So I started mid TBC and from that point until halfway through WotLK your reputation on your server really mattered. If you (seriously) ninja looted people would start to avoid your raids. If you played exceptionally as DPS, especially in TBC using CC, you would get added to friend lists and invites for people’s daily heroics.
While LFG and LFR have made it much easier to grab a group it has almost entirely killed that part of WoW and at the same time made it much easier on toxic cheats or robbers to escape repercussions.
So, it obviously didn’t kill WoW as that was ages ago, but do you think cross realm grouping significantly hurt WoW? Or am I rose colored glasses remembering TBC?
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Well, perhaps your server was all that. Mine, it was the “bad boys” who benefited from “server rep”.
I do miss seeing the same players in BGs, however. That was fun.
Still, I don’t miss hour long queues, or being locked away from friends that rolled on a different server.
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I don’t think that anything harmed this game more than losing individual server communities.
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As I recall it was at first limited to your battle group. It has had a serious effect on the social aspects of WoW.
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This is all the more reason why we need a WoW 2.0.
The lore is in sore need of a reboot and the current engine necessitates MMO killing mechanics like CRZ/Sharding - which have killed server identity/community entirely.
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My server never lost its reputation.
Roleplay servers will always have a server community since it’s hard to facilitate things x-realm for anything substansial. And, we’re really limited in terms of how many active rp servers there are anyways, so crossover doesn’t dilute reputations.
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I miss having rivals in BGs and each server feeling like a community of sorts. It’s probably better the way it is now but definitely lost something.
I mean, this 100% still happens. People add good players from their pugs to build a catalog of good players to recruit from for future runs.
Anyway, I don’t miss server rep specifically so much as I miss competing in a smaller sphere of influence.
My goals feel a lot more arbitrary in the context of “the whole world” than they did when compared to what people were doing on my server before xrealm-everything took over.
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It was nice while it was a thing but I don’t really miss it I guess. Maybe I just remember sitting there asking for more for non-max level instances for hours with a little bitterness.
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This is so wrong.
Emerald Dream RP-PVP was a healthy server up till WoD, when CRZ and Sharding really started taking a toll. All the off-server non-RPers came zerging all of our RP-PVP events, and were drawn here by the fact that we had a healthy and balanced WPVP scene which was due entirely to it being fueled by RP/Community standards of self-regulation.
Warmode was the final nail in the coffin that homogenised all realms.
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I remember having a pretty steady Tuesday night Kara pug and regular Friday night gruul/mag lair that we did basically every week with 80% the same crew. Not being in a guild but still having that to look forward to was so fun
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Rose-colored glasses smeared with some unidentifiable opaque substance.
“Server rep” in the way people like to describe it is a myth. You may have blacklisted a bad player. Your close friends may have blacklisted a bad player. But then you have hundreds to thousands more players on your server who didn’t know or didn’t care about the bad player’s reputation so they continued to get groups just fine anyway. Sheer numbers kept these “bad” players from ever suffering meaningful consequences–and even if they did feel the squeeze, they were a name change away from starting fresh.
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Guess it sucks to be Emerald Dream, but the pure RP-only normal servers never lost their steam from Sharding, CRZ, etc. Any open world zone that isn’t current content - is not sharded on RP servers. It’s actually pretty rad.
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No. Server rep was a bad thing because you could EASILY be a victim of someone who didn’t like you so they would give you the worst rep possible when they themselves were the person that needed the bad server rep.
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It was the dagger in the heart of the game. The rest of the time it has just been bleeding out.
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Yeah. Was good for the ol’ ego.
Yeah, that is not how I remember it.
At all.
I remember people being ostracized so bad that they would get name changes because theirs had been run into the ground for their actions or they would transfer servers because their negativity caused them to be pushed to the side.
I loved that.
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That’s not true. On our server, there were only a handful of endgame guilds, and we all basically knew each other. The active community on any given server wasn’t much bigger than a high school. And name changes weren’t always a thing, I’m pretty sure.
When I started back in EQ then EQ2 and finally WoW, if you got a bad reputation it black listed you from everything. Even if you named changed and we found out the word was spread about the new name. Rivalry between factions was awesome in battlegrounds because you ran into the same people over and over.
When they introduced cross-realm that’s when it became harder to police people through the community. Haven’t played EQ in a long time but I think you build your reputation on your server and not much cross-realm especially if on a time-locked server.
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Yeah, I remember the EQ days. It really did pay to have a good reputation. If you were hated on your server then your character was worse than dead. You were ostracised and isolated. You probably weren’t going to be invited into another guild, you weren’t going to raid, or run dungeons. You were just done. The nice thing about EQ was that people were friendlier on average and that was the community standard. As opposed to WoW’s standard of equal parts friendly and jerk. Dungeon instances weren’t really a thing in EQ. You had your whole server crammed into a handful of megadungeon zones. So while there was less drama on average, if it happened? the whole server was going to find out who pulled Trakanon through three or four raid groups in Sebilis (for example).
I also remember one Ogre Warrior on my server that was ebayed about half a dozen times. LOL.
In WoW? It seems like there’s almost a competition to see who can pull off the biggest d*ck move and not have it affect them in the long term. Or who can say the cruelest thing and not be banned, or who can pull off the best troll.
Different Times, Different Attitudes I guess.
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