I saw the WCC (Wow Community Council) thread discussing Burning Crusade Classic server population. As a non member of WCC, I couldn’t post anything on their thread. So here it goes…
In low populated realms, a lot of players mostly complained about not being able to find groups for Dungeons and Raids. Even a few guilds or pugs trying to fill the gaps in their raid is not working very well.
Cross-Server Dungeons and Raids
When people are questing they either quest alone, with a friend, or a guild. The size of the server will not matter. This will benefit more low population servers because they do not have to look for a specific group who can tank and heal. When players feel like they are ready to run a dungeon and having a hard time finding a group due to low populated realms, they should be able to search groups across servers like what they have for battlegrounds. Battlegrounds already put you in a queue and teleport you to the battleground of your choice. I wouldn’t even mind having to run all the way to the dungeon or raid, click at something to interact (like a summoning stone), select my spec, and queue myself to find groups for that specific instance. Similar in retail, where you can queue up and select your spec and get ported to a dungeon or raid. You can select the instances you can enter based on your item level. For Classic, instead of relying only on item levels, they should add other requirements. These requirements could be the minimum amount of consumes you can bring (food buffs, potions, flasks, elixirs, and weapons enhancements), limited amount of class can enter, class priorities, and/or attunements etc.This can also work queuing up as a raid or group and can select the same requirements as solo queue. Still seems like going to modern wow than classic you say?
There’s another alternative.
Cross-Realm Travel
It is basically like in modern WOW where you get to talk to Chromie to enter previous expansions or vanilla. Instead of choosing an expansion to travel to, create a place or add in an option to select or enable to travel forth to a cross-realm population, then back at your original server. The idea is to have the players get a choice to visit cross-realms where they don’t have too much struggle on finding raids and dungeons, and will be similar to modern wow where their interactions are limited. They will also be able to create a cross-realm arena team; a team can only group up and queue together while they are in cross-realm or in their own realm. A character can also be tied to two guilds, one in server and another in cross-realm, but only one guild can be active depending on where they are at. If a player is too overwhelmed with the mass population, they can safely return back to their small hometown, where they can quest in peace.
But how will loot affect both of these?
You can have two to three players queuing in raid, and ninja looting
- This can be avoided by a restricted raid queue if players have less than 10 in raids, and if one leaves, they will be instantly removed from the queue.
Guild or Server bias loot distribution
- Similar to your local server, where Guilds have everyone roll for an item that one of their members can use, allowing them to have advantage of winning. This is just the caveats of not having a guild. This happens to a lot of players including me.
- In pugs, you somewhat trust the player who is raid leading and master looting. Have the same opinion about the players in Cross-Realm servers.
What about the economy?
Someone out there probably has a better Idea than me, but to add my perspective, cross-realm auctions may be possible. This sounds like we’re probably looking more into turning a bit more retail which can be discussed in another topic, or feel free to pitch in your ideas.
I hope this is something they will consider. We all know, no matter how they try to fix things, there’s always going to be an issue, that is why this is probably a non-stop discussion for future classics to come. Who knows, this may be applicable on SOM (Season of Mastery). It’s always fun to theorize ideas and all that good stuff. Thank you players of WOW!