If we could just get 1 PvP server

This was not remotely clear back in the day. And in any case, wanting to hold players hostage to your server isn’t going to get them to engage with you, or go out where you can gank them. It’s not going to convince a minority faction player that it’s a good idea to roll more alts for you to gank and camp. And when you whine and moan (as historically has been the case) that when they rolled on a PvP server to play with their friends when they were 12 years old, their friends who are now long gone, they were agreeing to be your victim for life, even though the message in no way even suggested any of that.

This is why PvP servers failed in the past, they failed on Classic, and they will fail again in the future if they are brought back.

That’s the difference, its opt in whenever it’s convenient for you. PvP servers were initial opt in, but you couldn’t just opt out whenever it got inconvenient unless you paid the server transfer.

The other difference is the different sharding. I’m assuming if PvP realms were added, with OPs logic atleast, there’d only be 1 shard for that PvP realm.

That’s Local Defense, not World Defense. World Defense was broken around the time cross realm and shards became a thing. Reason why it’s broken is because the game doesn’t put you in a shard until you enter the zone. It can’t tell you that Crossroads on Shard Y is under attack while you’re in Orgrimmar if it doesn’t know what shard you’ll be in when you enter it.

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A distinction without any real difference. Begging endgame players to come back to newbie zones randomly to try and stop other bored players from camping old quest hubs is a really bad gameplay loop. It interrupts the activities of players at the endgame and holds progression hostage for lowbies.

If they do it, it should have zero cross realm ability. It should also lock out the dominant faction if it gets up to 65%. You should be forced to log in with your other faction alt if you want to play. The imbalance just got nuts back in the BC, to the point that playing the game was nearly impossible on my alliance server. It was constant camping 24/7 by horde players with mental issues.

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Without enforcement of the one-faction rule on the server, this limitation is meaningless. Players just flip once they get bored enough and cause havoc with logins for whatever side they don’t want engaging.

The difference is you need to be in the zone to even be alerted that someone’s attacking. When it was broken, those on RP-PvP realms for instance never knew when a city raid was happening unless it was coordinated by the enemy faction beforehand. Let’s say Alliance on Emerald Dream RPPvP realm attacks Silvermoon, yet no one’s there to alert it. World Defense would let others know from across the in-game world that it’s under attack, such as from Orgrimmar. They could then assemble a raid team quickly and port everyone there to defend the Horde leader in Silvermoon. (This is just an example)

No one needed to beg. For those who just love WPvP, whenever a low level zone was under attack, it just sounded out the alarm that X zone was under attack. Endgame players could choose to go there if they wanted or just leave it be. :dracthyr_shrug:

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Lowbies in the zone certainly need to. I recall a camp on Crossroads so bad that someone literally spirit rezzed to run to Org to beg for help only for the Horde responders to get crushed by the Alliance squad in the area. The place basically got shut down for the entire day until they got their jollies out.

Also, channels like the Defense channel are probably the first ones players tune out; they spam your chatbox with messages so it makes sense to just ignore it however you can.

PvP servers aside, I’m talking about World Defense as a whole. The concept was great and promoted WPvP very well by letting players know where it was happening.

The even worse gameplay loop is having players go around zone to zone in War Mode trying to find players to fight when the game is actively separating players into different shards. World Defense would atleast solve that part of having to go look for PvP. It’ll just tell you where the PvP is.

Your point? People can choose to opt out of World Defense if they want similar to how players can choose to opt out of Trade Chat. Atleast the option would be there for those who want the updates.

Such a weird argument lol.

“Don’t add World Defense again because it spammed my chat log, even though those who love WPvP would love to have it.”

Opt out of it then.

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Me too, I miss getting hate whispers. They’d always make a throw away alt just to whisper me smack and log out :joy: I still have a folder of it from MOP-WOD era haha. I’d camp quest givers, I still get to do it in classic era at least :nerd_face:.

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It was most useful in letting players know where not to go; if a force is seriously attacking a town, you’re not going to do much unless you take whatever time you need to muster up your OWN group and even that’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to handle it; if you muster up a 5-person group only to run headlong into a raid, well you just wasted your own and four other peoples’ time in an unwinnable fight. Which meant that unless your questline was leading you into that zone, you had to treat it as a no-go area until the Defense channel stopped uselessly screaming.

The WorldDefense channel issue is solved by Blizzard fixing their sharding tech, not something internal to War Mode itself. Still though, I could count on two whole hands the amount of times I’d witnessed an enemy force actually responded to by friendly players, and on one hand the amount of times they actually drove back the enemy successfully.

