the same server as communities they already play with.
My guildies and friends are on living flame. I’m on living flame. Some of our people did not get in before the lock. That does not mean they’ll roll on one of your other, because of this soon to be deader then dead servers.
It means they just won’t play SoD at all.
The more you try to fix megaservers, the more they become enforced. We already know if you don’t roll on living flame you’re signing up for having to reroll in a phase or two, what do you reckon locking it does except making more people not even bother starting SoD?
Stop pretending like servers matter in 2023, and link every single pvp server into a single connected realm. Do the same for every game mode.
I’ve not played retail for a long time. It is my understanding that cross-realm guilds and trading are still forbidden, is that right?
I do think there is merit to segmenting players in pools of a few thousand, because that way you actually recognise people you see again and you get the village style communities. But yeah, if they have the tech then maybe it’s worth looking at new ways to approach server structures.
Well, we can only hope that the dev team continues to learn from events as they unfold. I imagine it can be tough to balance all the systems and variables to take into account. I do feel sorry for the people with limited time who now can’t join their friends because servers are full. I feel like one source of this is the community’s anxiety about not wanting their server to die. So everyone piles on the ‘it’ server. You can enforce a limit, but maybe that mindset can be addressed?
The problem is, the consequences of picking the “wrong” server are disastrous if you want to continue playing the game mode, and many of us have made first hand direct experiences with that.
During Vanilla classic, if the faction or server you were on died, you effectively lost your characters unless you were willing to pay for transfers. You could still log in, but you couldn’t actually do anything that you play the MMO for.
With Season of Discovery, this is even more pronounced. Aggrend has directly said they’re not going to even allow paid transfers unless they’re forced to.
Say you roll on “Chaos Bolt” now, and in a few months it dies. All of your characters might as well have been deleted then.
So all that they do with regards to queues, locking servers and whatever else will only ever have one of two effects on players:
Make them double down on being extra sure to be on the most populated server there is with the best long term prospects.
Not play the season at all
The only way that mindset would be able to shift if the consequences to picking wrong weren’t basically the complete deletion of your investment of time or loss of real money to pay for transfers.
Yeah. I’ve been on a server that died like that. Population dwindling is a slow and insiduous killer. It’s like a horror movie killer slowly closing in across several weeks, lol. It’s a palpable, horrible tension. No wonder people fear it.
Merges or some linking of realms would be strongly preferable.
To solve the name duplicate problem, they could just put an abbreviation behind your name with the server name. You might have Druidmagisch (Living Flame) and Druidmagisch (Chaos Bolt), for example.
Though if it comes to it, I’d rather be forced to change my name than to relevel and/or see my friend group and guild split in fragments.
They could easiliy build a mega server. Its just all VMs at this point that can interconnect. But its probably too much of a hassle as people pay them anyways.
It did so, because Retail realms are dead you silly. They deleted those realms, probably, keeping only tags at player’s names, while moving them to a single realm.
Classic has explosion in population, way less realms, but they are bigger and can’t be merged because the way 19 yo game engine handling databases.
The problem to the issue is very simple actually just blizzard needs to stop trying to line their pockets every chance they get and accept thar small losses for the greater good of community outweighs the negative in the long run.
The simplest fix if technical issues are restricting is realm transfer for free. Like every other mmo in the market does when it comes to dead servers. If your server dies due to lack of population the obvious logical thing is to provide people on the realm a free transfer to a more populated realm. That would keep retention higher than asking them to pay 20-40 euros for a transfer (or flat out not having a transfer option at all).
On retail its not an issue if your realm dies as everything is layered into a megaserver anyway and most content is cross realm/cross faction. But in classic its not the case. So a dead realm is actually end of playing. As it takes much longer to level and invest into a brand new character.
I’m in the same boat. Some of my friends are on Living Flame but the rest couldn’t get it.
So now some play on Crusader Strike and some on Living Flame.
If they are gonna stick with this Server locking then Blizzard should offer free character transfer for the faction on those realms.
I completely agree.
Like, there are benefits of having servers, with being able to be more likely to come across the same people etc. But the fear of basically being left on your own when the server dies is what pushes people to high pop servers.
And to be honest, IMO the solution is already in place it just needs to be tweaked.
They’re already using layers, so if they work with megaservers, but add some form of ‘matchmaking’ that balances you to a prefered layer it will fix the issue. You will have both the security of always ‘being on the highest pop’ while the matchmaking will ensure that you’re more likely to meet the same people.
I think that would be a ‘best of both worlds’ idea.
And when it comes to contention for names, they can keep ‘servers’ and have the server appended to your char name. And if they have the servers just act like layers on a megaserver, where your ‘server’ is basically your preferred layer, the problem would be fixed.
(Easier said than done probably, but still when it comes to the isssues of servers and the reasons for keeping them, this would be a fix)
If you want to play with friends together, why did you pick the most busy server? It was clear from the first minute which server will be the most busy. That’s why I picked another server to avoid the queue and be able to play with friends who will join later. I mean, every complaint about this is from the same server. IMHO, there should be a free transfer from the locked server to a smaller one to solve this. But only with restrictions to keep the server balanced.
Usually free transfers work the other way (or at least they do in FFXIV). i.e. free transfer from high to low pop or new worlds, with additional incentive to transfer like one time gil cashout when transferring and bonus exp while on the low pop realm. The you’re locked from transferring away for 3 months. The game also has long term character creation/transfer locks to really popular realms (these are re-evaluated during major patch releases) as well as rolling locks when the current online population is too high.
The faction balance enforcement is one of the things that were done exceedingly well. All original servers have a healthy population and Ally/Horde ratio. I can only imagine how good Classic would’ve been if this was the policy at launch in 2019.