No I didn’t say you did. You did argue that PvP realms existing forces a choice on you between following your friends to a PvP realm they prefer, and staying on a PvE realm. If I’ve mischaracterized your previous argument here let me know.
However, by showing that there’s no content you’re left out of with your friends via-cross realm play (including guilds in TWW) - this argument isn’t valid. You aren’t missing out on anything, there is no significant forced choice here.
Yes, this is it in part. If RP players are sharded during RP, it breaks immersion. If this does happen, RP players can’t have spontaneous / seamless walk-up interactions with familiar realm players. This is important to RP realms.
Likewise - I’ve brought this up before - I used to play on the RP-PvP realm Emerald Dream. While RPers still played in cities, much of the unique PvP-flavored RP occurred in the open world within Emerald Dream spontaneously.
As an example: All Dwarven guilds would have pitched battles with horde rivals in the Arathi Highlands. Spontaneous PvP events in MoP occured across the map, which led to escalations between realm guilds - rivalries were developed which contributed to a rich realm identity. It was also this identity that led Emerald Dream to having one of the most (if not the most) balanced factions on US realms (possibly in the history of WoW, although I’m not sure here). Entire guilds would faction change to maintain balance.
The introduction of sharding and cross realm zones etc - the stuff of Warmode - cleaves worlds apart. It removes spontaneity, and doesn’t allow RP-PvP engagements similar to the type of RP you’d see happen spontaneously in a tavern in Stormwind on Moon Guard.
This is the type of community that PvP players no longer have in World of Warcraft, outside of Classic. And it’s a shame. Blizzard has shown they value this type of gameplay and realm identity by preventing sharding in RP realm cities, and they should extend this by allowing RP-PvP players a place to call home like they used to have.
I found a video example - here’s clan Battlehammer. To these boys’ credit, they’re still kicking it:
My argument was against those who say that PvP servers should be ‘closed off’ from cross-realm entirely or only draw from other PvP servers, which would force the argument. I don’t think we’re in contention here, as I don’t have any immediate dislike toward cross-realm aside from how sporadic it can be with regard to randoms, which I will concede is a legitimate issue for PvP communities. That, however, is not intrinsically linked to War Mode however, cross-realm, like sharding, are entirely separate problems that affect both PvE and PvP. People join groups from the ether that vanish into the blue, or gank you in War Mode to disappear into the void once cross-realm or sharding takes them away.
Sharding, as I’ve argued, is an unrelated problem to War Mode that Blizzard fixes with the backend, and would happen in PvP servers anyway once battles starting getting large enough; that big 40v40 raid battle? Cut in half when the server sends a panic and suddenly one or both sides finds themselves significantly down in personnel. Same thing happens with World Bosses and Gathering Nodes. Blizzard needs to address their server infrastructure and either lift the shard limit or spends some of Microsoft’s money to buy servers better able to handle the load.
Cross-realm is Blizzard trying to refuse the reality that they just don’t need that many servers and their unwillingness to bite the bullet and start merging. Yes, the initial bit will be messy but it needs to be done for ‘server identity’ to return. Again however, this problem is unrelated to War Mode. The expectation in ‘War Mode On’ servers would be to, well, have War Mode On and keep it on if you want to get membership in a guild or the like. Guilds, like in RP servers, would police themselves and their members to ensure compliance. Players with War Mode Off would have to fend for themselves or make their own guilds to advance on the server. So servers would slowly develop their identity as a WM On or WM Off kind of server, provided the PvP community did the work and grew their server. It’s up to the PvP community to establish buy-in with WPvP and to sell it to the game at large, this will make War Mode more populated and help reinvigorate those old rivalries.
And this is why improvements to sharding and guild self-policing War Mode status would bring it back. There is nothing about War Mode preventing players from having these massive and epic battles. If the expectation is to leave it on, there’s nothing preventing players from suddenly being thrust into dangerous situations by being unexpectedly attacked.
