I’m not against a merge, but this isn’t a merge. It’s a connection.
It matters because of a few things:
The Pros
You can trade
You can guild
You can group
You can pool together the economies for a more vibrant AH
We have guild members from each of the realms in our connected group, so obviously, that part is nice. Our tiny server shares with the others, so our Auction House moves pretty functionally, and that is also nice.
The Cons
You must type in the full name (character - realm name) of anyone you wish to address or invite ingame.
You can easily mail something to the wrong person by accident, and these are difficult to discern unless you know which server someone is from.
You will more often than not be sharded differently than guildies from different realms. This means if you want to meet up with a guildie in the bank, you will have to group together first…almost every time. The guild members who are on Thunderlord with me do not have this issue and we see each other in the city routinely, but everyone from the connected realms must be grouped, or we’re not gonna see each other.
Connections (as opposed to merges) do nothing toward “community.” Merges, on the other hand, would. CRZ already fills the world with people from outside of our connection group. We see Tichondrius players all the time, even though we’re not connected to Tich. So, this isn’t going to magically make the community different, better, or more familiar. It will fix the economy and it will allow people to guild with a larger group of people. That’s good…but it isn’t a merge, and it isn’t going to make the community more vibrant or polite or familiar.
Probably a vocal minority type of thing. The average player will welcome having cheaper items and more potential guilds to do things with. The only people I can see having any reason to be upset about connections are the types who domineer over the auction house and don’t want any competition. They are the only ones who stand to lose anything from realm connections.
I’m someone who plays on an already-connected server and sees how inferior connections are to merges.
I’m not “upset” that they’re connecting realms. I’m disappointed that they’ve chosen to continue that route rather than merging, which is a hope I’ve held onto since they announced Classic. It’s a dead hope, now, obviously, and that’s why I’m experiencing feelz about it.
In the long run…it’s whatever. But merging is not connecting and connecting is not merging.
I see your point and that all makes sense. I think part of the reason that they avoid it is so that people don’t have to fight over naming. Other than adding a last name to characters (which I feel like is probably something horrible hard coded deep in the game, similar to the backpack issue in the pack) are there other solutions you see to avoid losing character or guild names from a merge?
No, and I think that really is a huge part of it. It would be a loss/reset of naming. I don’t see how it could be accomplished without that, and I’m sure that’s a huge part of not choosing merges.
This thread is about connecting servers. They aren’t going to take servers that are predominately of a different language and pair them together, that would cause nothing but problems.
I’m hoping Ravenholdt is merged with Emerald Dream. They are in same battle group, so it only makes sense. It would be nice to have my horde and alliance on same connection.
I love connecting realms, don’t really see how a merger would be better in any way, and don’t like seeing people from unconnected realms. Stumbled over a returning player the other day, helped him out with quests, could group with him just fine but when I tried to mail him some waterwalkers…
As to names, I vastly prefer having to type the name and hit dash to bring up the realm names than to attempt to type special characters because someone couldn’t simply switch servers to get their name.
If you want to search for old rares, like TLPD and Aeonaxx, or look for rare hunter pets, better do it now before these things happen. They could be a thing of the past after these changes are made!
Please connect Moonrunner/Gnomeregan with MANY more servers!
Just doubling the size of my realm isn’t going to get me back for Shadowlands- every realm NEEDS at least a population (according to WowProgress) of 5,000 Horde AND 5,000 Alliance. Otherwise the economy is going to be garbage, the ability to do anything outside of cross-realm pugging is going to be garbage, and the general MMO experience of successfully doing hard things with other people you meet and get to know is going to be nearly impossible to enjoy without an extreme amount of work.
My guild got realm first Heroic N’Zoth nearly 2 months after release. It literally has the lowest Horde population in WOW and it’s not close. This past tier, there were a total of 1,201 people who showed up on Wowprogress from both factions and 153 Horde. There were a total of 29 guilds that qualified for even a normal kill, and only 16 that killed even a single boss in heroic. Only 17 guilds completed normal Ny’alotha. On the highest population Horde server Area 52, 267 guilds had at least one mythic kill, and almost 400 cleared heroic.
We have long been decrying the loss of all the benefits of being on a small server with none of the benefits of being on a large one because of realm coalescing. The problem with WOW for me is that there’s nobody left to play with but somehow going back and farming everything I missed out on is unbelievably crowded, and why would I spend hundreds of dollars more to realm and race transfer my favorite characters when I could just quit and save the headache of making new friends? My sub runs out in a couple months, and I’m probably not buying Shadowlands or continuing my sub, and the complete lack of interest in supporting 95% of the population’s needs and instead tuning raids for people who do 20 split runs in week one for the world first race that makes it impossible to casually run with nice people while making any kind of reasonable progress.
It’s a different topic for a different place, but a gradually increasing item level cap so the world first guilds can’t just immediately outgear any raid would fix pretty much everything about raid tuning- the code exists and it’s such an easy fix that would also remove the need for so many split raids completely and open up the world first race to more than just a handful of Europeans with too much time on their hands because they actually get paid vacation time. They’re not undergeared, they’re grossly overgeared and tuning the raids to be super difficult for professionals getting 30 weeks worth of gear in a week and a half creates a situation where normal, well-run guilds with skilled players barely have a chance at clearing mythic in less than six months.
It’s nice to see this finally happening. But you guys took waaaaaaaaaaaay too long(like, really) to do this. Should have been done at the end of Legion.
@Blizzard,
Does this mean the forced aspect of CRZ will be going away? Really hate seeing just a bunch of randoms from other servers for no damn reason.