Cross-realm bgs is the dungeonfinder fix for pvp queues

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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After patch 1.5, when battlegrounds got introduced, 441 days went by before cross-realm battlegrounds became a thing. When you ask players to think of their battlegrounds from back in the day, they’ll start to reminisce about “pvp legends” you’ve never heard of - because you didn’t play on their server. When you ask players in 2 years to describe their ranking journey in classic, I’m afraid we’re not going to evoke anything remotely comparable. There’s simply too many players.

On the 2018 blizzcon, on the “Design Philosophy” power-point slide Ion Hazzikostas presented, we saw the words “High priority on integrity of social dynamics”, followed by Ions comments, that:

[Design is] also about the community, it’s about the social dynamics that were part of defining wow classic. We understand that that is a key part of the experience, and anything that might threaten to undermine those dynamics, is something we need to be very suspect about. […] those small changes could have ripple effects, that undermine the way the players relate to the world, and to each other.

On his next slide Ion was explaining that there won’t be any dungeon finder in classic, even though it of course can be inconvenient to players to have to spend 40 minutes just to make a group.

I can’t help but think that cross realm battlegrounds is the dungeon finder for pvp. It provides the same fix to the same problem and has the same backdrop as the dungeonfinder: Convenience of shorter queues at the cost of social community and player identity.

In my opinion cross realm battlegrounds should be approached the same way as phasing was done. It was something that blizzard agreed only should be used if the game would become borderline unplayable without it, and it would be used on a server-by-server basis.

Would it be possible to modify the queue system so that players initially queue into an own-realm queue, and then have their queue “upgraded” to the cross-realm pool after say 15 minutes without a pop? This might have to be adjusted (shortened) for small population servers with unfortunate faction ratios, but for the majority of the servers, and especially the big ones, I feel a tweak like this could help get battlegrounds closer to what they were for the vast majority of vanilla.

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I agree. I wish crossrealm bg was never a thing in Classic. It takes away the whole community aspect of the game. Back in the day there was the PvP community on particular servers, people you would recognize from the world. And with crossrealm it’s the same anonymous, soulless grind as in retail.

I wish Blizzard would consider removing crossrealm battlegrounds.

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Yeah, they’ve added EVERY realm to the queues.

Likely to prevent horde from crying about massive BG queue.

But in exchange, you’re never meeting the same people in BGs again.

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Tldr.
You have two options:

  1. xrealm with short ques
  2. no xrealm an huge ques or certain time of the day even no bgs at all.
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I’m cool with no cross realm with huge queues.

Only the horde will get them after all xd.

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You are right that back in Vanilla this was ‘affecting’ the community aspect, but can you even HAVE a tight community anyway on these mega servers?

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Agree 100%. What on earth was Blizz thinking when they grouped up ALL euro servers together (all languages and all server types).
It wasn’t like this in vanilla and currently there’s absolutely no need for it. There are plenty enough people in each language group to provide short BG queues.

PS: Right now it’s 9:45 am on a non holiday week day, there are 100+ AV games active. Yeah we really needed global Xrealm…

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I grow tired of this domination on noggenfogger i want fresh meat and blizz deliver my word pad of gnomes i PvPwned just grows and grows this isnt a retail thing stop it

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Bg is the only place you currently have pvp Interaction and not having cross realm bgs is crucial to keep server community together.

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There’s actually science you can use to make an educated guess about this.

Instead of a long wall of text, just look up Dunbar’s Layers, the mere-exposure effect and the proximity principle on your own before you read this.

So with these fixed amount of mental resources and the familiarity principle as well as the proximity principle working alongside each other, odds are that if there’ll be these “mega servers” without xrealm matchmaking, you’d be limited to remember only those that “stands out”.

This includes within your guild itself, if you’ve got a large guild then the odds are you won’t be remembering every single name and who they are, let alone talking to them.

But the effect of having those people that “stands out” be a recurring encounter here and there, and quite often, you’re more likely to slowly develop at least a secondary social group with these people than you are in the massively anonymous social design in xrealm matchmaking.

This will be the same for everyone, and the differences between individual circumstances will decide who creates a larger social network and who’ll be limited to the smaller, more intimate ones.

So basically, by truly enforcing the subconscious immersive elements of the game and the social awareness by not including ANY xrealm nonsense, then yes, even with “mega servers” there’s a much higher possibility for a realm “community” to form, as well as to have people establish their own social networks within those communities.

To damage this awareness of competition with othe players on the same realm, by making PvP anonymous, you end up with retail. Nobody will care about anything, it just turns apathetic and thus the rewards as well won’t feel as good either. It basically removes most of what leads to a natural formation of a server hierarchy this way.
In other words, you can forget about rivalries like this. No more PvP stories like in vanilla. Xrealm makes that impossible, because it’s too anonymous.

It also puts further emphasis on only sticking to realm premades for WSG and AB this way, because the xrealm matchmaking makes it into something like twitter. Everyone will be 100% entitled without a single care for anyone’s circumstances nor differences in social norms like how “good” you are or not. You either do what they expect you to, or you’re “garbage” and gets flamed and kicked, because there’s no social awareness forming in these queues.
Basically the server reputation presenting a notion of consequences to bad behavior made it less likely for toxic behavior to occur.

In conclusion, yes it’s possible on mega servers.

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I have to say, I never looked at it this way.

You presented a very detailed explanation, which sounds plausible, cheers!
:+1::grinning:

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Yes please. This would be awesome. I want to play against the people I met in world PvP. There are already PVP players who are server-known. It’s awesome. I wan to play with them and against them !!! :frowning:

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I agree the crossrealm as it is now is very bad and will kill the good in the game.

Also the AV and russian problem is huge issue.

Again the BAD Blizzard thinking which killed the game is coming again, they just want to make happy everyone but it hurts game so bad that everyone will quit again.

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Exactly. After a couple of weeks I happen to recognize some pvp’er names. Now in battlegrounds it’s close to impossible to meet people from my server (Ashbringer). So what I’m trying to say is that as soon as the community started to shape itself, it got obliterated by crossrealm zerg.

Maybe there could be a switch to enable/disable crossrealm queue? I’d like to believe that on a fairly well balanced server, which Ashbringer is said to be, the queues could be pretty damn fine. On the other hand it could encourage people from poorly balanced servers even more to take steps to balance it out.

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I agree that it is bad for the community. I have not had this many uncooperative, disruptive and downright insulting and hostile players in battle grounds in any of the other WoW experiences I played.
I also think it does not work with the honor ranking system at all. The vanilla honor system has always had the air of rewarding those that can play the most over those that can play the best (which isn’t mutually exclusive of course). But with this it has been changed to who can be inside AV for the most hours in a day, even more excessively rewarding behaviours like botting and account sharing that are not only unhealthy for the community but also for their competitors.

Bloating the pool of available players also prevents any overview or control of the queue. While this might be useful for preventing things like queue dodging, this has allowed the alliance to effectively run premade groups for AV whereas the horde are unable to do the same, thus creating a gameplay imbalance.

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I dont want to play with or against people, that im not able to meet in open world.

Or is bg portal a demension door into another world…
Seems like blizzard didnt understand the Meaning of a mmoRPG

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