I agree that Aggrend cherry picked Crusader Strike to support a position he wanted to take (No RP-PVP server).
I cannot view his rational given on that Podcast as arguing in good faith.
Aggrend ignores Emerald Dream (which was an OG RP-PVP server). Doesn’t even mention it actually despite it being a large and successful server from Vanilla WoW (original WoW on release) up through at least Cataclysm. It was a large and vibrant community for years.
Emerald Dream also existed at the same time Moonguard did. It was simply not the case that all the RP only happened on one server. Dividing the RP community which is albeit a niche community across servers was not as harmful to RP servers as failing to moderate and actively manage servers.
Blizzard has been very poor at game moderation for many years now. It’s so evident in many aspects of how they don’t moderate and manage their server communities.
With the 2019 launch, they did not initially limit or regulation faction balance on servers. Failing to open a sufficient number of servers on launch in 2019, then not throtteling how many people could play Horde or Alliance on a PVP server resulted in lopsided faction balance and bad PVP experience.
You guys were told in advance of launch in 2019 you needed to regulate faction pop /character creation to prevent server imbalance and did not do it initially. You belated did it (later) after the problem the community earned you about ballooned and resulted in servers with horrific pop splits like 70/30 and 80/20 etc.
Aggrend pretends Grobb was some special/mystical case ‘due to the kind of people that were on Grobb’. That is basically not true and someone of his faculties knows better or should.
Aggrend omits that the faction population on Grobb was very close to 50/50 on launch and remained that way for much of the servers life cycle. It was not the case on other servers, and that is often a recipe for a poor PVP experience.l (when one side is grossly out-numbered).
He conveniently ommitted that during the podcast segment.
Grobbulus was successful in spite of Blizzard, not because of Blizzard. It was announced as RP-PVP server quite close.to launch and there was immediately a lot of hype. It got it’s own ‘Welcome to Grobb’ video that made the rounds on YouTube and discords. That was not common / not true of many servers that launched.
Grobb was an awesome server full of great people, but on launch it also had an infamous/racist guild on it which largely went unaddressed by Blizzard until it’s conduct became so publicly egregious that a U.S. congressman (from CA no less) started criticizing the Blizzard publicly.
Grobb was so popular that Deviate Delight had to be created to handle the excess population that were having a hard time making a character or Grobb or didnt want to ultimately play in a Mega Server. While Deviate Delight never approached Grobb mega server status, it was likewise a successful RP-PVP community.
I will tell you as someone who played on both servers…farming Black Lotus (or even just less or desired herbs) while on Grobb vs Deviate Delight was an entirely different experience in terms of the intensity of competition and overall player culture.
Grobb and Deviate delight (like Crusader Strike ironically) illustrated that Blizzard has not been (and apparently remains) a poor judge of how many servers it will need to house it’s community.
Nightslayer (PVP) was frankly a woefully overcrowded Mega Server with a toxic atmosphere that was created by ramming so many people into such a small space with so few resources.
Blizzard didn’t do that to preserve community; it was done as a cost saving measure for the company. It’s a wild thing to argue/say considering how profitable WoW as a franchise is.
Is nobody on the WoW Development Team familiar with the Judge Dredd Universe and the concept of the Mega Cities of the future, including Judge Dredd’s own Mega City 1?
What exactly did the Dev Team think was going to happen?
Do not tell us you can’t extrapolate out what’s likely to happen when you overcrowd a PVP server.
Does this crew believe their broken sharding system that randomly phases you (forcibly) onto a different layer/shard is good gameplay or creates a coherent experience for people interacting with one another in the open world?
Week 1 of Beta I invite a guy to party with me while he was killing a Silver Elite mob. He looked like he need.dome help, so I invited him to try and be helpful. A lot of people in today’s time might have declined the group invite thinking I was trying to take their green item /loot…but.not this guy.
He accepted my group invite in about 2-3 second to be friendly and inclusive. He was rewarded for being a social player / inclusive person by having the Rare Elite he was fighting forcibly phased away from him…MID COMBAT…onto a other layer.
The guy tells me…
“I hate this phasing stuff”, then leaves group.
That’s YOUR FAULT Dev Team. That’s YOUR design.
You guys should try talking to Kevin Jordan sometime. I’m sure he had his limitations as a developer, but he clearly understood the value of creating environments within the servers where you could choose to have different types of social experiences instead of having them forcibly engineered as afflictions upon the player base.
For the Dev Team to act like server communities are a thing you have fostered and paid attention to for years is pretty rich.
I have played this game since 2004 and it has been many…many years since I felt like the Dev Team cared about server communities…