Indeed. The solution to “our realms are too small compared to map size” is “reduce the number of realms by merging them”. It’s dead simple.
There is the problem where old maps have far too few people in them such that, even if you merged all the servers, they’d still be empty and the main clusters would become lag-bombs.
For those, CRZ is needed. Other than that, it can go. It shouldn’t be part of the default or new player experience at least.
They’re what you make of them. At least something happened. And that something related to a person, not the game just randomly despawning the node and you having no idea why.
Those moments of hilariously large world PvP battles? That’s because someone was a nasty person and decided to gank lowbies, and then the higher levels started an ever-escalating war to stop it and take revenge.
Is it disruptive? Sure. Is it annoying? Sure! Would it be better if it was just smoothed over and smothered? Absolutely not. Artistry, and this includes games, must also evoke negative emotions as long as it doesn’t overtake everything.
These gankfests and node fights are memorable as hell, there are other options (go to SM or Desolace or 1K needles for instance), and it’s a topic for conversation among the community, a rallying cry.
It’s not all about the little pin-prick of pain that happened originally. What results is also important.
None of this is even going into the multiboxing and economic issues and the nodes despawning when you arrive to it while the area is empty and things like that we’ve got now.
At least the frustration feeds a social end instead of just existing and being frustrating only.
I do have to agree.
back then it was the real battle for Azeroth. I saw far more fighting in one day back then, than I have ever seen in the latest expansion pack.
ongoing pvp at crossroads was a thing and I actually took part in pvp back then, having seen it right in front of me and deciding to have a go. it was fun.
okay, it was inconvenient not having the NPC to hand in my quest, but that was the point. and it also taught me that the quests were not the most important thing and I could go a little bit of time without questing. it actually helped me to learn some patience and humility and respect for others.
I should note, I never played on a PVP server. this was on Hellfire.
The wierd thing with live atm is you have to use means beyond pure gameplay itself (such as comms, guilds, or more distant still, the forums and discord) to find the connections with other players. The opportunity for “casual connections” has basically eroded.
You have to decisively take a step that you “want” to connect with other people in order to effectively do that. In older versions of the game, there were several opportunities for you to form more casual connections with people simply by playing the game, because of zone congestion, repeated encounters, node competition etc. Whether you specifically looked for it or not, the opportunity presented itself time and time again and you could take it if you wanted, or ignore it if you wanted.
The thing with live at current is if someone decides that don’t want to make any connections at all, the game does nothing to try and change it. I mean it shouldn’t literally try to change your mind, but it doesn’t really offer you a vast amount of opportunities to consider changing it. So you essentially become stuck in your solitude unless you decisively change that, but the game doesn’t really try to show you things can be differently.
Conversely if you do want to form dedicated connections, you have to execute that yourself and go out of your way to do it. You will not meet these players when casually playing ball in the park, and decide to make a team. You have to go to a club “for people who want to make a ball team” instead, because when you go to the park, there are different people every time. This is really wierd.
The other bizarre thing on live is, i’ve known people here, in the forums, and then recognized them in game in places like trade chat, or a chance viewing. Surely it should be the other way around.
Community is decoupled from the world, community is too impersonal.
The whole promise of the MMORPG is: World, community, character and the interactions between those concepts.
They’ve split it up. Community isn’t formed within the world and it isn’t your character that interfaces with it directly, but your battle.tag, Discord tag, etc.
World doesn’t respect the uniqueness of your character the story makes no effort to make your character feel uniquely yours and as if you’re in control of your destiny. Everybody’s the same Champion of Azeroth. They couldn’t even be bothered to make it plural in raid encounters half time…
Character can’t target gear, doesn’t get much identity because fewer choices are being made. Lack of social interactions with the character as opposed to with your real self.
The person most in need of social contact is the one who pretends not to need it. Have the game give it a try at least. It’s an MMORPG, for Pete’s sake - we’re supposed to be playing together some way or another.
Whut? Who said anything about exchanging insults?
Classic:
Guy runs ahead of you and loots the chest.
You: “Hey, can you share that? I worked for it as well.”
He might say nothing or “sure, buddy!”
In latter case, you might start to chat.
Retail:
Guy runs ahead of you and loots the chest
You spot the chest, but that guy is gone.
You try to loot the chest, but the chest disappears and you have no idea why.
Your reaction?
Mine’s quite negative. Towards Blizzard, and they aren’t listening. It’s like a form of cursing at the Gods.
Third option:
Chest never de-spawns and never re-spawns. We’re all in our own separate pocket dimension.
My reaction: I’ll just go and play some Elder Scrolls then, bai!
You seem have whole different experiences. Just yesterday a gnome came in and took the ore then gave a whole tyrade of abuse as to why he didn’t give a <can’t say what>
I do not call this a sense of community and those same exchanges happen in Retail.
