This is wrong.
Pet Growl was never a true taunt, it was a threat based attack that did 0 damage and produced a flat amount of threat, like distracting shot.
This does not solve the problem. Ok it’s player driven! So what?!? So what’s blizzards solution?
I will give you one, how about a 60/40 cap on all servers. Once a server hits it, players can no longer transfer to the that server if they are on the dominant faction.
Boom! Problem solved! Make it happen blizzard!
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Only things I have right now is:
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Revert on their current plan and not nerf BT/Hyjal at release
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If gear drops at the same count per boss as P2 (can’t remember, so not sure), maybe have bosses drop 1 extra piece than normal. We won’t have a year between P3 and P5 like original TBC.
No joke, take this to your handlers. This is step one.
Free Transfers, from all realms, for the month of Jan.
No restrictions.
If Blizzard is going to neglect their responsibilities to the players, then the very least they can do is prove that its not motivated by their boldfaced, naked, greed.
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Seems kind of silly to being throwing “improvement” ideas at a dart board while the wall holding the dart board is on fire (server population mismanagement is the fire).
The gameplay of Classic and TBC are basically fine, warts and all (authentic). Blizzard has wiggle room in “phase” schedules and content tuning, which will never make everyone happy, but not many WOW classic fans would quit over any of that minutia. But many players are finding it hard to play the game in any form, when server after server is imploding and dying (I’ve been part of 2 mass extinction events).
Blizzard has had more than enough time to recognize the problem and address it in some manor (since p2 classic). So I hold Blizzard responsible, even if player group-think was the mechanism.
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Blizzard should of predicted what servers would bloom and die is what you’re saying?
Seems kinda sus to expect that.
Players xfer, this isn’t new it literally happens back then too.
Unless they just stop offering paid xfers which is unlikely as that’s in literally every MMO.
The solutions you guys keep thinking will fix the issues won’t.
Maybe blizzard doesn’t have the staff for this now, but a better company running this game could totally have put regulations or (dis)incentives in place to control server balance. It’s frankly embarrassing how bad they let it get.
I’m paraphrasing, but blizzard literally said at the beginning of classic “We don’t want to open too many servers because we want to maintain healthy servers in the long term, so we are going to add some layers, but only temporarily”. In other words, developers that long ago were clearly aware of the possibility of server population issues. So what happened?
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Without layers, these mega realms would be unplayable.
Next.
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The biggest part of faction imbalance is on PVP servers.
Unless they fix horde racials there is no way it will ever be balanced simply because we all maximize our characters and horde are better at PVP and PVE when it comes to their racials
It does seem that HvH agrevated this problem. I rolled Alliance mainly for faster BG queues, I’m sure many others did as well.
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Just imagine if Blizzard actually cared about their game, about having a somewhat authentic experience, about the communities that built up over two years. This was something they actually thought about before in this long post from April 2020 when at the same time they restricted transfers and new character creations on certain realms:
I’ll again point out THIS comment: “We feel very strongly about thinking long term and avoiding using layering as anything more than a temporary solution.”
At this point, TBCC is really catered to people who care about fast groups only. They don’t want an authentic experience, they don’t want an MMO, and they don’t care about server community. They do care about themselves though - a lot. Not about any other person though.
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“well that was a lie” - meme
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I like your gumption Sixx, not only taking on a large amount of player negativity responses, but also handling it in a fairly professional manner. For that I’ll apologize for my silly facetious response.
I will say if you’re active on these forums, and active playing the game as it is. You should be intimately familiar with the game’s issues that we’re facing. Be that as it may, I suppose it’s not unfair to ask for outside opinions.
Issue number one being glaringly obvious. Server balance and dead servers plaguing all around. This in my opinion should be the main preached problem and no further discussion on any other issues until this is solved.
With that there’s plenty of creative solutions and routes that can take place with this. I am completely speaking from observation, and I don’t claim to take ownership of this being an absolute fact by any means. I feel that most players don’t enjoy the aspect of “Mega-Servers”. With that being a notion we are taking into account how do we incentivize joining a low populated server when you’re on a “Mega-Server”. I think there’s plenty of options here, just would mean how generous would Blizzard be willing to be while also selecting a reasonable offer that wouldn’t be absolutely ridiculous breaking the game. After all we want to solve the server balance issue and not make another problem trying to fix the original. So what are things that can be offered to players?
