With the ability to have cross realm mythic raiding in TWW & Warbands (sharing rep etc, with even characters cross faction) and with the way the cross realm functionality has been applied to WoW, cross faction guilds, cross faction raids, key runs etc.
I wonder why Blizzard haven’t just made the whole server list, just 1 large mega server. They have the phasing tech, which has been in place for god knows how long now.
They have the limitation on how many people can be in one zone before a new phase is created to make room for the next bunch and if you wish to join friends, you will either join their phase or a new phase ends up being created etc.
So it’s not about it can’t be done, but why hasn’t it been done yet.
For example, with a new player experience, you login and boom make a character, no need to go through the server list.
Oh and lets now forget in TWW the character list is not going to be like it is now, where you need to go to that server and then you see your characters. It’s going to be you see ALL your characters when you log in to the “server/character” menu/screen.
I think this goes for PvP realms as well since factions are a must over there, although as someone, who solely plays for the RP/story aspect of it, until we are left alone, I’m all for it.
Well there is no proper pvp servers anymore, which is a shame. Having that always on PvP mode back in the day, was so much more fun, when you’d walk into the PvP zones, when questing … oh hillsbrad, how I miss those wars!
But the RP thing is indeed the trickiest part to manage. Do they have it where you need to select that you wish to do RP and you then enable those phases.
That is something, which has a lot of ifs, buts & maybes involved.
Mega server just sounds better in my opinion. But the current shard system if I remember correctly is only limited to that number of servers, which are connected with each other, but I could be wrong, that may have changed.
I just meant that ALLLLLLL servers are now interconnected, outside of the whole raiding/mythic+ runs etc.
In StV going on constantly with the war around Nesingway Camp and the horde base… rolling rogue just for the fun of backstabbing people THAT was true faction war! Loved it and hated it the same time, now I’m too much of a blob to PvP. Anyhow, I thought PvP servers are still like, PvP?
We are sharded with any realm apart from RP realms. We haven’t had battlegroups or server groups for many years. Obviously if you are on a busy realm you are less likely to see people from other realms. Especially in WM off. If you got WM on you notice people from other realms a lot more even on busy realms.
The only thing I’ve not seen how they are going to address is crafting and AH. Some of the AH is already region wide but only commodities.
So with the advent of realm being irrelevant in TWW for guilds, I’m curious if they’ll also allow us eu wide work orders, crafting orders, and full AH.
I don’t think the game is handled like a mega server. However things are definitely changing to make realms less of an issue. So being stuck on a lower populated realm isn’t an issue.
Very true on that part of the Auction House and the crafting orders. If they did a region wide AH, it would balance out a lot of prices for some people and of course the knock on effect is a lot of sellers on those more expensive realms, would lose gold income, but that’s a pebbles throw into the ocean.
Character names would be a issue, hundreds of names would overlap and people would be forced to change the names of their characters. The only way a mega server would work, would be if duplicate names were allowed, but that would cause all sorts of issues with mailing and support systems. The charactername-servername formular created a unique ID for each character.
That is actually something that I didn’t think about.
You’re indeed correct that the unique ID so to speak with the name-server does help a lot. So that is probably another reason it’s not yet happened.
The only thing that pops into my mind is having something linked directly to the battletag, but then again, there are those who do not want to share their battletags with any random joe in the game.
When they kill my alt, I still want to be able to log on my main and camp them. Even today, I sometimes get put on a different shard, although it’s like 5 servers per group currently.
With a mega-server it would be almost impossible to run into the same people twice, as sharding would be completely random.
There’s still some charm to seeing familiar faces in the capital city or in world PVP for me
You’re indeed correct from that PvP side of things, that you highlighted.
I think what people have said thus far, shows why such a system has not been created. As I mentioned in a previous post, there is still a lot of ifs, buts & maybes.
Yeah, I think one side of it is PVP, and the other one is Russian/French/German/Spanish/etc. realms being grouped together due to the language barrier.
From a purely technical perspective it’s totally possible though, they could probably do it tomorrow if they wanted
I expect it’s something they’ve probably talked about a few times over the years and they also probably ran into the same points that yourself and others have mentioned.
The language servers, are pretty much I believe not a massive issue. As long as Blizzard set a chat default feature, where based upon the language presets prior to a Mega Server feature, your chat is bound to that language.
You’d then need to go into the chat options to either turn it off or turn it on, so you can then see those languages for example.
Then for new players, when they’re making their account, their game language option is set based upon what language preference they select in the account creation.
Roleplayers like to use any faction hub in any zone they plan their rp for… So really it could be anywhere… But Obviously our Cities would be the place where we would the most like to be left alone. Orgrimmar… Stormwind. Dalaran. Silvermoon… etc.
In Guild wars 2’s group finder there is its own section for rp… And the only way i see a Mega server working for us. Is if things are kept as they are now. Rp servers are only sharded with other rp servers in capital cities and RP hubs. But in ‘‘Outside’’ zones they would have to join a ‘‘RP shard’’ to stick to their own.
That rp shard has to be massive. And I mean massive… it has to be able to contain houndreds of Roleplayers at the time. As Rp events can become a pretty big deal
Yeah I know what you mean Skullfox, as I have a Paladin on Argent Dawn, so I know how the RP community loves to use all aspects of the zones for different things
GW2 and Lost Ark is something I liked in relation to their phasing, where you could jump to even phase 1 to 10+.
From what I remember of the tech blogs they have posted over the years, the AH was surprisingly one of the hardest things to make work in the process of server “globalization”. It was really hard on their databases
… oh hillsbrad, how I miss those wars!
In StV going on constantly with the war around Nesingway Camp and the horde base… rolling rogue just for the fun of backstabbing people 
THAT was true faction war! Loved it and hated it the same time, now I’m too much of a blob to PvP. Anyhow, I thought PvP servers are still like, PvP? 
