Yeah,it would be cool for realms to have some sort of " guild sense " and to put all members on same shard/layer whatever it is.
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Launch night happens how often? Every 2 years? Or few months if you count content updates. Activate it during busy times?
Group content like BGs or Dungeons can still be cross realm. I just want a sense of community in the “overworld”…and remove the feature that makes players fade out all the time. But maybe I’m playing current WoW for the wrong reasons.
Yes. I asked for this since I was camping rares for mounts
Personally I don’t care.
I’ve had no sense of community in classic or retail. The only difference is that weird dms in retail become rarer and rarer, the further away I am from goldshire.
The simple fact is, if you like and want CRZ and sharding in wow permanently then you don’t want to play an MMO, u want to twist wow into your own abomination for selfish reasons. People who are like this would be better to quit and free the game of their anti-social burden
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People who like crz don’t care about realm only about doing dailies fast and log out.
I think phasing a friend when in group should be allowed, but crz by default should end.
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You wouldn’t need to phase a friend in if phases didn’t exist. Why stop at removing CRZ.
Sure, let’s put more people in the same zone. It’s not like the Vale is hanging by a thread as it is.
Crossrealm Zones… take’em or leave’em. I don’t care either way but Shadring is the solution to a genuine problem.
Because not all friends play in same realm and cross realm grouping (for dungeons) won’t be possible to summon stone if other realm phase.
Remove sharding and Spanish realms will be even more dead than they are. Given that CRZ zones are not cross-language by default (unless you join a group) the Spanish shards are limited to only Spanish realms. And at least without warmode that means there is only one shard for all realms. A population that is not enough to fill just one shard can’t be divided into 5 shards, one per every connected realm group that we have.
I’m not really following there. Removing shards means all people in a zone are there together. How would that make Spanish realms feel emptier?
Because shards have two functions, to create multiple copies of the same zone for the same realm when there are many players in that zone, but also to merge the players of multiple realms in the same shard, in the same copy of a zone, when the zone is empty. There could be more shard than realms if there are too many players, and there could be more realms than shards if there are too few players.
Spanish realms are 5, but most of the times there is only one shard, one copy of the zone, for the 5 realms. Without sharding every realm will be like it was back before CRZ was implemented, every realm will be separated in their own copy of zones.
No they don’t. Crossrealm connections and shards are two seperate things. They interact a lot with each other but interactivity isn’t equal to dependance. You can have Sharding on non-crossrealm servers as well as Crossrealm connections on non-sharded servers.
In your example where spanish servers only have one shard, it’s effectively turned off by default.
You are mixing Connected Realms with CRZ zones, it is not the same. Realms could be merged into a Connected Realm, and multiple connected realms could be asigned “temporarily” to the same shard of a zone, in spanish realms it just being permanent. Spanish realms are 11 realms, and those are connected in 3 connected realms and 2 isolated realms, and those 5 use always the same shard (non warmode at least).
EDIT: The OP said “having ONE server community in a single connected world”. As I told you spanish realms are 5 servers that even mxing everyone in the same zone there are two few people. If the game is changed like OP said it will be 5 server comunities in 5 single connected worlds, when we are not enought between the 5 servers to fill one single connected world.
You call it shards, you call it cross realm, call it what you want “having ONE server community in a single connected world” equals dead to spanish realms.
ok, now i get where you’re coming from and i 100% agree with that. but:
I’m not talking about Connected realms because functionally they are just one realms with two or more names and frankly, they should just be merged into single realms already.
Keeping Crossrealm Connectivity while removing sharding would simply turn all realms of a given language into a single connected realm, true, but some are asking for exactly that without realizing the consequences. I’m not talking about any specific people from this thread, but i have seen this suggested several times on the forum.
So given that Crossrealm Connections without sharding would most likely blow up the server farms, another option I’ve seen is “turn off Crossrealms” which would result in more or less the same as we have now, just with a closed server community populating the shards and fewer shards per realm.
Option 3 is basically the nuclear option. Just turn them both off and that would result in 2 different kinds of desasters. For one, it would most likely make the Spanish and a few other Language realms feel even more deserted than they already are.
