I doubt it’ll do more damage than sharding. Every time I log on in Org on the Draenor server, I’ll be lucky if I see more than 5 people. Absolutely depressing.
That said, I think it’s a useless feature.
See, i am a lore nerd, big nerdynerdnerd, and i collect any book, note or what ever ingame lore dump or tidbit i can find, but they are starting to take up ALOT of space in my bank, i would love to have a book case where i could store all of these.
Would be nice
3 Likes
Depends on the implementation.
2 Likes
Yeah, this always puzzles me when people try to portray less crowded capitols as this horrible thing to happen, how many (Or rather, few) people there do you actually interact with? (Grumbling at your screen, wishing they’d move their huge mounts off vendors and/or mailboxes doesn’t count)
Other people in capitol cities are pretty much confused NPCs, already.
2 Likes
I didn’t actually mean transmog, I meant the system is focused on furniture and other appearance related aspects which do not become irrelevant in the next expansion, so it will never become irrelevant like the Garrison did. In other words, it cannot be an expansion feature.
That’s fair, I just woke up, too. I might not have explained myself very well.
If the house has a courtyard that’s outside so you can mount you already have a repairsmith, mailbox, auction house (with a store purchase… lol), transmog, and vendor to sell trash to. Your only reason to leave would be profession stations, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they add those, too.
Let’s talk about MMO worlds and why they work.
The idea is to take the multiplayer game and blow it up from 64 players (or less) to tens of thousands of players, and make a world with a size to match: Azeroth. It’s really a lot like an 80,000 player Minecraft server.
The idea then is to make players at similar progression levels meet and interact, and if they meet multiple times allow them to infer their interests are similar. They become friends, they make a guild, and a community sprouts.
So what you shouldn’t do is have an automated system that moves players between phases based on whether or not the population density finds that convenient, because what it means is that you almost never, if ever, meet the same person twice. You also shouldn’t do automated LFD because it means the people you do meet are not useful to you. Other players should be a presence other than just physically existing on your screen. They kill, they craft, they run, they quest and, maybe, they fight you.
Now, if you empty the world dynamically or make it way too big you end up with a dead open world, and now you have to dynamically merge servers, which means that, given the above objective, everything is ruined.
Since RP servers don’t do this at all, they just end up empty, and many areas of Argent Dawn are indeed empty.
This dynamic sharding is called a “megaserver”. It was invented by Elder Scrolls Online, and it completely wrecks any MMO, including that game. ESO is okay, but only as a way to play Skyrim with a bigger map. As an MMO it’s trash.
Given that this has happened here, player housing can’t destroy the game world. It’s already broken.
But now Blizzard has yet another problem in the mix should they ever attempt to fix this.
really? i play on draenor and dornegal is always packed. and orgrimmar too.
I don’t know when WoW devs supposedly told you in person how MMOs work, but I suspect it must’ve been years ago, because your view is so nostalgic I don’t hesitate to call it outdated.
These days a bustling WoW community is not made up by random people who happen to stand next to each other in the game. It’s made up by Discord servers and to a lesser degree guilds and LFG-people-turned-friends.
If I need help with something in the game, I’m not going to ask some rando. I’m going to ask my Discord server. And I’m fairly sure I’m not the only one.
I know 2 vanilla devs and 1 former CM.
So… yes, it’s nostalgic, but it has aged well.
Because people standing next to you mean nothing. This is what dynamic sharding does. WoW has become incapable of building communities - we build communities around it, just like you would with games like DotA 2.
As such, WoW has lost its MMO roots.
Call it nostalgic or old-fashioned or whatever you want. It still works if the game doesn’t delete it through “convenient” changes.
Replacing the guild chat with Discord is fine, and I’m not expecting you to ask someone random. I’m expecting the game to help you find those Discord servers, essentially, by presenting you with random people until someone - and that will happen eventually - that you like, and letting it blossom from there.