Maybe if you weren’t a PvPer sure, otherwise it was there to let you know where the PvP was happening so that you could kill whoever the enemy was. You act as if players couldn’t just dip their head in real quick, see that there’s either a group or a raid, and determine how many players to bring based off of how many are there.

That’s certainly what I did, especially on my Hunter. Eagle eye down to Crossroads, see that there’s only 2-3 players. Okay, cool, time to bring some friends and kill them.

I know that, which is why I said PvP servers aside, I’m talking about World Defense. The easiest way to fix it is by changing how sharding works. First, lower the amount of available shards (especially in War Mode). Next, instead of sharding a player upon entering a zone, they could instead shard a player the moment they log in. This will determine what shard they’re in synced for the entire game. This will allow an outlet for World Defense to properly work.

Being invited by a player on a different shard will of course change your shard to theirs like it does now. It’ll sync you to theirs.

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Not the same. Read the many reasons players have given above

Are ppl not opting in for warmode enough? I thought it would be flourishing

dont feel like reading the entire post but if you want PvP servers go play classic they are probably never coming back to retail wow

I’m just sayin if you feel the need to say war mode is the same but other people have said above why it’s not you gotta understand why pvp players disagree with why WM is not the same

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I would love a true pvp server.

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Agree. I came from Shadowmoon, an old PvP server with a well established pvp community. People knew eachother and went out of their way to engage in pvp with big names on the server. Guilds would be like “SUP BRO” is ganking at elemental plateau, lets go mess them up! It was a good time man, warmode and open world cross realm really killed a big part of what made WoW great.

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To many people like Linqxiu that wanted to play with friends cried because their friends like pvp.

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The main disconnect you’re getting though is that you haven’t really bridged the gap between WM and PVP servers. I think Lingxiu is being more antagonistic than is required, but his assessment on the functional difference between the two is something that you don’t seem to be willing to address. Essentially, you want players who are on the server to be unable to refuse to PVP at a given time for any reason. Now I don’t have a horse in this race, and I’ve even said on this (or the warmode thread from last week) that I have no problem with PVP servers making a return for those who want them. But intentionally sidestepping the the combination that always on PVP can have some nasty side effects and social pressure to play with friends can put players into uncomfortable decisions where all their options are undesirable.

It’s disingenuous to act like his points weren’t valid about the history of PVP servers though. Most PVP servers were heavily dominated by one faction who would use that advantage to make all populated contested zones a shooting gallery. Even when high level players wanted to help, if they were outnumbered 4 to 1 they were only slightly less of a sitting duck than the level 24 characters simply trying to level. Even if that level 24 has any interest in PVP, what they were experiencing was not PVP, they had no avenue to outplay the people bullying them while trying to level. They had to rely on the high level players of their faction to stop what they were doing to help, and even then it oftentimes wasn’t enough if there weren’t enough people available/interested to help.

As I mentioned in the previous section of this reply, I do not have an issue with PVP servers coming back. But you really don’t help your cause misrepresenting their history on WoW. On day 1 when everyone is just starting and scattered throughout the world, it’s a great way to spice up the leveling experience. At 6 months when there will be a critical mass of max level characters on both factions, you can get some epic world PVP going. By year 5, small faction imbalances most servers have early on have become massive gulfs and playing the minority faction is an exercise in frustration as you constantly get murdered relentlessly until you log out because your faction simply does not the fire power to fight back. And because your friends talked you into joining them half a decade before, you now have the options of either starting over somewhere else or paying to transfer off the server (if that’s even allowed).

I agree that players shouldn’t be prevented from reliving those glory days you remember for PVP. Players in 2024 have a lot of history with which to draw from to figure out whether they might want the PVP server experience. But players looking to get back into WoW in 2012 after having made their toon in 2004 on a PVP server and took a break in 2007 had little way to predict what their server would become if they happened to select the “wrong” faction nearly a decade prior.

being one side dominate isn’t just a pvp problem people go where they can with their faction.

take moonguard its heavily skewed alliance for rp and wyrmnest is heavily skewed horde, which meant if you wanted to rp and do raids those servers were your primary choice.

No one here ever said trolls didn’t gank.

That sucks but you joined to play with your friends, and they could still be having fun while you’re miserable.

People have said they would be okay if blizz did to the new pvp server what they did for SoD and balance the player base as best they can. As for dismissing Lin’s point the player said somewhere up above, they would be happier if there was no pvp at all so their point is means nothing when people were willing to compromise.