And now imagine the impact that would have on German, French or English servers… I play on Blackmoore-DE, one of the biggest servers, full stop. Can you imagine the mayhem that would wreak on zones like the Vale of ternal Blossoms, a zone where you have 200ms latency on an good day with sharding turned on?
The horror…
As I said I don’t know too much how shards work in more populated realms because by default my characters are always assigned to the only shard available for Spanish realms. In some way, Spanish realms work like roleplaying realms because there is only one shard available, and I don’t leave by default that shard unless I join a group. So I never see all those things about players from other realms that I won’t see again, I only see players from 5 realms and anyone that has joined them in a group.
The only solution I could imagine is to have in German, French or English servers fixed shards, just like Spanish have an indirectly fixed shard. So that would mean by default a player of a given realm will be always assigned to the same shard unless there are too many players in which case there should be created temporarily more shards for that realm. And any realm like the Spanish ones that are empty would be mixed in the same shard as other empty realms but always having that shard fixed to be used by the same realms (unless joining groups). If the population changes this can be changed during weekly maintenance, so unlike connected realms maybe this week realm A and B use the same zones and maybe next week realm C join them. And maybe one month after that B changes to another shard.
Current expansion zones and old zones should be separated, of course, there are more players in the current expansion, so there are more copies of those zones in the servers. At least with this, if you are doing some quest in a zone you will see people from the same servers in the next zone, because by default both servers used the same shard, at least during a week.
Honestly, I’m ok if things stay the way they are now. We’re not gonna get the “Classic” server Communities back either way. As long as things like Crossrealm Dungeons and Raiding exist, they will not return. Whether the zones are XR or not won’t change a thing about that.
The communities existet because those were the pool of players guilds of any given realm could recruit from. Unless you changed servers, you were going to raid with those people. Run dungeons with them etc. Sure you ran into the same guy farming the same Ogres repeatedly on different days, but would anyone even care? I highly doubt that. Aside from the odd “oh hey look that dude is still farming bottled up troll sweat” moment, nothing would change. It certainly wouldn’t contribute to the Servercommunity.
“Back in the day” I had regular discussions with other Guildleaders, with Raidleads and Class officers to keep my “Blacklist” recent and to give them updates for theirs. But given XR Communities, rnd groups and a multilingual M+ System, those days won’t ever return. And I don’t miss them too much either
Please , tell me how i am supposed to enjoy the game and i will follow your instructions step by step.
Jk , you have no power here 
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Shards there cos people swarmed xyz realms, where thousands of players together, and i dont want wait 30 mins to kill x mobs in a zone, with 600 other players, even with group it will takes ages.
Want crowds? Hours waste on 1 quest? Go to classic.
Ohwait, crowds nowdays inside the cities, waiting world buffs or bg que.
Sop force qol downgrades on retail, and the qol changes to classic. They made Classic for this very reason. Want the old stuffs? There you go.
Like I said there are pros and cons, there is more group activity in the game than dungeons or battlegrounds.
I remember the days when you could only really find groups for world bosses at the start of a reset and it was a lot harder as the week went on. Peak times were obviously a lot easier but it’s still something you had to get through asap. Now you can do any group quest for a rare or a world boss at any time of night and still find people because the pool of players is region wide, not realm.
I also remember the bliss of levelling alts in peace and only coming across people from our own server (few and far between). Blizzard feels you should run into people in the world even if that means they are from different realms.
War mode is now a thing. It’s not really possible to have that without sharding or CRZ. War mode on Draenor without any Alliance would mean I’d never get a single Call to Arms done.
The other problem is that the player base (although in no means insignificant) has shrunk from it’s heights in the glory days of Wrath. So we have a lot of servers with tiny populations. They would probably suffer the most if things were reverted. Merges are badly needed but we’ve not heard updates since Ion said he’d talk to the server team (at BlizzCon).
RP servers are probably the closest thing to the older ways. Obviously I don’t recommend that people go and play on RP servers if they are going to be disruptive to the RP community. Ideally only RPers would play on RP servers.
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