2 Likes
fair point to think about that, but to me at least, even the hubs feel empty. ppl fly in on the mount. pick up the weekly. sell some stuff and are off. it feels as if the crowded busy days are over since a long time.
the reason i see it like that is, i just came from playing SOD. that was amazing. phase 1 Thunderbluff was the main hub. and it was so full and activ and ppl trading and chatting. phase 2 the same with Ogrimmar.
but that is pre flight mount…
1 Like
Judging by other games that have the feature, probably not. GW2 added housing recently and the main cities don’t look any different.
Also people AFKing in a city doesn’t make a game feel full, its makes a game look uninteresting to play, atleast with housing (depending on how its done) it adds a new layer of things for people to do instead of logging in just to AFK.
Yup. There is an almost infinite number of reasons why the world broke. That’s another one.
I’ve given up. It’s just crazy - they (modern Blizzard) don’t get it at all.
I hope it stays that way. I hope they don’t allow crafting in houses nor AH utilities. AH mounts need to be disabled in the housing districts/instance etc. This would be the sole problem of why cities would then be emptier. You still need a reason to go to main hubs.
Obv a mailbox is not going to kill cities and getting mail at a postbox is kinda the norm.
Edit: and on the AH mount story…personally I wish they were disabled in the cities too. The convenience should be purely out in the open world.
Both Stormwind and Orgrimmar are outdated dumps anyway, especially when compared to hubs developed later like Bolarus.
I could not care less if they were empty. At minimum the Portal rooms will remain busy.
As for the world argument, that died long ago when Blizzard dramatically sped up levelling, trivialised open world mobs compared to player power (even while undergeared), introduced LFD and automatic teleportations to content and gradually reduced and trivialised how much interaction with the open world players are required to do in order to speed up access to endgame instanced content which the game is wholly designed around.
I’m wholly indifferent to player housing but don’t blame that feature for killing something that has been dead for well over a decade at this stage.
2 Likes
^^ This
Well said
People tend to forget that the ah mount combined with housing are not concerning at all to empty main hubs , remember that crafting orders which everyone use , and portals for m+ before doing your 10 keys or weekly quests and banks are still the major usage of main hubs.
Main hubs were slightly empty cause of the ah mount , but only for farmers , since they don’t have to come to the ah and sell things anymore. the system will be fine , don’t forget that not everyone is getting the auction mount , and the deal will be over next year on january , and hopefully we don’t get a banking mount , otherwise that would be slowly killing the game if they go that path.
Depends how it’s done.
If they make a housing district which is open to the general public which has a bank, an AH, a portal room, some well laid-out streets with some fountains, Profession workshops, Vendors et al. And off this main square are streets with player houses in rows. Then players will be wandering around this area. Even wandering around the housing streets admiring the outside of others’ houses, obviously you wouldn’t be able to just go into those houses (you’d need to be invited somehow).
very true. also why I (and that is just for me) the delvs are the best thing ever.
i have odd times i can play and i just grind away by myself. no m+, no raid. just chill single player mod. i hardly notice the other players around me anymore.
esp. since the mailbox can be a toy. molly-e, best piece of tech ever!
1 Like
I won’t. But I will point out that, were they ever to attempt to fix this situation, they just got a new problem on their hands.
1 Like
Agreed, if you were to try and revert a lot of these design trends, it would be incredibly difficult and you would get a tremendous pushback from most of the community.
It’s easy, and often initially popular, to streamline things down, and a lot harder to build them back up. It’s rare for the second order or cumulative effects of such changes to be fully interrogated at the time, but saying that you can now be automatically matchmade and teleported to the dungeon sounds convenient on paper.
I don’t think Blizzard will revert course on this. Where the design is wholly focussed on the endgame content pillars, anything that presents friction between players and those endgame pillars is seen as a tedium or at worst some deliberate attempt by Blizzard to decelerate and gate player progress.
The best middle ground they can aim for is with something like Dragonriding, which is faster than regular flying but involves more meaningful gameplay interaction.
2 Likes