How are you even managing to get exchanges over spawn nodes in retail? Does not compute.
It is strange that people are so hostile to you. I think someone’s told me to go plough my relatives or myself like… twice in 300 hours of Classic, but I’ve met over 50 people, most of whom I either don’t mind or like.
I never said it was a node in retail, you presumed.
Classic is full of badly behaving players. I’m actually quite amused how it was meant to be this amazing sense of community and it’s just the same as Retail, if not worse.
The community was not great in vanilla either, where some think it was. I mean I got death threats because I wore cloth as druid. And you do not want to know what classisms were in place to get into dungeons, or how people even nitpicked if and what talent you had or did not have. And oh that storm I heard when I got Sulfuras and I was not a paladin/warrior.
There never was loving-caring community in Vanilla.
There is also people playing who don’t need extra social contact with random other players because they already got friends to play with. We are all different and while some like to constantly meet new people and hang in big groups some like to spend their time with smaller circles with people they know well. Just because someone is not keen to poke a chat with all the other players they meet around doesn’t mean they are some lonely unsocial player who “pretends not to need social contacts”. They just already have those.
I think ‘never’ is a pretty strong word to use in this case.
my first experience of this game was making a druid in teldrassil and spending my first week questing around there… finding oakenscowl and whispering teh people I’d met along the way and asking for their help with him and eventually forming a guild based around that particular challenge. The guild was called ‘oakfellows’. I don’t recall any unpleasantness or animosity from that time.
of course, I quit the game after that because I had to focus on university, and only came back for TBC and rolled horde to be with irl friends.
My first character in TBC when I started playing encountered the most elitist horrible nasty people and I gave up on interacting with others. I just struggled through alone but at least I was free of the insults. It was hard but I wasn’t going to be pushed out of the game.
I mean the general sentiment of how vanilla is supposedly different from let say modern retail. I believe there were good people thenm are good people now, there were morons then and are morons now. But there is not, in my opinion, more nice people in classic. In fact my own memories of Vanilla/classic and class/race bias are so strong that I often forget that there were good things too. Like the very fact I got to wear cloth as dps druid (i had whole guild allowing me to do that and I was one with mages team and they were protective of me - how cool was that!), but it gets over shadowed by guys, who came to me in AH and said I must have ninjaed those things, or told me to go resto to enter UBRS when I was there in my Nax40 dps gear… It felt so absurd that I had to struggle so much to play the game in full freedom.
In retail still are people who panic when see survival hunter and what-not, but nothing compares to fights I had as balance druid in vanilla.
At time I found that roleplayers in my realm were probably most edgy people ever … I did fit in perfect though. I was myself equally … if I may say - nasty.
In Classic the main-issue I faced was that i was rogue and did not fit into the speedfarm metas.
Sure lets go back to no lifing like classic and TBC ,having no gold or being able to farm unless you play 24/7 and lets blame everything on flying for ruining the game and social aspect .
Lets all stand in town all day spamming trade for tanks and healers and taking 18 hours to do a dungeon .Lets exculde and ban casual and social players lets make it so only top 0.000005% can see the raids and anyone who cant is deamed unfit and mocked .
Lets not forget that flying must be banned because its the devils work and route of all probelms.
Spending 20 mins to get to node only for it to be stolen so engaging so immersive the excitement is really overwhelming .
Actually there would be one benefit to having a single PVP/RP/NoFly Realm, with everything contested territory, except major Cities and 1-10 starter zones (kinda an Argent Dawn, for Murder Hobos) and sandboxing it… a demonstration of the reality of how few players that actually appeals to, when everyone is ganking everyone else, all the time…faction balance would be the responsibility of that realm’s community, of course.
Should the realm fail, we never have to have the debate again.
I think it’s incredibly interesting what you say here because it is highlighting the fact that we are selective with our memory and our attention.
I probably experienced as much negativity as positivity back then , but I mostly remember the good stuff.
I would totally agree that there is probably the same amount of toxicity and the same amount of love in the game as there always has been, but the difference is, back then if there was a nice player online at the same time as me, the chances are, I would see them in the world and they might be helping me out.
now there are nice people in the game, but I just don’t see them or get to interact with them in a casual setting.
back then, if someone was nasty , they were nasty right in front of me. tagging a mob before I could. taking a node that i was fighting a monster literally right on top of. now there are the same nasty people but I just don’t see them as much .
there are two different type of people. people that avoid the bad stuff and people that look for the good stuff.
This is actually hilarious… because back then i might have been sad I had no gold because the gold was needed.
in current wow, the gold is really not necessary for anything. if gold was useful now, I think people would feel bad that they have no gold and then maybe play the game in order to go get some gold.
the whole concept of video game is having positive and negative stimuli. I feel like this game and some people playing this game, want to try and pretend that we don’t need negative stimuli to create tension and ultimately relief and joy.
