With the population numbers going down and down servers feel more empty than ever. This also has to do with sharding and phasing I guess but whenever I try to quest I feel WoW has become a single player game with some multiplayer options. Like Dark Souls (Summoning option) sometimes I summon 4 people for a heroic or mythic sometimes I summon 39 for raid. After that everyone leaves and simply disappears in to their own sharded/phased world.
Can’t you just go like the old days and move different realms together. This way all realms are high populated we have more human interaction which is quite a huge thing and expectancy when playing a Massive MULTIplayer Online game. I know people are in love with their realm but still just merge the majority of them.
Currently there are 110 English realms of which 27 are low populated, 63 are medium populated 8 are full 12 are high populated. The low medium and low populated realms do struggle filling raid teams. And they feel boring and empty… If I walk (ride) from one zone to the other in Zandalar I would be happy if I would see more than 2 people.
Since character migration costs have skyrocketed (thanks to Activision!!) it’s financially not feasible or even funny to migrate to a good populated server where there’s more action.
Could you please remove sharding and just throw us on a big pile like the good old times? I would love to see a person or a group of people when questing.
Sporeggar during the golden age, when the grass was greeen and the girls were prettier (tbc and wotlk) was dead. And blizz never touched anything. Is cyclical.
The problem with merging servers is they will need to connect ones that are already linked with 2 or 3. Having 6 connected realms is really going to be a mess, as to be honest 3 already is.
They obviously don’t want to merge wholesale because they don’t want a whole lot of people to suddenly have to rename their characters.
Unfortunately they think cross server play and community is a solution, but it really isn’t because guilds are the core as is seeing other players actually on your realm.
I have alts on low pop/rp realms to snipe bmah containers, tcg stuff for pennies and I have to vouch it. Yesterday around 9 pm there were 14 people in stormwind lmao.
Low populated and the sharding/phasing makes it dead actually. Nothing really happens even turned on world pvp still hardly any people on the road or at quest hubs. As I said: I’m happy if I encounter 1 or 2 people on the road.
Questing is designed as a single player activity. Because of the need for mobs to be active particularly the final mob boss of a quest chain you really don’t want other players in the area making it harder for you to complete. I have been questing in this game and levelling for eleven years and trust me, my biggest annoyance is other players. Amazingly eleven years ago areas were empty. I hated Lost Rigger Cove, Raven Hill, Chill Wind cus they were always busy and I could sit for hours waiting to get the mobs.
Just this week I was struggling in Ghostland to complete stuff cus of the one shot brigade. I even took to playing very very late so I could get stuff done and yet three in the morning there were still players doing things. The prisoner in the tomb is a particular annoyance as you have to wait for her to spawn.
So sorry… multiplayer in this game is anything but questing and levelling. I queue for dungeons to play with others and they tend to pop evry ten minutes or so at busy times. I still see plenty of players in the field though have no desire to befriend any of them. Never have.
Having been in dreadful games like Rift and Archeage and tera where they pretty much destroyed my game by endless merging I am dead set against it. This game does avery good job of adjusting the numbers. My realm is very important to me and it should never be degraded or merged. Ever. In Tera the developer deleted half my characters during the merge and I lost so much stuff that I had paid good money for. In Archeage I lost all my farms, peoperty and had to buy endless bags with scrolls to store all my produce and stuff. And then I had to ceompete again to try and re-establish my property… and then they did it again. Rift was the worst as I was forced to merge about a dozen times eventually having to join a German server just to find a home.
SO a big no to merging of any kind. It won’t do anything at all other than send a very sick message out which sets a trend and pattern for further merges. I guarantee you ‘not see’ any long term change in activity on the ground.
The recent discussions regarding level squish is also a response to the fact that this game is so large it has its player base spread very thinly across the whole map. It gets worse when you add dungeons and instanced events and locations such as garrisons. And with each expansion it gets more thinly spread. I guess that is what they will consider changing maybe. And here is the scoop, what do you think Classic will do to player activity in current zones.
Also questing is so BORING… seriously. Who wants to do that anymore ? Not me. Won’t catch me out in the field. Not till they change the content to make it actually interesting.
