It is almost 4PM in my time zone (MEZ). I play on a highly populated realm.
And yet the Forbidden Reach (the currently last added zone in a patch) is so empty that literally 17 rares are up and no one is engaging them.
https://imgur.com/a/wWxV3j7
Meanwhile the world chat channel for the Forbidden Reach has at least 100 people in it. Just all of them not on my world shard.
Can we please get more control over what Shard we are in? WoW is an MMORPG. Not a singleplayer open world game. There should be never such a downtime of players on a shard. And since it seems your automatic systems for sharding is not working good enough to guarantee this condition, players should get more control over what world shard they want to join.
SWTOR (Star Wars: The Old Republic) has such a feature. On the map players can select the world shard and transfer to a more/less populated one as they wish (within their own server). Once initiated, players have to wait 30 seconds to change the world shard. If attacked or engaging enemies, the transfer will be interrupted.
https://imgur.com/MXLXJkJ
Why can’t WoW have that too?
And before anyone says “just LFG, duh!”… In a functioning, healthy, MMO open world you wouldn’t have the need to even make a group. Because there would be always people around you.
It’s not just this though. 95% of the time on AD, the zone is rammed and rares are get engaged as soon as they spawn. The other 5% of the time I’m on a shard with like 5-20 other players and lots of rares up.
Sometimes I can relog to join a bigger one, sometimes I have to swap character and farm some keys on that for a while. Fortunately I’ve never had more than 1 character at a time get banished in this way because it really sucks.
Would be helpful if the sharding algorithm would merge smaller shards, even if it means going over the “limit” on a bigger one. It’s less problematic to have 110 players in a space for 100 than it is to have 10 players off to the side.
I’m on silvermoon, it’s basically impossible to do certain WQs at peak time in a timely manner due to there being so many players in those areas and the objectives being mobs to kill or objects that despawn when picked up by a player. No matter what shard, there’s too many people and the fact that only 5 people can tag a mob makes it hard to even get a kill.
The RP servers are the only servers with this problem, really. Because they don’t CRZ with other realms than RP realms. Our shards are pretty much never empty because we CRZ with all the realms that’s not RP realms.
There’s a lot of people on RP realms that are kind of special in my experience.
I got reported when I was just jumping around on my mount after I joined a group from an RP realm for a m+ dungeon. Because I was “disturbing their rp” and it’s against the rules or something, even though I’m not from a RP realm myself.
While most RP players would welcome a “RP mode” in which players are separated from every NPC and other non-RP tagged player in the open world, it could cause problems with players on PvE-only realms.
Because game features are usually accessible to all, no matter the realm, it could be used in ways that hurt the PvE players by dodging mobs or similar (like imagine dodging every mob in the Maw in SL when getting to Sanctum of Domination entrance).
Also, to add to that, for a new player on a Roleplay realm it could be confusing and a turn off to enter a specific mode just to do some proper roleplay with others.
I don’t care if it’s a solution for now. I don’t look for a quick band-aid. I am pushing for a long-time fix so this problem NEVER comes up again. People really gotta stop relying on “work arounds” all the time.
That’s not “being special”. That’s literally the rules on a RP realm. Sure, you have no real control over joining a different realm via a group. But that roleplayer was telling the truth.
Footnote on that, this would be a bad idea, because there is a reason why Roleplayers want to be separated from PvE-Only players. And the main reason for that is simple harassment. I remember when I was playing SWTOR for roleplay before WoW (they had once RP server too, but they got scrapped due to money upkeep) and that meant we RPers had to deal with PvE players on the same server.
And as result of that, people were often jumping around in their mounts within the models of us roleplayers, interrupting our IC talks with their gamer talk, insulting us in PMs as “cringe” and “weirdos” and such and so on.
Forcing RPers and PvE players on the same zones is a bad idea. Because that would result in said situations where we Roleplayers are trying to play our roles like in a Theater but the PvE players as “audience” are being nasty, interrupting the screenplay with comments and such. It’s not fun.
that certainly wasn’t what I was thinking for an RP mode. It would be basically a PVE realm but with some RP rules similar to an RP realm is now.
Although I do see that it could be abused, realm hopping when hunting rares etc.
Sorry, but that is what most of us Roleplayers identify with such a term. You would be surprised how annoying patrolling NPCs and Guards can be for roleplay. Also, having such a “no NPCs” mode for roleplay would also mean that Horde/Alliance players could visit the opposites factions capitals. Which is something some of us wish for since ages.