Cross-realm guilds are certainly a fantastic change. The role-playing community at large can benefit from this if handled correctly. Like, now Alliance MG can link up a lot easier with Horde WRA. If you’re a WRA Alliance player suffering from the lack of Stormwind public RP you can join a MG Alliance guild and join a friends party to phase over to MG SW.
That said, there are still some hurdles. Elixir of Tongues are still necessary to use /s, /e, and /y for roleplay cross-faction. Party and raid chats can be used instead, but still… And MG and WRA are still cross-realm so they naturally wont see each other in the same phase of SW. Group play will be required.
Merging was something brought up in the recent post-BlizzCon Q&A. If it ever does happen we’ll all have to accept the fact that everyone is gonna lose their character names and guild names by force. A free-for-all race will likely emerge to claim them all afterward. Messy stuff.
I’ve no clue who they are, so by my account they’re not as prominent as they might think they are. Heads in the clouds.
The only dramatic thing I can think of right now is a MG guild advertising on WRA’s forums “poaching” people, or the other way around.
Actually in another game called Perfect World International, my home server Harshlands merged with the Russian server of Morai to become Dawnglory and nothing was actually lost. No one lost their character names nor did the guild names lose their names. They just moved the servers over.
That would only happen say if there was a Rainaa on this server and a Rainaa on WRA existed. Which I don’t think is all that likely.
ESO now has what’s called a “megaserver” which means no realms, you just get sorted into shards according to your friends and people with whom you’re grouped. ESO has players choose a last and first name, so that alleviates a lot of the issues related to that subject. It all sounds great in theory, but in reality I find their megaserver to be very laggy. For this reason I hope like heck we don’t end up with something similar in WoW someday.
This, I’m renown as a bard for example, most people who are on MG in SW enough probably see me around and kinda know me by name. Also welcome to MG, want some folks to show ya around?
The “prominent personalities” are pretty much just insular groups of people that are squirreled away in discords who don’t interact with the larger community except to maybe throw a public event or two which are mostly attended by those in that community. Sometimes new people find their way into those communities and assume it’s how the sever operates on a whole. But you’d be hard pressed to see people not involved recognize any of the “big names”.
Though, there are also some people who are active and/or consistent enough in their rp habits that they become familiar to anyone who has the same playtimes.
In my experience, over several months on MG, and coming back to WoW after a rather lengthy hiatus, I really wasn’t sure what to expect from MG. Especially after 7+ years on my old realm. Fortunately, I really haven’t seen any “prominent” personalities or wandered into any of those insular individuals and their gated discord communities. All of my experience has been in game and people on MG are second to none. It’s been a pretty enjoyable ride so far.
And MG and WRA are still cross-realm so they naturally wont see each other in the same phase of SW. Group play will be required.
Heads in the clouds.