#ConnectAzeroth - The Final Realm Connection

Community General Discussion
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With sharding and cross-realm in place there are opportunities for players to interact across a region. Constantly players are playing with players from across the expanse. It seems like a rarity to see players in the same zone as I am who are also on my realm.

Sharding and cross-realm work really well. This begs the question,: Why not go the rest of the way? Merge into one big connected realm (by region of course) and use sharding to manage the over and under populated realms.

This could bring back guilds as it makes it so players who make friends in a dungeon or BG (premade or random) can create a guild together and form lasting bonds through shared effort. (Thinking Firelands or ICC like legendaries.) It could infuse the premade competitive spirit by making group achievements more within reach. (Side Note: Guild Halls. Please and Thank You) Communities are great but they really don’t have their own identity and flair. There is no pageantry, or common guild bank, or achievements.

The economy would balance out and normalize with steady supply and demand. The new Auction House UI shows unique items as a single market value stack. This is very doable.

I can hear some concerns from players who want to keep their populations low. I say have a toggle in the UI that tells the server the player prefers low pop shards. You can lump all those single player players into their own worlds. If you did it for Garrisons you can do that here (Side Note: A toggle for people who prefer RP would be equally helpful and dissolve the difference between realms similar to war mode. This should assist in balancing populations while preserving the RPers experience.)

There are also the concerns of realm firsts. I think a Region first would be even cooler. Further you can compensate by having First 10,25,50,100 Achievements similar to how you handled cross realm fishing tournaments.

Point is, I think that LFG, Cross-Realm, and similar random region based systems opened a pandoras box that harmed community cohesion. I think we can undo that harm and do more good by going to the rest of the way and making us, for all practical purposes, one giant realm (by region)

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I like it, only issue is that the trade chat would be slammed to the point where you couldnt read it all. (Idea to fix the issue i just brought up, is to bring back city specific trade chats. This would bring back the idea of people using general chat to just BS like they do in trade now anyway, and trade could go to trade.)

Only other issue is that Blizzard as a company need to decide their stance on groups/guild selling runs for gold. If they support it, then they should put in a UI that allows for that sort of thing to be advertized. If they are against it make it a silence-able offense so we can get back our chat. Trade is only used for someone to talk about religion, politics, or full of groups trying to sell runs currently. when it should be used for selling goods/Profession services, as it was before.

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I think the solution to Trade would be how we have a solution to General in current content zones. I believe you can only see the chat for the shard you are on. Effectively there is an invisible distinction between the General on your shard and the general on someone else’s.

Also separate from that I think this also solves the issue of time zones and peak play time. They don’t put the time zone of a realm in the UI so novice players started out and continue to play on realms that may be off peak their time zone. Simultaneously the “Full/Locked” queue time issue would go away. No more having to do realm transfers on overpopulated realms. Blizz can balance internally.

From a monetary perspective I can see how Blizz would be hesitant to pull the trigger and lose out on that sweet transfer cash. However I am willing to bet that the social bonds created by this action would vest players in the game longer and Blizzard would see an ROI through a reduction in subscription lapse. Think back to before a lot of these cross realm systems. Subs were at their absolute height just before the cross realm system LFG was added. It was all down hill as systems made community pointless. I can’t speak for everybody but I play wow for friends. If it is hard to make friends then I might as well play any number of single player or match making games.

Also a big part of where carrying for gold came from was from how difficult it became to create and maintain guilds. When the convenience of random matching overrides the benefit of being in a guild then there is little incentive to try to make one or be in one. Carriers for Gold exploited that hole in the market.

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I agree, except connect into each datacenter location, not necessarily region. So for NA, Chicago (US East) and Los Angeles (US West). Realms were a solution to server infrastructure limitations in the early-mid 2000’s that don’t
 or at least shouldn’t exist anymore.

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Totally. If there isn’t a solid backbone then that shouldn’t even cross-realm. As near as I can tell they solved that problem. The taxing transactions between data centers aren’t going to be syncing Auction transactions or logical guild containers. The taxing parts are the ever shifting real time position of players, NPCs, and spells in the game world
which they handle now anyway in cross realm. The connecting of economies should be the easy part.

That is to say my only disagreement with limiting it to datacenter and not region is IF cross realm exceeds the datacenter anyway then there is no point in that limitation. IF it is limited to datacenter then sure have a handful to datacenter tier realms.

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No they don’t, they are the cause for the major lag that BFA has seen as stated in the Tech support forums.

They are also bad for the game as a whole as it torn apart communities now. In the open world you might as well just have NPCs around you since no one gives 2 craps about other people in the open world.

It’s killed my enjoyment of the game i will not longer be playing retail due to this. Play classic to see what REAL realms are meant to be like, what this game was built around. This game has no soul left, no passion and it’s such a huge disappointment the dev or anyone at Blizzard cannot see this. But thanks Blizzard for saving me money, since I’m not going to play any expansions !

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I agree cross realm has torn communities apart (see original post) and I think connecting the realms will sew that particular divide. Players will no longer see people from different realms as being ‘other’ because they won’t be other.

As far as the technical issues, I haven’t experienced them personally but if they are that persistent then I think cross realm should fall back to datacenter only
or make their shard algorithm favor same datacenter unity.

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Was going to reply with something longer but it’s better to keep it simple. It will not work with mega servers. Once your populations gets too high there will be a lot more layers or shards and you will be in the same spot that you the realms are now with CRZ and sharding.

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Megaservers! Lets do it Blizzard!

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This would be fun with wpvp.

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agree

sharding in reverse would have been better

bigger realms (ah/guilds/trading) but with sharding to control lag would have easily made a 10000x better experience for everyone involved

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Soon


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I think the contention you and I have is cross realm in general. My point is if you are going to do cross realm you might as well do connected. The only difference between cross realm and Connected are the economies. A guild is an economy of a kind. The AH is an economy of a kind. Trading between players are economies of a kind.

It seems you dont want CRZ at all and thats fine but that misses my point a bit. LFD, LFR, BGs, CRZ are not going away in retail
so you might as well finish the job. At worst you are exactly where you started. At best you can better manage your player pools and encourage permanent community through economy.

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I agree with you that the lack of community is a problem but you are dead wrong on the solution.

The way to building community in wow is to have LESS cross realm activity, not more.

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The toothpaste is not going back in that tube and even if it did that would leave the low population realms worse off and the only way out would be to spend a whole bunch of money to move their characters to another realm which in turn could also go under.

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Exempt RP realms from this, period.

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I would agree that RP realms should have a mechanism where RPers can segment themselves away. If you look above I argue that there should be a toggle similar to Warmode that more or less keeps RPers together. But failing that yes, I agree they should put all the RP rounds together and leave them separate from everyone else. That being said I know that’s not true because I see people from Moon Guard all the time and I’m on a Normal realm.

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For connecting the AH, they could use AH servers and allow you to swap between them from a dropdown menu.

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That is an option for sure
but with the new stacking mechanic I think it is just as easy to merge AHs into one. We now can show a stack of 2000 copper as a single stack so surely we can do 20000 copper and get the same result.

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Should totally just be every server is connected within the time zones, you start out by picking a time zone and then the long list of servers inside of it appear to pick from. Slap all those servers into the CRZ system with themselves and shard it until it’s stable.

That’s just my opinion though.

But of course, always exempt the RP servers. :slight_smile: We need places to make trials and steal your rare moun
 erm
 oh look a butterfly :butterfly:

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