I can't stay away from this place

blizzard should make a deal with discord to have all the guild chat be IN discord and IN the game so that it’s not all separated. but that is a whole different matter.

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That would be awesome :smiley:

Discord tends to be where people hang out yup.

My issue is finding places where I don’t want to put half the people on ignore and this place ain’t it.

I disagree, that’s just a whole list of ‘I want Classic’.

We had flying, group finder, portals, cross realm play etc etc and still had a community, we still ran into players from our own guilds, our realm, our faction etc. Zones weren’t CRZ in the current expansion, just older expansions, so that they felt busy and had players around them.

I don’t want to go back to the dark ages. I just some middle ground. However, I can’t see them getting rid of WM on/off and moving CRZ back to old expansions only, so you can only be present on another realm (in the current expansion) if you were invited there.

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Which discord?

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I would suggest join FF Discord if you’re interested in being social.
At least when I was in it was active.

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this ^

We have a community Discord with most regular posters of the forums if you’re interested :slight_smile: sometimes a bit too social, peaking like 4k messages per day :joy:

We also often make forum runs (you can search “forum run” on the forums)

https://discord.gg/cWG33U4

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Kyrel expects all sorts of favours as the boss though, be sure to bring some polishing cloths.

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At least we have the fortune of having them be pleasurable favors.

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Well yes, but actually no.

It is a list of what makes vanilla what it is, and as such it is not a list of what I want.

As it happens, I do like vanilla and I do think there is a middle ground where we can fix the problems that currently plague the game by taking inspiration from classic without copying it wholesale. We can never return to where we were from where we are - we have to abandon what we are to get there, which is what Classic does.

You are correct that the game was working in the end-game continent, but that’s precisely the point. The world is too large and the number of players playing too small for the entire Warcraft world to be populated, so a large amount of time is spent playing a game that is fundamentally broken. If you try to fix this with CRZ, you lose the town effect.

You get this choice - pick one:

  • Making players level faster, further thinning out the world, not improving anything except making the pain last a shorter amount of time
  • Deleting group quests and making the world a lonely place for hundreds of hours until the player reaches the end-game, but it’s playable and paced as intended.
  • Deleting content that makes the map too big.
  • Speed players right past it and ignore its existence (the character boost)
  • Filling the game world with far too many players - not per area, but in total.

The portals are an abandonment of the sense of the world and the seamless landscape in service of convenience because the map is too large.

Most game designers know well that map size and player count are intricately linked, and getting the balance of that wrong can have dire consequences for the pacing of the game or even the functionality of the game mechanics. However… we want new zones. The map will grow, there is no way to avoid it, and that presents these problems.

This is why it is a good idea to limit new players to the newest and second newest expansion and making the entire experience around 10 zones that they’ll level through. The map size is diminished and the world springs back to life unless the player chooses to go the map that isn’t lively consciously.

In order for this to really hit home, however, the mobs are going to have to have more health and especially do more damage to slow people down a bit - so they get a chance to talk - and the removal of CRZ and merging of servers, using layering for the latest expansion if necessary.

You can also use Covenants, i.e. allegiance to a landmass, to cut down on travel time to further decrease perceived map size without actually decreasing it, but spreading people out over it so the density of players remain as intended without too long travel distances. It’s a brilliant move.

We can’t copy Classic, no, but we can identify what’s gone wrong and use Classic as a guide to help us where appropriate, and that is what they are doing, and I applaud it. Yes, I’m being positive. Sue me.

If this game turns into Classic I will probably look for a new game. I hate Classic. Classic is there if people want that kind of game.

I would happily just remove WM and go back to excluding CRZ from the current expansion. That would fix everything to a time when communties still existed. We weren’t phased from each other and didn’t suffer sharding. I don’t want to go above and beyond that because it will destroy everything good in Retail for me.

I do not feel there is any need to destroy the things that are great about the game. Even back in TBC/Wrath/Cata etc etc the older zones were dead. It was a perk of levelling an alt. Personally I wouldn’t care if it went back to that nice quiet state again but retained the ability to be CRZ with friends/others/groups if you wanted to. However the reason the change came in was to make the world appear busier.

I guess we all like different things :slight_smile:

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Of course you would say that.

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And what about the people who want that kind of game but don’t want that game cause they’ve already completed it?

Blizzard made a promise to those players, and they broke that promise by catering to people who didn’t share in that vision instead of those who did.

We’ve been through this argument before. We can’t all win here, but we’re going to have to find a way to restore WoW without taking away what the newer players enjoy, and I think Blizzard are well on their way to doing that. Precious few things remain to be done when looking at Shadowlands. If Shadowlands won’t make you quit the game, you’re not as far off as where I want to be as you think you are.

Yes. And M+ not having a queue system, which is already the case, and the raids being as they are (but with collapsed gear scaling a bit, PvP is broken because of the gear scaling), and really all of it just being as it is, LFR remaining as irrelevant as possible. That’s the only way forward: Restore as much as possible and leave what needs to be left to not piss too many people off.

Shadowlands is doing that. We’ll see if we can boil the frog from there, but for now, Shadowlands is doing what I want Blizzard to do. It’s a good step. Just remove CRZ in the two latest expansions so it’s the default experience to not ever have it and continue merging servers (but try to avoid doing it across different official languages again…) and add layering if necessary.

Transport some of the Classic tech, such as the “high amounts of players”-optimisations. Doesn’t change gameplay, just lets lots of people be in one spot at once without lagging the servers.

Honestly, they’re so close.

This is one of the major issues to overcome…not sure there is an easy answer, since sharding, etc has been tried and player characters vanishing and reappearing is rather jarring.

Blizzard just managed to put over 500 players in Silithus without layering.

They did it by not updating how people were facing as often and batching buff/debuff applications.

This isn’t an ideal experience, but it prevents the server from crashing and it’s quite playable, and in a large city where people aren’t in combat anyway you literally won’t be able to tell at all.

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People come and go. I joined and became active in a dwindling guild which has grown in a year from 100 chars to close to 800. It’s a RIOT how much fun people are.

My advice is you find a fun guild and enjoy.

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I love this line so much

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I actually disagree

My views are this on it, the new systems modern wow introduced made it easier for players to not interact. So they didn’t interact.

None of these things stop a player randomly saying hi to someone or starting a conversation between 2 players. It’s the simply fact the said 2 players no longer have to.

Classic made life really hard if you were to attempt avoiding other players. And that’s simply the difference.

You can have all the conversations u effectively want. And I’ve been in several circumstances throughout groups and more and had conversations with the players.

It’s just simply alot of people now don’t need to speak so simply wontm

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I’d like to know how shadowlands is bringing anything back??

Like as far as I can tell it will be the same as BFA in a social aspect.

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You need a reason to say “hi”. Just saying “hi” randomly won’t produce any results and will usually just end up feeling awkward. You need to feel as if you’re going to have an easier time if you work together. The game should bring you together. You can resist, and the game should respect that, but it should try.

Right now it doesn’t.

It does some clever things with map sizes and the levelling system, the covenant system provides more identity at the cost of flexibility, flying is, as usual, going away, world quest mobs are harder and you’re expected to do fewer world quests, legendaries are back, craftables are much more useful from many different professions.

It’s a lot better. It still needs to lose CRZ though, that’s really important, but Blizzard appear to be prepping for that by reducing the map size relevant for levelling (level squish) and merging realms en masse.

They also talk openly about this issue, and they want to talk even more about it.