Good God, that would surely be utter chaos. You’d have to expand the chat log and be a speedreading god to actually keep track of all that stuff going in there.
I should know, because in a full plain text RP environment, there’s a certain event once per year that I sometimes attend, and there’s 25-30 people there, and it is almost impossible to keep track of everybody’s messages without using highlighters.
EDIT: I’ve also noticed that when going through SWC at times, even with the chat channels turned off, the /say and /emote spam gets ridiculous at times. Like, your chat log fills with 10-15 messages within 2-3 seconds at times just going from the mage tower to the market area…
Down with sharding and crossrealm altogether IMO. It’s nothing but trouble on regular servers too, causing the day-night cycle to change depending on which shard you get thrown into, causing players and nodes to phase in and out, and practically guaranteeing you’ll never stumble across the same players in the open world twice, and that doesn’t even get into the downsides of crossrealm like inability to trade.
It’s time to link all the servers down into just a handful of logical servers and disable sharding. If a particular server group ends up getting too crowded, turn on Classic-style layering instead of sharding so at least you stay in the same continent-wide layer the entire time you’re there instead of getting flung around between shards like a pinball.
I’m not an RPer but that shuts out or at least complicates things for players on lower leveled characters (of which there are a disproportionate number in the RP community), plus expansion cities aren’t as neutral which restricts the types of RP that makes sense in those locations.
But… it is themed. “Medieval Human City”. While I myself even enjoy medieval settings, I would have to admit that I’d find myself wanting some other settings sometimes, but that’s just me, I guess.
/shrug
As for lowbies, you are aware that like 2-3 hours spent on a brand new character would open them to pretty much everywhere in the game except Valdrakken, right?
There actually havent been any issues outside of rp. Last Assembly of the Three Hammers meeting had a large group of people turning out. No one had any issues with phasing. Senators and Thanes are always in a raid group cause its easier to communicate oocly, and we’re not interrupting proceedings.
Ironforge Market had a good turnout. Other events arent having the same issues. Only ones that are those that are in Stormwind such as the Job Fair and the Market.
The point is that xpac cities have a ton of extra story/lore/things going on that have to be ignored for some RP stories to work. There’s much less of that in Stormwind or Silvermoon for example, whereas Orgrimmar is one of the worst with how dramatically it changed in Cataclysm.
And it doesn’t matter how trivial level is, it’s cutting down accessibility on an aspect of the game that’s already very niche.
Now this I can get on board with. Some cities have been ignored to a ridiculous extent, like Ironforge and TB which haven’t seen significant change since the 2003 WoW betas, which is ridiculous because they’re great cities and should be getting some airtime.
On my Horde, I would LIVE in TB if I could. But nah, every time something significant happens, off to Org I go on my horde characters.
Or Darnassus. I was so ticked off when they demolished Darn and left that old version kinda like Chromie Time’d, but yet made it very inconvenient to use, between the lack of portals and for awhile there, every. stinking. time. you logged in, you’d get that idiot horde NPC going “RAAAAGH ATTACK!!!” well after that event actually took place.
Yeah, the way “new” Org (sadly now in-game for longer than the original) is unavoidable plays a big factor in my Horde characters having increasingly gathered dust since Cata. I too would make TB my base of operations for those alts if I could.
Don’t get me started on how much I hate new Org’s portal room…
/shiver
Who thought it’d be a great idea to split the portals up between two very distinct rooms, and make the other room an offshoot down the hallway and down a spiral ramp and force you to try to remember which portals are where?
At least SWC’s portal room is a giant T-structure and you can LOOK down both hallways and find where you wanna go if you can’t remember.
I think the difference there is that Stormwind’s portal room wasn’t restricted by having to physically fit in an allotted space since the mage tower had been using TARDIS logic since Vanilla.
They should’ve just made an equivalent to SW’s mage tower and done the same thing in Org.
Blame Blizzard. No portal to IF unless you have Boralus unlocked.
Teldrassil is gone.
Gnomes never got their city back.
Gilneas was left as a battleground.
And the smaller areas?
Southshore destroyed, Astranaar burning under attack, the Ashenvale areas we used to use obliterated by the Horde, Elwynn taken over by “visitors,” Westfall phased, Red Ridge phased in spots, can’t get to Exodar easily at all… the list goes on.
But I’m at least hoping the Trading Post will move around to different cities and have us doing stuff around those places.
But yet, Org’s portal room is underground and they could have fit a T-room in there, if they just made the downramp a bit steeper and longer and placed it under the terrain.
Or, you know, put it in the warlock area, where it used to be, and make a cave there which they could easily fit underneath the rest of Org.
One of the very few things we agree upon, even as a person who doesn’t RP in-game, I miss these places. One of the first things I did in TBC Classic was go to Astranaar and just walk around the place for awhile, reminiscing about good times I had there a long time ago when I leveled a couple Night Elves there. Oh, and that town in Darkshore, I missed that place too… or was that Astranaar? I can’t remember the names of all of those forgotten towns, lol. I miss both of them.
There were a lot of Alliance ruins even in Vanilla, but with all the xpacs piled on it’s what half EK+Kalimdor consists of…
The docks at Auberdine and Southshore are particularly big ones for me. Something about the vibes in those places. At least the latter can be visited in CoT: Hillsbrad…
But the other places being phased and/or exploded also stings.
Southshore to me, eh. The PvP always ruined it for me. I’d go there and I’d see a bunch of what looked like children on pogosticks circlestrafing each other and I just rolled my eyes.
The few times I went there where this wasn’t going on, seemed like a nice enough place.
How about … crap what was that town in Wetlands called again? Even though most of the vanilla quests there were annoying AF, that town was kinda neat too.
Anchors enable attendees from other servers to phase onto the server where the event is being held. Multiple anchors enable both factions to be brought over.
If one tried to use multiple anchors to defeat sharding, the separate groups that were made by those anchors would simply be placed in separate shards and be unable to see the others.
I have been to many. Some are performance events where most of the attendees are audience members and deliberately keep /say and /e chatter to a minimum to avoid drowning out the performance. Some are markets or guild faires where people roam around a large enough area that not everyone is in each other’s chatbox all the time. Regardless, these are RP events happening on an RP server, and thus the RP server should be set up to accommodate them.
Maybe not. But it may be worth explaining for the benefit of readers – including, potentially, feedback-gatherers from Blizzard – who don’t know.