Well no. CRZ populates the world. Servers merely create the illusion of individual communities.
They’re still players. I mean cool, they’re not buying my enchants from the AH but they still sell without the asterisk bois. I don’t care about “transients” not being able to join my guild. I can invite them into my raid if they wanna come and who knows, maybe they’ll hop on over.
But I’m rather lucky. I play Horde on Thrall. This will be one of the last servers to ever feel dead, when the game finally does die. But I expect that it’ll probably outlive me at the rate it’s still kickin’.
Anyway imho the game was much, much better when there were real server communities. Dunno if you were around in those days, but we all had a lot of fun.
Everyone knew everyone and there were consequences for bad behavior – not so with transient players you’ll never see again.
The community was much more civilized, cooperative and just plain fun.
Except it isn’t, because CRZ was implemented during Mists of Pandaria, when the game was actually at a population peak and it has remained in the game throughout WoD and Legion (which both had high numbers of players at launch).
CRZ exists because there are medium pop realms which don’t have a lot of players in them all the time. There are over 200 servers in the US region alone. Now Blizzard could have merged those servers together. Took 3-4 medium pop servers and combined them into one full server, but they’ve refused to do server merges thus far because of the damage they do to the communities of said servers.
A necessary evil to ensure that players on medium and low pop servers can have the same gameplay experience as everyone else without feeling like they need to transfer to a more populated server. Not something implemented because the game is ‘dying’.
Some fool will doubtless ask you for “proof” of this. Of course the fact that so many players have left the game that Blizzard now feels it needs to send out surveys doesn’t mean anything.
Empty servers? Don’t mean anything
Empty world except for WO and other expansion areas? Insignificant
Guilds inactive – not to worry
Friends lists dark – no problem!
Everything is perfect, unless you have proof that it’s not.
Like I said, I’ve been playing since 2005. Individual server communities or CRZ, it really doesn’t matter to me, personally.
I still see the same common trolls in trade chat, day in and day out. I see the same people chatting up in raid when we’re bored. They all seem to be from Thrall, but if they weren’t I honestly wouldn’t miss much.
Guilds have always been where I found my community. I have discords for classes and such now for communities. WoW literally has a communities feature. I’m not dying for familiar names or people to run content with.
So yeah, seeing rando214(*) in my quest space really isn’t any better than seeing rando214-thrall. The world’s alive and there are actual people around. What exactly am I missing here? The ability to send them a ginvite they probably don’t want? Getting asked for gold by a stranger? (I honestly can’t think of another reason why I’d need the ability to trade with someone I don’t know).
I guess I could longingly miss the days of knowing that someone was a ninja looter, but they couldn’t even do that now if they wanted to.
But I digress. I sure hope ESO gives you all the same-server randos you desire in your MMO.
You want to know why medium pop servers don’t always have players active all the time? There are multiple reasons. Peak times varying from server to server, faction imbalances (Area 52 for example? 90% of the server is Horde, which means that if you’re Alliance on that server? It’s going to feel a bit empty), transfers (be they free or paid) as players move from one server to another.
There’s no evidence that the game is ‘dying’ right now. As I said, present some evidence if you have it, but I won’t hold my breath, because all you have is guesswork and ‘feelings’.
people tend to be constrained by the public nature of the forums so I’m not seeing the problem with them asking for it in email. it’s a chance to be 100% honest as possible without public interference in my opinion
Sending out a survey doesn’t mean you listen. It means you sent out a survey. Now actually reading said survey and adjusting to fit the needs of the player base would be fixing it which they clearly don’t.
Your server might feel empty but that doesn’t mean that other servers are.
Friends get bored, get a life, or just stop playing for all kinds of reasons.
You’re using emotional arguments for numbers. This truly is the correct time to ask for empirical evidence. I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but I am saying that you are making statements based on perception which can vary widely from server to server.
Blizzard doesn’t allow us to take evidence because they stopped documenting subscriptions and server populations many expansions ago. Sounds like they have something to hide.