If you have War Mode off and attempt to attack or support a flagged target, you could get a dialog box reading ‘This action will be considered hostile by the opposing faction and will lock you into War Mode until you return to an Inn or your captial to disable it. Are you sure?’ It could even be a Ready Check if you’re in a group. You can use this to ‘join the fray’ if you see enemy players attacking friendlies. There’s still plenty of spontaneity to be had with War Mode, but the first and most critical step is the buy-in; you have to get those PvP communities to understand that War Mode is the new PvP server and that for it to grow, people need to participate in it. If everyone joins War Mode for only a little bit, sees no one’s in it, and bails, it will never grow. The PvP community needs to show up and show that WPvP isn’t dead, and that means staying in War Mode, like I would expect PvP-oriented guilds and players to do.
I mean, if we are talking about points being made, the ones that have been made repeatedly are either ‘the vibes’, the nature of cross-realm and sharding that is so disconnected from the conversation on PvP and War Mode, or just saying it should be there. Deunan does make a good point though, if they brought back PvP realms they would need to distinctly make them separate, not just drag out the old system. A lot of servers used to be PvP servers, being against the return of the PvE/PvP split for what it might cause to players on those old servers is a reasonable objection to have to it.
And there are more/other points made besides the ones you mentioned. I dont have time to go through this entire thread, but if you want to know, feel free to look
Clan Battlehammer still resides on Emerald Dream for retail side. We have to have someone from another realm invite us to server hop to find any world pvp. The lengths we have to go to in order to find world pvp is excessive. Multiple characters on other servers till we find a pocket with enough players to play against then inviting the rest of the guild to that shard. Quite time consuming really to even get things set up. See you all out there.
If you are interested, whisper one of the officers of Clan Battlehammer on Emerald Dream server on your Dwarf character for a guild invite. We are a Dwarf only guild inspired by the dwarf clan in the novels by R.A. Salvatore. There is an invite interview that has questions that are back and forth Q&A.
After playing on lone wolf in SoD for a couple months I decided to give retail war mode a try again, thinking I was too harsh on it.
Nope, it was actually worse than I remembered. I saw a few players in the isles, and after flying around for what felt like forever, tried a supply drop. A few people showed up, battled for 1 minute total, and dispersed. After that, it felt like a desert. I went back to SoD after that.
The main reason alot of people play Classic is due to the fact we can wpvp without toggling war mode on and off, the current state of PVP is a sad state in retail
I’m not a PvP player and completely agree with your view of it.
With that said, I would be interested to see if they created a single PvP server if there is enough players who like that play style to make it viable.
My personal opinion is no but we won’t know until they tried it.
If nothing else it would really put to bed the notion of whether or not pvp is dead.
But it isn’t, which is the point that it always comes back to. I’m pretty sure my server used to be a PvP server before the revamp with War Mode, and few people are ever set to it. War Mode gave them the choice to not start fresh and toggle it off, and an overwhelming majority did. Re-dividing the servers for DF or War Within won’t spontaneously generate people who want to PvP, they’d have War Mode on already.
People don’t like war mode. This thread has hundreds of comments from people saying it sucks. They don’t use war mode but they would join a pvp server.
That’s why war mode it dead. I quit using it and moved to a classic pvp server because it offers a better experience.
Even the likes on this thread show I’m not the only one who feels this way.
We are not trying to divide the servers. You guys can keep normal servers and war mode.
We want a pvp server where pvp players can gather and do something in retail with the new content, instead of always resorting to classic.
This ask would not change anyones play style at all.
Just imagine 50 normal servers with war mode, and a pvp server at the bottom with a warning message before you join it. That’s all.
ha i led that battle in that vid. King Regent Lightreaper of SoD Clan Battlehammer. good times lol. i do wish they would give us a pvp server and let us transfer to it with no warmode cause warmode has runed this for us in retail. its made doing these type of things difficult cause 90% of the population plays with warmode turned off. and the ones that have warmode on 95% of them dont pvp at all they just in warmode for the bonus. CBH has been in wow for 15 years come may and we REALLY want a pvp server without warmode. but blizz isnt going to give it to us or listen to the 10% (maybe more) that loves to pvp unfortunately. they never do. maybe one day they will give it to us but all they did was double down on the warmode after most of us pvpers complained about it. sharding dosnt help or layering whatever it is today. that screwed us even in SoD half our raid was layered and couldnt join us no matter what they did to get layered to our layer.
