Why closing Zandalar Tribe (RPPVP) goes against Blizzard's vision for WotLK

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
1

On June 22nd, Blizzard published a sort of mission statement with a vision on how they want to go forward in Wrath. It says: “The first and most important design pillar is: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences.”

This spring and summer, a group of people have created a small but growing community on the all but abandoned server. Since gold basically has no value on ZT (well at least after having bought epic flying…), the only currency that has value is being helpful and kind.
Mats, gear and services are being traded freely and it generates gratefulness and a feeling that people want to contribute to the well-being of others.

To quote the Blizzard Dev team from the June 22nd post:
“The compelling social experiences within World of Warcraft are why many of us first fell in love with the game. To retain these experiences, we want to help players build friendships and deepen their relationships within parties, raid teams, guilds, and server communities. Online social experiences are a complex phenomenon and can be very easy to damage. Positive relationships build community, reduce toxicity, and forge friendships that have kept players coming back to our game for many years. We need to nurture and protect these relationships. One very big key to this is providing “Social Proximity” in our game, or what some cognitive scientists call “Repeat serendipitous interactions”. Put a little more simply, you need multiple interactions over time with the same people in a way that feels happy or beneficial.”

Zandalar Tribe has all this. We love this game, this server and the home we have here. There is no room for toxicity, there are no endless spammers for GDKP runs, no one want to inspect your gear before inviting you to a group and no one reserving stuff from raids or dungeons.

And in before people shouting “COMMUNISTS”. No - at the moment there is no auction house - unfortunately. We’d like to have one, what we’re doing now is out of necessity. We’d like to have more players. We would like a larger community. We would like to have a market. We would like a server that continues in the same positive spirit it currently has, where the community and the players are in focus.

Now some might say “But if we grow - wont ZT become just like every other server?” Well, since we are very small and we don’t care for things like “the current meta”, it is very believable that mostly like-minded players will find this server to be their new home. However, players will definately not come here if we are to shut down on 10th August.

So Blizzard! Show us that you believe in your vision. Give Zandalar Tribe a chance. We have laid the foundation for exactly what you describe your goals are. Let us grow, let’s welcome people back to ZT and have them see if they prefer this style of play.

“We need to nurture and protect these relationships.” These are your words, we ask you to do this now.

Best regards,
The players of Zandalar Tribe

[Blizz dev post, June 22nd ](Blizzard’s vision: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/world-of-warcraft/23813563/developer-update-a-look-at-what-s-ahead-for-wrath-of-the-lich-king-classic)

27 Likes
2

:clap: :clap: :clap:

Really well said, couldn’ t have said it better myself.

I wasn’t even aware Blizzard had made such statements, and would be wonderful if they kept their word.

Blizzard please close free transfers from Zandalar Tribe and open free transfers to Zandalar Tribe!

9 Likes
4

they already decide they gonna sell to microsoft, i think it will happen next year, they probably fired more people, we can expect to seee absolut 0 investment 0 dedication, they will keep the absolut minimum effort to keep this game up during this time

5

This is exactly it, and this is the reason why ZT feels real.
If you want to do dungeons or raids, you adapt with the people around you. You find solutions and different approaches to reach your goal. Yes, good gear helps but the mind is more important and by far! On regular servers, if you wipe once or twice people will abandon you without a doubt. But on ZT we just keep pushing and brainstorming until we find solutions. We try to succeed with the team we have at the moment. And we do succeed in dungeons and raids! I can’t even describe the reward feeling of accomplishing a run after several tries with a non-meta team. It is simply amazing and makes you enjoy the game even more. Each run is unique and teaches us new ways to combine class abilities.

Also, greedy people are very rare on ZT because like Brothernatur said, you want your whole team to improve so it gets easier each time you do something. So everyone is considering who will benefit the most of an item before rolling greed/need. And if you are ninja looting everything (which I don’t even recall happening tbh) well, people will just not run with you anymore so you don’t win in the long run.

ZT has one of the best community I’ve seen so far and I’m proud to consider it my home.
Everything you do will matter for someone here. It feels good to be needed.

15 Likes
6

This is just the thing about ZT. I choose to believe and I choose to be positive.

5 Likes
7

Hello Blizzard and ZT

Indeed we are facing dire times for our community, especially after the awful news.

I would like to have your attention to the fact that closing this server will scatter this amazing population and all of their interactions.
I, myself, leveled from 1 to 60 during classic and found on this server the community I wanted to play with. Many hours spent on farming, raiding, pvping made me the player I am now.
All of the server, during that time, was very intricate, especially the RPing community, that now keep this server afloat.
Since the great exodus from ZT, the remaining people banded with a single purpose, to keep the server alive and active.
Even without any sort of commerce or possibility to clear pve content outside of the guild structures, caring about, giving to, and helping each other became the day to day of our people, so the remaining players and also newcomers would have an environment to enjoy.

For all of the above I am grateful.
So I am proud to announce that before the inevitable comes, there will be a final Hardcore Run for us!
This run will be streamed and available to all the community.

Please join us, on the path to keep this server alive and kicking.

Classic World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade - Hardcore Challenge on Zandalar Tribe
Death = Delete

6 Likes
8

This is so well written and true!!! It goes for Celebras as well
Please let all three RP realms survive they are all unique in each their way

Kind regards Vanillataur. (On behalf of HW and Celebras)

8 Likes
9

i remember zt was more then a rp server, had good premades back in classic… also some drama :smiley:

1 Like
10

It is not likely that we’re going to see a fresh RP-pvp server, so shutting down Zandalar Tribe will have some severe repercussions for those who prefer RP-pvp servers in Europe. Let Zandalar Tribe be a beacon to those who seek a stronger community, and a place for greater narrative immersion!

