Go play retail then - where there is zero community. Youre here for some reason. Why? Know why Im not in the retail forums - because retail is garbage.
Its interesting that you come here to troll but thats what a butthurt DH does, it seems.
Maybe you can check that LFG channel in retail for some boosting in Mythic+ and high end PvP - make sure you bring lots of RMT tokens.
What a joke.
oh come on I donât know anyone from my retail server(s) the best friends I made from the game are guildies or some random guys I jelled with in random BGs. itâs just a fog of random names and classic can be like that too but I did like some parts of it facilitating interacting with other members of your realm especially the AQ event. people from my realm are still saying âmayoâ in-joke in general chat because of the collective insanity the realm was facing during the event that is awesome and something about leveling facilitates it too in Shadowlands leveling I paid attention to no one. maybe this is not the case for everyone
Disregarding all the BS going on at the moment we need to understand and realize the elephant in the room:
They took $25 per character from us for over a year, sometimes multiple times per characters, because they REFUSED TO DO ANYTHING about the server issues.
IT BLOWS MY MIND SERVER TRANSFERS COST ANY AMOUNT OF MONEY AT ALL IN THIS CURRENT ENVIORMENT. LIKE HOW? WHY??? WHERE DOES THAT MONEY EVEN GO???
It makes me beyond angry seeing this game that I love be completely disregarded. Why does blizzard not have customer service agents anymore? How small is this dev time? WHAT IS GOING ON?
Nost limited vision range to like 50 yards. This allowed them to do what they needed to do but it led to a really weird gameplay experience. They also only had, at best, ~70% of the online benediction player count (not including the queue) online at any one moment. I believe nost peaked around ~14k but quickly fell to around 11k average. Bene caps at 15k.
I agree. Even if they wanted to say they need to charge for it to cover costs we arenât seeing any results from those profits, same with the criminally overpriced upgrade packs TBCC and Wrath have now had.
They could have at the very least allowed a one or two free character per server transfer per month or even every three months, at least to cover time frames people might take breaks for and server populations dip.
Instead they waited, said nothing, and crapped the bed.
Yeah, and limiting draw distance wasnât the only thing they did. Here is the relevant section of the Nostalrius post-mortem document released by their team:
Their hardware capped out at 10,000 before they were required to make gameplay compromises.
Do note that this was running with the original vanilla client, so a lot of it was totally custom solutions that were incredible for what they were working with. (Not to mention they worked for free)
Classic/retail has many more options due to the modern backend.
Truthhhhhhhhhhh! Well written
Maybe keeping RDF was a good idea after all. The FOMO for dungeon groups in Wrath exacerbated the issue exponentially.
20,000 of us literally paid for this. But it is Blizzards fault. We had no idea we would have queues. Itâs never happened before.
RDF, Cross-servers, Warmode.
All of these are a recipe of getting the hell out of the mess weâre in.
People should not be playing musical chairs with these servers anymore.
Youâre also getting these weird, small indie company goof ups such as events releasing randomly, the EXP buff was released randomly. Bunch of interns just got hired and they have no idea what to do. Itâs so embarrassingly bad.
I suggest Brian head over to Japan and talk to Naoki Yoshida, the Dev of FFXIV and get some pointers. To save you the trip actually, heâs doing what you guys did 15 years ago and is why XIV is popular as it is: Care about his players and the game. Something Blizzard lost feeling for long ago.
Cross server functions has shown that people will act differently when faced with a group of random randies from other servers. The anonymity along with the likelihood youâll never see the people in your group again in Retail wow has mixed results with how some people act towards others.
RDF would be an upgrade over the current LFG finder in WOTLK classic if it stayed local to your server although this wouldnât resolve woes on smaller/imbalanced servers that have been an issue all classic.
Allowing mass transfers to a single server with no restrictions has caused a significant portion of the issue given few guilds on 1 faction leave for the mega server then it starts a slow cascade of guilds transferring.
Incentives to be on the underdog faction such as exp bonuses would definitely help urge players onto certain servers to spread them out. This would need to be done in a way that pushes them to stay on said server/faction instead of just transferring after hitting max level so further incentives would be needed in other areas. Would have to be done in a way that doesnât cause dramatic issues with the economy or allowing faster progression of raids/content.
