Hey Blizzard and team.
I want to start a conversation about phasing and the roleplay community, particularly on populated RP realms like WrA-US, MG-US, and Argent Dawn-EU, when it comes to the future of the game during and after Midnight. This is particularly as pertains to Eversong Woods and Silvermoon City. I realize this is an incredibly niche concern and topic, but I wanted to get it out in the open regardless.
I don’t think it can be understated that Silvermoon City and Eversong are particularly valuable and desirable areas for the roleplaying community, especially for the Horde but now that they’re going to be neutral zones/cities in Midnight, for the Alliance as well. Silvermoon is a beloved RP destination by all, and its doors are going to be open to more players than ever before, and its revamp has shown that it is going to, without a doubt, be the most popular RP hub for Horde of all time, and probably for the Alliance as well, second only to Stormwind.
Now, obviously on roleplay servers, the majority of the time capital cities are not phased in order to encourage community interactions. But this is not always the case, in particular when it comes to current content like Dornogol. I can count the amount of times I was able to find my friends in Dornogol this expansion despite being in the same part of town on one hand, because we were phased. I understand this is a necessary evil on RP servers for current content, as the phases and layers keep these cities from being laggy and overstuffed (like Stormwind on MG-US currently is most days of the week).
This is going to already cause a lot of issues for the RP servers in Midnight, as the RP community will be totally fractured on any average day. Roleplay anchor raid groups can be helpful in this regard but not particularly satisfying or intuitive. It might be time for Blizzard to consider the ability to transfer in and out of specific phases by choice, so that roleplayers can make sure they’re on the populated phase. If a player wants to enter into a phase that is slightly more laggy just so they’re not in a ghost town or so they can see their friends, I think that’s important.
My hope is that we can call some attention to this issue, and also guarantee that once Midnight has come and gone and we’ve rolled into The Last Titan, we can see to it that an unphased Silvermoon is the norm so that the RP community can flourish in this incredibly re-imagined space.