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Player Services i.e. Name Change, Race Change, Faction Change, and then lastly a single WoW token possible account wide. (Logic for single possible is so that players can’t just get a ton of tokens and be super rich over night. However, offering that single token on a highly populated server can help circulate wealth in a different way.)
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In-game they could offer other Cosmetic like items for the character being transferred. Such as, “Transfer to {insert-realm-name-here} get the new hero transmog appearance set. Incentivizing something only possible by transferring. Anything cosmetic truly can be as far as creative as they want it to be. The appearance could even be a Toy item.
The above options of course would only be feasibly controlled under the contingency that the character transferred under these incentive actions would only be applicable if the character is then locked in that realm for 1-2 years. (Arbitrary time line just speculated off the top of my head.) Then of course this only being an actionable option for those on high to full population realms to a low-pop realms.
Also throttling the availability of these limited time offers while keeping control on the following variables:
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Once a realm reaches Medium to Full status while having a conscious effort into only allowing an “X” amount of horde & alliance in; you could set this number to something like 2,000 on each side. (Again another arbitrary number off the top of my head.)
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Limit the amount of players that can transfer away from the prospective realms offered this incentive. Shouldn’t enable a solution that creates a problem where the “Mega-Servers” consequentially become low population servers as well.
Other avenues/routes that could be taken would be realm merging along with realm layering. Only taking into consideration merging player community populations that wouldn’t exceed a a certain level of total population, essentially merge low to medium pop servers to create new balanced Full to High servers. And only with the mind set of merging servers that need it, not contributing to the existing “Mega-Servers”.
Lastly probably the least popular option at least in my opinion. Realm layering, this in my opinion would more than likely be the most feasible actionable route to be taken by Blizzard. I just feel that it’s a band-aid solution that somewhat ruins community connection a secluded realm environment can foster. However, I wouldn’t be opposed to it as any solution would be better than nothing I guess.
Between these options, or at least the options that Blizzard is even willing to consider. I think it would be best or rather most sensible of their team to only finalize an option based on mass player input taking a poll vote that is tied to a Blizzard Account with an active WoW subscription. This gives the powers to the players giving an impression they want the solution to be chosen by us to an extent.
Like I said this is the only main issue the game is challenged by right now so I wouldn’t personally be wanting to press any other agenda. As other problems can be solved after this, whereas this problem shouldn’t be ignored behind others. Players aren’t going to quit in masses because there aren’t certain desired features in the game. However, they certainly will if no one is on their realm to even play with.
Hope you can make some optimistic changes. In all honesty, Blizzard has had a long repeated track record of disappointment. So I can’t not express the fact that I doubt anything will happen through the Community Council. Regardless it never hurts to try or provide input I guess even if it’s just saying something into a void.
If you read everything - good on you for sticking it through, you’ve finally reached the end of the wall.
Judging by your responses here you are not a great community representative because it seems you assume a lot about us
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I like the idea of carrot (incentives) and stick (disincentives) server re-balancing, with free transfers to support the target balance.
The problem with incentives is that they may not work if too insignificant, and may be game-breaking if too significant. For example, free items or gold could break the economy and change raid metas. Titles and pets won’t be enough.
Disincentives could also just punish players without achieving the desired effect.
I think blizzard needs to get really creative here.
My idea was to add some sort of faction specific competition to each server. Where players are competing against other players on the same server-faction. The competition is public to the server (fame), and gives meaningful rewards based on your rank.
The rewards could be worked in any number of ways, but I think the best approach would be to add a new token that players accumulate based on their rank that week.
first 30 players get rank 1 (1k points)
next 70 players get rank 2 (500 points)
next 500 players get rank 3 (250 points)
next 2000 players get rank 4 (50 points)
This is unnormalized, meaning its much harder to achieve higher ranks the larger your server is.
The points could be spent on meaingful items:
1K for a special mount
500 for an epic trinket
100 for a primal nether
10 for 1k honor
As much as possible, the competition should be based on things players already compete over these days so as not to majorly shift the game meta. Arena ratings, parses, farming gold, honorable kills, etc.
Some should be controllable by guilds, since we want to incentivize guilds to transfer. An example would be competition over getting first weekly raid boss kills, or fastest raid boss kills (from fight initiation to boss death, single attempt).