I mean I just ask⌠why do people flood onto 2-4 realms per region?
The biggest things are probably access and time to access. On a big realm it can be 8am, noon, 5pm, 10pm, 2am and you can probably make a group. Probably can find a raid team. Probably can get into a GDKP. Probably can find a arena team. On smaller realms you are stuck mostly in prime time or with niche groups of people that play off it. Not ideal.
Cross realm really solves this. If you could get a 5 man 24/7 on any server because of it. You can get into a raid anywhere 24/7. You could do arena with anyone at anytime on your faction 24/7. These things really do work because we see them in action starting from Classic. BGs are always going. Always functioning. Always available. Because they are automated groups that pull from a cross server resource pool.
Now will I say something like RDF or cross realm raiding hurt some community aspects a bit? Yeah, I think it is fair to say something was lost when that happened. But it certainly didnât lead to 7 hour ques to even be able to engage with the community. It didnât lead to what is probably thousands of players remote viewing/accessing their computers to log in hours early or stay logged in all day so they could actually play. These things too damage the community.
So the weight of the question is take some damage to community by cross realm and making these things never happen again. Or knife the community every patch and expansion release because people are to stubborn to go with the obvious solution to the problem. Because the truth is just being able to play the game is a LOT more important then some philosophy of being pro/against something like RDF. Without being able to play the game both those sides dynamically die in a que line. Which is bad.
Being able to play the game and enjoy the game should always, absolutely, be above those things and we are seeing right now why. I think this was a lesson Blizzard already learned in the past, but for some reason thought was just going to be different this time. Or maybe just were smug enough to think they could out chess the reality of the situation.
In either case⌠put down the koolaid of what you think and believe and focus on the only thing that matters⌠let us play the game⌠if the technology âdoesnât existâ to let these server sizes exist (which I think is a little misleading) then do what it takes to let people have a good game experience WITHOUT having to all be on the same realms.
Its that simple.
Hardware isnât the issue, unless they are trying to run their own servers and not utilizing services like AWS, Azure or Googleâs services. If it truly is a software issue, then no amount of hardware will change the limitations of the software unless that software is totally re-written to remove the current limitations. Software wise they have a solution, but people donât want the solution because it involves say âretailâ, and sharding is incredibly unpopular. 
My issue is they just arenât telling us the whole story. What have they tried? What is even possible? What options do they have?
Fact is they make money from people transferring servers; and to fix that problem would cost money, and they would lose money by not charging people to transfer.
Just be honest, bring up the details of cross realm cost, time frame limitations. Itâs 2022 the idea that I pay $15 a month to play with a small fraction of a player base when the technology exists for me to group up with anyone is depressing.
This post is like godly. Because I agree completely. Did RDF and other cross realm things put a ding into the âsoulâ of the game? Yeah I can agree with that. But being able to play the game feels like a lot more important factor in the whole situation. Even if its at the cost of a very slightly diminished âsoulâ of the game.
Personally, just sounds like another player who thinks they know, but knows that they donât actually know, but then doubles down and says that they know.
They donât.
Iâm inclined to believe the blue text.
I think its also fair to say what your base your belief in the blues on is just about the same. You think you know, but knows they donât actually know, but then doubles down on saying they know the blues are right.
That is why I usually avoid this kind of logic.
Would that not be the WotLK experience though? It is when we got our first microtransaction in the gameâŚ
Iâve played original Vanilla to Shadowlands non-stop and I couldnâtâ agree with you more that Classic has felt like a cash milking side project in its implementation. As a matter of fact, this entire game including retail has begun to feel like a cash milking side project on the whole.
Server management, customer service, and their atrocious reporting system has been really disappointing to see but itâs 2022 and Blizzard Activisionâs integrity has long since been questioned.
I think when Classic came out there was some passion behind it.
Unfortunately it was so popular that the Suits immediately had $ in their eyes, and it transformed from a faithful recreation of how the game was once, to just a milking machine to get players to buy micro-transactions. Itâs gotten so out of control now, itâs just sad.
So little time and resources invested in the project. But hey, the boost sure works great. And the deluxe edition. And the Retail rewards linked to it. And server transfers. And soon to be name change, race change, faction change services.
That is now the only reason Classic exists.