I was happy with cross realm BG’s that kept it to small battle groups.
I frequently did premades, and I would see familiar faces ALL THE TIME. I think I was on the WW battle group… anyways… I would see other premade groups that I knew and would fight all the time. I would see familiar faces that would recognize my main premade buddies i played with and myself and sit inside their dungeon entrance…
BFA is a lot more spread out so we dont ever see familiar faces. No community. No sense of helping others get their gear to play with you… I dont want that.
PVP? Cross realms actually did a lot to help the instanced aspect of PvP and the ability to farm honor to get ranks/gear.
Honestly it was much much worse for PvP before XRBG’s took effect.
“Cross Realm” cannot include phasing as it is the same realm, just different world state and some other mumbo-jumbo. In some respects, they probably would have been better to implement most phases as shards, but that isn’t the design spec. Either way, phasing is moot with regard to Classic WoW, because Phasing has zero utility in Vanilla, and didn’t exist until Wrath.
Sharding may not have existed until after Wrath, but it does have utility in Vanilla, so it gets complicated quickly. However, you can have sharding without it being Cross-Realm.
By definition, CRBG is Cross-Realm, so that is possibly off the table.
They explicitly said the LFG tool from Wrath and onwards is off the table. For that matter, the TBC implementation of the meeting stones as summoning stones is also apparently off the table.
Given that the summoning stones are supposed to be off the table, why they would implement a “Single Realm” implementation of LFG which teleports you into the chosen dungeon a’la Battlemaster queues is beyond me. (And as I think about it further, I think it being Cross-Realm is a BIG factor why it did that, being X-Realm, you couldn’t run over to a summoning stone and start summoning your party members from other realm servers, at least, not in Wrath.)
I think that was EARLY in the BG implementation, like before the Capital City Battlemasters existed stage. It might have persisted for a while after that, but not very long after that IMO.
So it would teleport you back to the physical entrance of the bg initially? I guess that doesn’t matter since there will almost certainly be battlemasters in Classic. Honestly, there’s advantages to getting instantly ported back to the battlemaster after every bg. As I think about it more I think that was actually the case. I remember alliance rogues who used to stealth at the battlemaster in Org and 1-shot lowbies as they appeared after a bg ended.
Well, there also were the players who simply queued, found somewhere to stand(if they moved at all after that), and alt-tabbed until their BG queue popped.
So those players would “naturally” return to where the Battlemasters were after their BG ended because that’s where they were when the queue popped.
Initial implementation did drop you off at the instance portal after the BG ended. Around the time that the Battlemasters entered the mix, it started returning you to where you queued from. At some point after that it shifted to dropping you back to where-ever you were at the time you accepted the BG invite, but I remember that also happening in Vanilla.
(I also remember group queuing being available at some points and one guildie constantly queuing the group from Darnassus because he liked it there. So we’d periodically find ourselves over there after a BG ended.)
Without cross realms bgs the space between queue pops is long enough that you may be standing around for a long time waiting, but there’s no way to know. The wait is long enough that you’d like to go do something like farm but you really can’t.
Inevitably what happens is you spend time getting to your spot, then sure enough, the queue pops. After the BG, you get sent back to the battlemaster and you’d have to try to go back to your spot quickly again. Usually it isn’t worth bothering. So for the most part what you end up doing is just tabbing out of the game for a long time waiting for the queue pop sound.
With cross realm, the queue’s pop consistently, you spend most of your time in the actual BGs. You finish one and often in a minute or two another one pops. Sometimes instant. There’s very little standing around bored waiting.
What you’re describing you can experience right now in BfA. I want to know the enemy again. I want to see familiar names and drool with anticipation, or recoil in fear. I want reputation to matter. I want Classic bgs to offer those things that Current WoW doesn’t.
Please just admit it, you would not be happy unless there was no wait between BG pops whatsoever.
One compromise that has been suggested in the past would be to ONLY have CRBGs for brackets leading up to the L60 one. That is about as far as I personally would accept its use.
I think not. Unrestricted Cross Realm is poison to communities being able to form.
Certain forms of Cross Realm are potentially very beneficial. The challenge is the “population management” side and Blizzard(and more specifically Activision’s finance types) wanting to favor a more hands-off approach.
CRBG isn’t much of a problem, so long as the peak player pool involved isn’t larger than a “Large Town” as wiki would define it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_hierarchy
I would certainly prefer that, since when I queue for BGs I intend on doing a bunch in a row. It isn’t some sort of deal breaker though, I just preferred the cross realm system. I did many BGs both before and after the system was implemented in Vanilla.
Battlegroups were the best thing to happen to PVP, hands down for the reason stated above. I have no idea how long I spent at 60 with my PVP character, even after BC came out, but I got to know the “who’s who” in my battlegroup and had a hell of a time going after rivals and seeing when established battle-buddies were on. I sincerely hope they implement battlegroups, but not the blanket “Cross-realm of anonymity and trolling” one they have today.
Why not just avoid opening dozens of ghost town servers for no reason while simultaneously setting a faction balancing measure which prevents the numbers from deviating too much by limiting character creation? That would prevent the “need” of adding a feature which contributed to the game’s downfall and is universally despised by most vanilla players.
Easier said then done. People want to play with their friends. People being unable to roll on a particular server because “the player population is imbalanced” is not fun. It also creates other problems that get to cause ripples all over the place.
The only way to remotely have a chance to manage player population in any maner that isn’t a Rube-Goldberg Contraption from the onset would be to throw everybody onto a single server and shard it.
Otherwise the best you can do is cap the concurrency and hope things sort themselves out on their own with maybe the occasional free realm-transfer for targeted overpopulated factions… Which then creates problems when you wanted 800 people to transfer, and get 1200 instead for example, because well, we don’t want Johnny to get left behind by his friends. Because now your previously overpopulated faction is now underpopulated on the source realm, and you’re now overpopulated on the xfer server.
I wish Blizzard still held this true for the live version of WoW. CRZ and sharding was one of the biggest mistakes Blizzard has done with WoW and it’s one of the main reasons why i stopped playing BfA.