Some should be controllable by players with more time on their hands. For example total weekly honor. Or total weekly rare spawn kills.
… anyway… I might think about this idea more and make a separate post
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That’s why I mentioned the above.
As long as something is in place I truly don’t care what it is. I just want it done right, and fix the realms.
The fact that you mention things like “the arena point system” in such a dismissive way is exactly the reason the council is an absolute farce. Everything you stated above were way more than just “significant”. They were enormously huge game breaking changes.
The first person to respond to you was correct. You don’t speak for the community, only for yourself. No one on the council represents the players, they represent what they think. What the players think is right here on the forums directly from the source.
The PR middle man is the last thing this game needs in order to save it from further decline.
That was never, ever the main goal, specifically due to all the “significant” changes made from day one. That fact that you think the statement you posted is true literally proves you are absolutely out of touch with what the players as a whole wanted. So how can you represent anyone but yourself?
And finally:
No, it is not difficult to navigate in the slightest. As many other posters have amply stated in so many threads, there are plenty of extremely easy and instant ways for blizzard to get any and all feedback they need directly from the players, including polls per account, and a myriad of other extraordinarily easy ways in this day of instant internet information.
No middle man needed, ever.
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I definitely agree that server balance and the state of the servers are the biggest, most pressing issue right now. That’s why I was literally the first non-blizz person to make a post about anything in the Council and it was about TBC servers. I’m eagerly awaiting the response to that after the new year rolls around.
I can’t speak for everyone, you are correct. I’m not even going to try to because that’s impossible. I also may make generalizations that you don’t agree with, but they’re not baseless. There’s always some part of the community that I base any comments (regarding the community) on. Whether it’s the minority or majority I honestly don’t know because not everyone voices their opinions. It doesn’t really help me or you or anyone really to continuously point out “who speaks for who” or whatever.
I care about trying to make the game better where I can with a direct line of communication. Help me make it better or don’t, that’s your choice. I appreciate you voicing your concerns and distastes though.
Sure thing. With your direct line of communication let blizzard know what a collosal mistake the whole council PR stunt is and that they need to get feedback directly from all the players.
I don’t mean just you (none of this is personal towards you). When I say you I mean every single person on this farce of a council needs to let them know this is not the way to save this sinking ship.
3 Likes
Most of us appreciate your work on this Sixx. Hopefully the trolls aren’t getting you down.
For me the most pressing issues are:
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Server population/balance issues. I think this is objectively the most important issue that blizzard needs to solve and should’ve been dealt with months ago at the earliest. But hopefully we can finally move forward on this soon, as you said.
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PvP participation/PvP gearing. An entire endgame activity is basically dead in tbc because of a multitude of issues ranging from server population to respec costs to OCE realms not being connected to U.S. realms, to honor gains being so abysmally low compared to what they were in retail tbc. There needs to be meaningful changes so that the pvp community can actually have their portion of the game back. I stopped pvping altogether in tbc because it’s just awful trying to respec each week on top of endless hours of honor grinding for very little benefit. Catching up is nearly impossible and unless you don’t have a job (or you’re a streamer) it’s hard to both raid and pvp seriously right now. Having an authentic experience is meaningless if that experience is awful for the majority of players.
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Dual spec - this goes along with pvp participation but honestly it also helps dungeon groups become more active too. It’s good for the game and it should be added in some form.
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Botting needs to be dealt with. Botting in classic has been rampant since the beginning and it never feels like there’s any meaningful progress made on that front. And the boost simply made it worse.
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This is going to sound like a weird one but herb spawns need to be increased - specifically terocone. One of the many reasons there’s so many bots is because terocone is so hard to farm and unless you’re on a low pop server, good luck. It’s nearly impossible. It shouldn’t be so hard to farm an herb that’s so heavily used by nearly everyone in pve. I think it’s reasonable that if blizzard can act on the black lotus spawns, they can do it for terocone for the same reasons.
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Battle Chicken - make it squawk when spawned, and don’t let it stack. Problem solved.
The first two issues are by far the most pressing, the others are important but I’d rather see the first two fixed before anything else. But just in general, Blizzard needs to start communicating with the players and stop being so afraid. Communication allegedly dropped because people were being mean - but blizzard has the ability to clean up the forums - there has to be some standards. Ban the trolls, communicate with players, implement change. Saying nothing makes people cynical.
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