Warbands are cool. That’s not a problem. QoL is good.
Favorites are cool. Neat little character select flavor.
But I don’t want to see ALL of my characters in one big sprawling list.
I literally have characters on different realms as a form of organization.
I have spent money to clean up my list in that way.
Now, Warbands have forced it to be disorganized again despite the realm differences.
And, while I don’t have this particular problem, I know people who have duplicates of the same character (name, race, class) on different realms. Now they have essentially the same character listed 4 times in a row on character select.
It’s obnoxious, and there needs to be a way to organize better if they’re going to force consolidation like this on us.
Either have the characters sorted by realm (which can be minimized), or allow us to create additional “groups” (ala Favorites, but without altering the background like Favorites do) to sort characters into (which can be minimized).
It’s a superficial thing, but I hate my character select screen now because of this.
Moving characters up and down the list is NOT good enough.
Edit:
There’s also this little gem:
Clearly, lumping everything together like this isn’t the most ideal thing.
At least let us clean it up, since I doubt separating it back out completely is on the table.
Just added it to the OP, but it doesn’t even automate the realm-switching process for everything. It does for logging in, thankfully, but if you want to use the Gear Update function, you have to manually go change Realms still.
I also have my many characters purposedly sorted by realm, and I also had them listed in a particular order on the login screen for each realm based on what game content they had completed (bank alt > realm main > realm sub-mains > lesser played alts, etc.). It sounds like this new “feature” of having them lumped all together will ruin all of that, and I’ll have to keep track of any character specifics in a separate file.
100% This is a MUST!! I have all my alliance on one realm, my horde on another and my son has some toons on another that he plays maybe once every 2 years. Now they are all together in no particular order. They aren’t even sorted by last toon played. That would at least be something. This makes zero sense.
I do tend to have characters with the same names across realms.
To summarize:
Allow us some sort of automatic grouping by realms AND a way to see the realm a character is on by either implementing headers or some indication on the character themselves that doesn’t require mousing over them.
Fix the access to addons, put the button directly back on the character select screen AND ideally allow us to select by realm. Also implement proper scrolling for the drop-down menu to support those of us with more than 45 characters.
I’d prefer we have an option to enable headers and grouping by realm so if they HAVE to force it into a big list (why, why, why, why?) at least let us make it organized by checking an option so it’ll in-line in the list say like “Moon Guard” and then my Moon Guard characters beneath it and so on with other realms and let us drag these around obviously to stick one on top.
At the very least they need an indicator that doesn’t require mousing over the character to know what realm it’s on (like a 2-3 character shortcode for server name that players actually would recognize like MG for Moon Guard, WrA for Wyrmrest Accord, Tic for Tichondrius).
This has been a basic fact of WoW since the beginning, the realm separated character lists and they just rip it away. If they want to do away with realms entirely as a concept and merge things into a mega-server or two then fine but do so at the same time you make these UI changes, don’t confuse things. AS LONG AS REALMS ARE SEPARATE in that I can’t mail whatever I want between them, people can’t interact without groups, and so on I want separation.
This has completely broken addon management per realm as well. Used to be you could click the addons button and choose to enable or disable all addons and that was per realm. Why would that matter you may ask. Well there are still RP and non-RP realms and as someone who RPs I want my RP characters to all have RP addons but characters on non-RP realms have no reason to have them.
Addons no longer have a button on the main screen. Whose idea was this? Now they’re hidden in the menu button (another click) and the drop-down menu to select characters in addition to being unable to select all characters on a realm at once (only all characters and one at a time) doesn’t scroll right for those with tons of characters. I have to click a character at the extreme top or bottom of the list to go up or down, close the drop-down menu, open it again and then continue on this way to get to the bottom (or if at the bottom) the top of my long list. THIS IS BAD DESIGN. Who thought this was an improvement? Unacceptable loss of functionality (much like how they stole guild permission granularity years ago and still haven’t given it back).
I’m also annoyed they completely randomized my character ordering. I had characters in the order I created them intentionally. I wish they would just give us a command we could run in-game like /charinfo that would tell us "Created on date xx-xx-xxxx) or something but they don’t so that was my only way of knowing approximately the dates and order my over 45 characters were created in. Luckily I have screenshots of my character select screens so I can more or less fix this ordering but many others don’t.
OH MY GOSH… just logged in and now have Warbands. I have the same problem. I have toons on specific realms that I play with specific people. This is a mess. As an alcoholic, I have a TON of toons to sort through now. I don’t remember what toons were on what realm. I have 60. There needs to be a “Sort By Realm” option with headers showing the Realms. Thanks
Hehehehehe, I have 30 max level characters across 3 servers. When I still had low level characters it was super easy to do as you and arrange by level. Now I just have the giant list. It hurts my brain.
Blizz, want real brownie points for turning a negative into a positive? I’m so used to disappointment and “toughen up buttercup” rhetoric from you that I don’t even expect my minor proposed improvements or anything like them to ever come to fruition.
If however you’re actually listening. Instead of just static headers per realm with realm names, why not allow players to create their own custom headers with whatever text they want and group characters under them? So for example if someone wanted to create one that just says “Rogues” they could do that. One that says “Gladiators” and put their glads under that? They could do that. One that says “Progression” for their progression raid team toons they could do that. One that says “Retired Toons” and they could do that. And so on.
Create new char name: HeaderNameOne. Log out. Drag to correct position. Create new char name: HeaderNameTwo. Log out. Drag to correct position. Group real chars accordingly.
There was absolutely zero reason to change the character screen. 99.5% of my playing is on one realm.
I originally bought the game for my son, and I started playing when he quit. Several of the servers that my account has characters on, only has his characters from 25 years ago. I don’t delete them because he enjoys the occassional reminiscing, but I really don’t want a couple dozen sub-level 10 characters clogging up my list.
Yeah this is crazy. Needs a bit more organizational tools as OP mentioned, or a way to swap to the old view. Is there a way to just swap to ‘realm view’?
I figured I’d just replicate the order I had per realm but in a giant list and when I log back in, the 4 I moved out of the ‘favorites’ section are back in there
I have multiple characters (64 just 1 under cap) on multiple servers with the same name, searching by server doesn’t do anything, selecting realm doesn’t show you the characters on that realm…
so now if i want to find a character i have to scroll through 64 of the same names while hovering to find the server i want to join
this is bad design i hope they fix it so at least you can search by realm name
Doesn’t seem to be. Seems like they consolidated it for the sake of being able to put any character from any realm into the “favorites” slots, and having a realm-specific view would mess with that.
That’s why I mentioned assuming separating things back out wasn’t on the table.
I assume they also did it just to hammer home that this is an account wide thing, thematically?
Organizational tools definitely should be on the table though.
I think I’ve created a nightmare for myself. Idk exactly yet as I haven’t logged in yet.