With server reputation no longer mattering when you can just buy a server transfer if it gets too tarnished.
With battlegrounds being cross-server.
With an entire WOTLK zone being made cross-server.
With World Tour groups whose sole purpose is to avoid using the new manual dungeon finder tool as much as possible.
With a 70 Boost causing seemingly new players to just randomly appear in the community en-masse.
With Deathknights being allowed to be created on any server community you aren’t already a part of.
With Megaservers existing where you never group with the same stranger twice or see them ever again.
With years of no Blizzcon where people from the same server meet up with friends and guildies from around the world for the first time?
With all the alleged automated warnings and bans going out for talking offtopic in Tradechat or LFG where community topics, feels, gossip, prominent server characters, and friendly advice all once shined like gems through the occasional nonsense?
Despite all of this, does a meaningful sense of Server Identity, Culture, or Community still exist on your realm? Or do you feel the community has more become generalized as being the entire WOTLK playerbase regardless of server?
No lmao. More than half the servers are quarter population DK bots while the other quarter RMTs from those bots and the remaining half remain clueless gatekeeping each other out of dungeons/raids because of gearscore and raidlogging until the next tier comes out.
Classic is every man for himself, the days of 2019-2020 vanilla small server identities have all but died out.
Yep its very different nowadays at least on Arugal-OCE servers.
We use to have verified crafters that worked hard to become one of the few people crafting specific gear (lionheart helm) and a bunch of guilds would share a massive discord to verify trusted crafters/server blacklist entire guilds/players for bad behavior.
Maybe it still goes on in wotlk but not from what I’ve seen so far.
I’ve seen a total of 1 time in trade/lfg chat of someone calling someone else out for ninja looting and then the entire chat laughing at them.
Far less personal accountability which is the whole point of locking servers from eachother but atm it doesn’t feel any different than cross server as bad behaviors never get punished.
Outside of Grobbulus no. They’re all just amalgamations of other servers. Even grobbulus is mostly just a bunch of xfers from other servers. It’s just people in their own friend/guild groups mostly. Server identity has been a meme for years.
Why do people keep saying this as if bgs havent been cross realm since literally the original 1.12?
But no, layers and megaservers killed server identity. Layers basically make every server a mini set of linked cross realms, since you never know which random set of people you’re gonna be assigned to play with today
I think there are still server identities and server communities but they are very much in pockets on the biggest servers so not the same thing.
Although I’ll agree with the above post in that Grobbulus does still have some sense of identity and that’s because enough of the players there want that.
I think that the smaller servers can/do still have real community and identity.
Wintergrasp is just a battleground now, not really a “cross-realm zone”. The zone itself is not CRZ when not a battleground so it’s not accurate to call it that.
World tours you can still meet people and click when you’re doing that many dungeons back to back (world tour). With the daily heroics and whatnot, maybe not quite so much. When grinding to 80 with my tank friend and me as a healer I grouped with the same guy two days in a row because we recognized his name in the group finder. This was on Faerlina so that kind of stuff is still possible.
Anyway, I’ve seen your other posts and I think I know what you’re doing. I could write a really long post about server community things but it’s mostly pointless given the current environment of this forum. All I know is I left Retail because there was zero server community or any community at all really. Finding even a guild of like-minded actually nice and good-quality people is nearly impossible to even on the RP servers (although if I wanted to find highly judgemental, egotistical, and verbally abusive jerks I probably could there but that’s not my style) so that game hasn’t held my interest for a while. If there is no community the game has no soul so I’ll get bored. I’ve found what I want in Classic, even in Wrath. There’s not really a point in fighting that’s my opinion on it.
Remember when everyone was outraged over layers, and they finally got rid of them in phase 2, only to sneak them back in as a permanent thing after tbc launch?
Really cool experience I just had with layers to add to the list
Port to IF, Fly over, Wait by stone, 2nd guy shows up and we can’t summon because funny layers, 2nd guy leaves instead of waiting for someone else to fly from IF