10 Likes
11

well said my friend!! what’s getting me though is the lack of response from blizzard! we have made the very best out of a dying server and though some may find it a bit lack-luster we’re all still leveling new characters, making new friends ( recently there have been a few people to join us ) we trade as if we’re in an open and free world, an AH would be nice but its not needed! we raid, and have managed to unlock the badge vendor with such little numbers!

To shut down this server would be going against everything they have said to us!

#SAVEZANDALARTRIBE

7 Likes
12

There is more positivity here than we have seen in any other thread and while I personally am asking over and over what is happening with Ashbringer on my own crusade I cannot help but feel empathy and that perhaps the best route to embracing what WoW originally meant until the end of WotLK is to look and learn from ZT.

I really hope that it works out for ZT, because the passion and dedication displayed here and in Gatorin’s post should be making someone at Blizzard ask the question, ‘can we keep ZT open’? If it doesn’t happen, then I think sadly, it will tell us exactly what Blizzard has become.

I hope it doesn’t come to that and that the lovely people on ZT have a chance to spread the way they play all the way through WotLK as a beacon of what can be if people actually talk to each other and form a community. And that Blizzard shows us that deep down, it actually listens and cares.

/salute .

9 Likes
14

Very well written and I hope Blizzard reads this. Zandalar Tripe and Rp-PVP server will always have a special place in my Wow-heart.

2 Likes
15

I’ve never played on ZT, but I was on Hydraxian Waterlords until the announcement came that it was getting shut down. I evacuated my characters to Nethergarde Keep, but they won’t let be undo the transfers after the announcement HW will survive. Guess I live here now. I miss home.

One thing that always struck me was the love that the ZT crowd felt for their home server. Many of them migrated to Hydraxian in the hopes of finding a more active RP scene, and those that did were not only among the most eager and charming that I met there, but they also unanimously showed great fondness for their home server.

I suppose the hope is that by having only a single RP realm, at least the RP communities won’t be dispersed between PvP and non-PvP subcommunities - though understandably that’s at the cost of the Zandalar magic. Hydraxian is also a complete heccin ghost town with no functioning auction house, so I can understand the desire to merge the two.

4 Likes
16

Hey Guys!

First off all I would like to thank all of you that came online during the stream and showed your support for the server.
I would also like to point that besides Twitch there are several channels where we can spread our voice. So please, everyone keep showing support and try to dissuade Blizzard to close our lovely home. Subscribe to the channel, share the link, share your thoughts and most importantly have fun!

Me and Styga’s will continue the effort until we reach our goal.
We will be returning tomorrow, hoping that you guys will join.

Cheers and once again Thank You All

3 Likes
17

As a player from the German rp server Celebras, I absolutely support your cause. Blizzard has said that they do understand the fact that some people prefer a small server, even though most might not. My prefered size is about 500-1000 online at night for the facion I play. But I also enjoy rp a lot and actually like my server. So given the choice (and we were all given said choice via free transfers!), I still stayed. There were still 200-300 playerd online at the same time sometimes on Alliance side on Celebras, before the announcement of the “consolidation”. I have so many memories on my home server! It is not just replaceable. I can see that you feel the same way about ZT.

Also: Blizzard chose a devastating way to handle all of this for the server communities. First, they opened free transfers to literally every singe PVE realm in Europe. Then they couldn’t be bothered to tell us in advance which server undecided characters will be transfered to automatically, so this realm might have been a natural destination realm for voluntary transfers. By the way: We STILL don’t know this! For Celebras, it could be any German PVE realm or HW or even an English PVE realm for all we know! For ZT, it might be any English PVP realm or HW or do they just roll the dice and send you wherever? We haven’t been told. Both decisions just led to the community splitting up, because some decided to follow people who had already left to Razorfen, others to Lakeshire, some are trying out HW.

While I have read a message from one of the devs to one of our players that ZT and Celebras are definately to be shut down despite all efforts of the community to stop it, because they think we basically could all just play together on HW, and I do believe that the damage is done, there is no reason to stop telling Blizzard that they really didn’t do any of us any favours. They screwed this one up. Period.

I am severely frustrated by Blizzard’s server management. Yes, all of the “dead” regular pvp servers need to be put to rest. Everybody agrees. Literally. And this never happens. But how is it they don’t understand that we are different? We have been on these forums, on reddit, on twitter, written tickets. And they still feel that this was/is the right decision. Well: It is not.

7 Likes
18

my friends and I have been looking for a while to be able to transfer to Zandalar Tribe. that would be amazing… rppvp… having open world pvp, being able to raid AND not having any gdkp spammers, meta kiddies… can only imagine the beauty.

5 Likes
19

If they really would not keep all 3 RP servers alive, they should just have let us all transfer to Celebras. That RP server was really alive - also with lots of PvP things happening. I’m sure they would have welcomed us warmly. As it stands now Blizz is killing all three servers and communities :frowning:

1 Like
20

Isn’t Celebras a german-language server?

21

Yes. They fought for almost 2 months to have a German RP server and got it. Since they’ve had a thriving community. And now Blizz is closing it down. Like ZT

If you can read just a little German look here: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/de/wow/c/celebras/250

22

Blizzard please close transfers from ZT and open transfers to ZT for alliance and horde.

2 Likes