Cross realm battlegrounds leads to massive win trading that screws the ranking system and LFD. No thank you.
I’d prefer the old battlegroups that they originally implemented. It was the closest thing to a compromise between open cross realm and realm only bgs. Battlegroups that were at least small enough (3-6 servers) help pad out the que times without totally destroying rivalries between guilds.
Personally it would be nice if the non CR bgs worked. But unless they strictly police faction balance on the realms there will always be huge wait times involved for Bgs (with today’s twitch culture I think there will be many realms with huge faction imbalances).
Another benefit to having some form of CR bg is that it can almost be impossible to get into a bg while leveling. Adding more players to the pool at least offers some people to play against during people’s leveling experience.
CRBG was in Vanilla. LFD was not.
While we know where CRBG ultimately lead, it obviously wasn’t that toxic on its own, as WoW thrived through TBC and into Wrath some 4 years later without major issue.
It wasn’t until CRBG was paired with (CR)LFD in Wrath that things rapidly started to slide downhill. In some respects, I don’t entirely fault LFD for that slide, as Blizzard made a LOT of other design decisions in Wrath and later in Cataclysm which further amplified that slide, and had nothing to do with LFD.
I think Blizzard made a very bad call as to size and selection process for player pools that were used with LFD. If it had been a single realm feature, or even involved a short list of realms, and not full Battle Groups, say limiting the potential player pool to a peak size of say, 12 to 15 thousand players, could have been survivable for the community. But that would have required some active management/oversight on their end and a lot more back-end work than what had already been done. It also would have created problems in the event that a group of low-pop realms suddenly experience a resurgence in their player populations. (For example: Having to potentially split apart meta-communities that had formed; which then adds another layer of complexity to things.)
Simply put, they screwed up on the “Community” aspect of the game, and didn’t look hard enough at the numbers side of things with respect to social dynamics. It’s stuff that fascinates Social Scientists to end to this day, but they do tend to solidify around “hundreds” being a near ideal for a community where everyone knows/is aware of everyone else(1 or 2 degrees or separation). “Thousands” is where social network starts to come into play, you don’t know everybody in the community anymore, but chances are very good you’re no more than 2 or 3 steps away from them all the same. (aka initial stages of the “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon”)
But as you start to move into the 10’s of thousands. It is no longer just 2 or 3 steps, you’re out to 3 or 4, or even more. At which point “the community” starts to break down as enough separation has then been achieved that its ability to act in any kind of cohesive manner outside of major issues falls to the wayside. (Do I really care what the friend of my friend’s buddy’s sister thinks about this guy? What do I even know about that sister anyway?)
And Blizzard goofed by throwing all of these “small communities” into one giant pot and stirring vigorously. Sure it helped address the complaints about queue times for dungeons, but what it ultimately did to those communities was horrific.
CRZ just put a final nail into it, but even that was intended to help. As it was addressing complaints about realms populated by nothing but one dead zone after another with no other players to be found anywhere. The correct call would have been to place them into slightly larger pools that could reorganize into a new, larger, community. But instead they threw everybody into an even bigger common player pool.
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Meaning they will avoid tinkering with things so long as its not needed.
Perhaps things like AV from an earlier version are so popular that they elect to use that older version because its more “Authentic” than the later 1.12 version.
Perhaps the CRBG system of 1.12 is just not considered authentic either, and in turn they elect not to use that component.
That still falls into the “Avoid messing with the 1.12 data”
I’ve probably done more BG pvp than any sane human should admit to in my history of this game… Maybe some of your guys’ battlegroups where just super dead or something, but I never knew who the hell anyone but maybe a choice couple of players where on mine.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that Xrealm tech itself might have been designed, implemented, and released specifically BECAUSE of TBC coming out…
Vanilla PvP only had WSG, AB, and AV as options to queu up for… The entire server population was picking one of those 3… TBC, however, had World PvP objectives, a 4th battleground, and 3 arena brackets all soaking up pvpers into various options, in addition to those 3 initial BGs… Players would have divided over too many areas to effectively cover for a single server, thus creating a need for Battlegroups.
There are other, imo better ways to keep BG queu timers down, if need be, than resorting to the same Xrealm mistake that the very tail end of vanilla made.
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Their is nothing wrong with cross relm bgs aslong the world isn’t crzd or sharded after the first week. Just hope they have battle groups like before. I was on Auchindoun…it was in the Retaliation battle groups. I remember seeing people from area 52, ghost lands, terrokar, underbog and a few others.
To be honest it probably won’t be as strongly noticed as you may believe. Chances are they will not designate a large number of servers to classic, so it will be a very contained unit in of itself.
I still agree that battlegrounds should still have a “battlegroup” as they once did, which would probably include all classic servers. However I don’t think the containment would affect it too harshly with population density.
Cross realm grouping for BGs should be introduced if we reach a point where necessity drives it.
I think this is the case. Much like the mount changes in 1.12.1.
Thanks for the book but what I said was true. Win trading and LFD. Leave all cross realms out including bgs which wasn’t in until the END of Vanilla. If people want to pvp they can roll on a pvp server. Problem solved.
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Sorry, I don’t want to wait 2 hours for a pvp queue… I also like <60 pvp…
server population imbalances makes it not worth it.
cross realm pvp pls… as it was in patch 1.12. You still get server cohesion in world pvp and pve
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It seems like this debate boils down to convenience vs peak experience.
Would it be nice to have no queues and easier BGs at low lvls? Sure.
Still, I would prefer the PvP community be kept as intact as possible. It’s much more enjoyable battling with and against familiar faces.
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No to CRZ. CRZ and server transfers screwed over Stormreaver’s community and it never recovered.
Hopefully we can just raise the pop cap to 4k/server and have decent enough bgs then.
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Subjective. Some people also probably get sick of queueing into the same people numerous times (especially if one side is consistently dominant). Seeing the same people and having rivalries isn’t something I care about. With battlegroups you’d occasionally be bumping into the same names. Not to mention that queues for BGs below 60 will be dead.
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When I look at Classic, I look for things I can’t experience in the Current WoW. And farming random strangers is something I can do in BfA. I want something radically different in Classic. I still remember the day cross-realm bgs were added in Vanilla. I was thoroughly confused by the fact that suddenly I didn’t know anyone in the bgs anymore. I pretty much stopped doing bgs at that point, and I won’t do them in Classic with cross-realm bgs.
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Then lobby for population balance control via queues or other avenues. If a PS can do it successfully, then Blizzard can certainly manage it.
Perhaps a RPMMO is not the best of choice for those people then.
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My vanilla server had lower queu timers (post battlemaster release at least) than BfA does for Horde.
Also worth pointing out that Xrealm tech actually encourages faction stacking, as you gain advantage in wpvp without costing you anything on your bg queus, since you instead use an opposite faction unbalanced realm to counterbalance your server, rather than being incentivized to keep your factions relatively even.
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If you’re talking loot trading, then yes.
If anything I was arguing for crossrealm bgs. I personally don’t care either way, but people who act like cross realm bgs will be this terrible thing like crz honestly either forgot how it was or they are too caught up in the circle jerk
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they have not said a word about CRbgs, i think we will get them