There you go. Just my thoughts. Sorry for any errors in the text. I aint checking it… I’m off to do some Battle Pets and in mid flight and I see I have arrived. Bye.
That’s a shame, the sharding is meant to make it feel more populated rather than less. It’s supposed to just CRZ you with others to fill shards.
My Alliance characters were on Terenas years when the first lot of realm merges came in. When they merged with Emerald Dream it did initially mean there were more people around in the main hubs, sadly it didn’t serve to be a long term fix. I moved all my Alliance characters to Silvermoon. I’d rather be on a well populated realm.
I actually think they just need to close a number of realms and offer all those people a Free Character Migration to other servers.
Yeah, that’s what Blizzard intended, but it just doesn’t work out that way.
At the end of the day, who cares if the world is full of people if you can’t meaningfully interact with any of them and will never meet them again, and have no reason to develop a relationship?
You can’t trade
Other player may spontaneously disappear when you go to another zone
You can’t invite him to your guild
You can’t add him to friends list without asking for is battle.tag or realID
If you get invited by anyone or he does, he may disappear
He probably doesn’t care about you because he’ll never see you again and know about all the other restrictions I just told you about, so any attempt to invite him to your group will probably fail
CRZ are not a solution to WoW’s community problem.
But this is. And it’s the only one that’s ever going to work.
I wish they just did more connected realms. Seems to be the better solution + offer free realm transfers to the lowest number servers that don’t make sense to connect.
Also server transfers in the shop should offer transferring every character on a server to another (with an option to exclude characters from the transfer). Especially now with us being able to have 50 characters on one server.
The AH could use some work, work orders are essential. And something I feel would even be better: Global AH, but they’ll never go for that.
Server merges would be good, Guild Wars did a similar thing, they started out with 20 odd realms but as the playerbase became smaller they just merged them into 5 large servers instead.
Would help make the game feel way more alive if EU had 10 servers instead of 50
I’m no fan of CRZ or Sharding. Except when it suits me. Like when I can play new expansions at launch. Or when I need a boss mob that’s bugged out in my shard or I need to group for something
CRZ killed the game just as LFR/LFG did. Just accept that more than 1 person is trying to catch your mob. This gave you the opportunity to group up and maybe quest together with him/her. Atleast that’s how I got in my guild back then. Because of that teamwork and being dependant on another friendships grew. As of today I still have a few friends I met during Vanilla and TBC and we sometimes meet.
Now there’s a mob for everyone! It’s just 5.000 people with 5.000 mobs in a sharded zone… That’s not the MMO spirit tbh. I cannot wait until Classic is released and truly hope that Blizzard doesn’t ruin classic because of whiny lil people who want QoL changes.
I’m not sure that’s totally true, well not for me anyway. One of the big problems I had when they revamped levelling is that there are too many players in with me and the mobs were so scarce. So sharding did me no favours.
When I started playing the game (in TBC) people were rude, horrible and elitist to me so I avoided doing any group content. So you could avoid grouping with others. I actually got to see dungeon content while levelling when LFD was introduced during Wrath. I continued to avoid group content unless I could get a guildie to come and bash it for me.
I actually miss pre CRZ levelling because there was no one else around you, you were just your server population and after the rush you’d rarely see others and the mobs were plentiful. I had a character on a French RP realm and that is just like old style servers which are totally quiet and no one is around.
Due to my horrific experiences with randoms throughout the game, it wasn’t until WoD that I really got over my fear of PuGs thanks to a friend. He took me with him to lots of PuGs and eventually I was happy to go alone. Some groups can be incredibly unpleasant and others can be a good laugh.
I am going to play Classic with a group of friends and I’m hoping enough of us stick at it to do the content
I have friends who had wonderful experiences during Classic and TBC. I just never met anyone nice
That is because the zones have become obsolete. The level gap between Outland / Draenor and end content is soooooooo big that there’s no reason for a higher level to be there. Instead of just releasing new island maybe they can start adding new dungeon and lore in old area’s like Cataclysm did. Atleast for 3-4 zones.
I know it’s challenging for Blizz and they rather inflate the ilvls of previous expansion and add a new zone for inflated dmg and health.
![:laughing:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/laughing.png?v=6" ":laughing:")
![:slight_smile:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")