It is unlikely they would do it, and I’m sure some people would object, but if you combined the West PVE (Myzrael/Azuresong/Old Blancy) you’d end up with still a strong ally lean, but an overall logging pop around 3k (2k ally, 1k horde).
Then let Bloodsail free transfer to either Windseeker or Ashkandi (East PVE) and let Earthfury go wherever they want.
They haven’t said how many fresh servers are coming, but it seems likely at least a few of those will end up being small pop.
They’ve already done it in Retail before, with Connected Realms. They just need to do it earlier than they did the first time around. Or actually do the merge, since they’re showing willingness to try other solutions, since they’d also “never done it before” to close servers.
Remembering too, that RDF is not designed to, nor does it, solve low population servers, since raiding is still not cross server.
Realm-locked RDF is no worse than whatever they’re trying to throw at us, for community, and in many situations is better, because the people you’re grouped with are randomly selected, but they’ll be seen again, so people are both more well behaved, and also have a real reason to pay attention to each other and recruit for guilds or other activities, in a Dungeon.
Realm-Locked RDF is actually more beneficial to community than no change at all.
Why compromise for a system that does nothing but positive things for every server…
On a mega server: Don’t get gatekeeped, or forced to play with “gold farmers”
On a dead server: Get to actually run a dungeon instead of waiting 4 hours or until your guild finally puts 1 together… or just logging off and ultimately just quitting the game.
Because it damages the mid tier servers that still do have community.
Also RDF is only a stopgap that allows Blizzard to ignore the problems of “dead servers”. You can’t play together and you can’t raid together, with people off server. Cross realm RDF would reduce Blizzards impetus for fixing the realm imbalances both at the high end and the low end.
Not quite sure why you need to enforce x-realm or not at a system level. Let the player decide. If they don’t care about the all-mighty social aspect and potentially getting a bad apple in their group, they can select x-realm. If they care, they can restrict it to server-only.
The system can still prioritize for server-only, but adding artificial queue times is just another way to enforce how you want to play on someone else for your benefit, at their cost.
In the end, it’s a completely stupid discussion. In the “spirit of classic”, they’re retrofitting retail systems to replace authentic systems from the original game. I can’t decide if it’s hypocritical or just a massive case of cognitive dissonance.
lol, low realm servers will offer xfers, you don’t have to stay and never had to.
Can you explain what community means at a server level? Are you guys waving to eachother as you drive by? We talking a small town vibe thing? LOL there is no community… RDF wouldn’t hurt it either… cause who cares who you run a Dungeon with… as you stated you aren’t raiding with these people which is an extended period of time… lol this community stuff is driving me crazy.
The compromise is allowing a toggle so players can remain in queue until they find a local group. As per the start comments.
Clearly you’ve never played the original or been on a server with community. Regularly helping out with other raid teams alt nights, knowing who from other guilds is up for tanking a heroic, knowing who is the annoying guild hopper to not invite to your guild, seeing a guild tag and knowing they’re a good group or likely to be someone to watch out on looting.
Community is knowing and interacting with the same group of people over a long period of time, greater than just your guild. And a general ethos and standards of acceptable behaviour that people understand.
Yeah megaservers lost that because people wanted to recreate the CRZ experience in Classic and wanted the “streamer server”, but that’s only one experience. There’s no expectation of behaviour because the pool is too large to ensure that. That’s what cross realm forces on every other server who’d prefer to avoid dealing with those players who’ve already given up.
This is an interesting solution on paper, but there are some mathematical challenges that kind of make it break a little bit.
Lets look at thought experiment. We know that tanks are in HUGE demand for the forming of dungeons, as such tanks will ALWAYS experience sub 1 minute queues (if it is longer it literally means there are not enough players online to form a dungeon anyway). With a wait time of 15 minutes, will there EVER be a tank available from another server to form a cross realm group? I would imagine not, because any tank that queues will instantly get matched with players waiting from his server. This means that the effective cross realm tank population will always be zero.
So lets say that after the 15 minute grace period or whatever, players who are still waiting are put on equal priority as those who are queuing before the 15 minute period but on another realm. Well now you have inflated the queues of literally the entire game by essentially 15 minutes because there will ALWAYS be players sitting in the dps queue for over 15 minutes who are holding spots against those queuing prior to the 15 minute grace period.
We are now back to how normal LFD works except now DPS are guaranteed to have a 15 minute queue minimum due to the lack of tanks. Alternatively, those players who wait past the 15 minute queue never get equal priority with dps from another server and you might as well make LFD server specific anyway because no tanks will ever make it into the cross realm pool of players to make groups.
The other scenario mentioned is one where people can choose to queue cross realm or not. But this also suffers from a similar problem. If tanks are not choosing to queue cross realm then there will be zero tanks available for cross realm groups. If they are, then cross realm groups will be the ONLY place for players to realistically get a group.
There isn’t a simple solution because ultimately the tanks will be the ones to choose where people can/should be queuing to get the fastest groups.
That is your short sighted opinion. Why compromise? So a larger majority of players can get what they want, with small compromises. Instead of back and fourth arguing that will get nowhere, coming together to push for a system that works and possibly getting something from blizzard is much better then the current outcome for the for RDF camp.
Unless of course as I suspect you enjoy arguing for the sake of argument.
Yes a toggle could be a great option and it’s been mentioned in this thread. 10-15 mins really isn’t going to change queue times but it will ensure more local groups. Tanks and healers will be instant if there is dps queueing obviously and dps generally wait ~20mins anyway.
Due to a consistent delay all dps will essentially already be in their respective queue positions from the start, it won’t change anything, except dps will have the opportunity to fill groups on their server first.
The whole point of keeping it server only first is so if players are locally available the group forms locally, theres no issues here. Most groups will form locally unless the dungeon is obscure, the time queued is way out of peak time or the server is essentially dead. Going cross server is only really for these circumstances and it will apply just as much to tanks and heals as it will dps.
Honestly I doubt queue times will change much at all with a system like this.
The cross server pool is always going to have far fewer tanks and heals to dps, no matter the system involved.
The problem is this isn’t a compromise anymore? Unless dps who have the longest queue are given some kind of priority against tanks from different servers you will never be able to even get into a X-realm group. The effects of this will be small on Mega-servers, but on smaller servers this will bloat queue times by a fair margin.
Right now they should be looking to address some of the major problems that LFD “would” have fixed. Largely expanding the pool of players for redundant content. The leveling community is already struggling outside of mega-server communities. In fact just last week I literally out leveled WC in the time it took to find a group for it (this is on Argual the largest OCE server available to us).
LFD also creates incentive to get near raid-BiS characters a reason to do LOTS of heroics via the repetitive rewards associated with the tool. As evident on TBC, almost no one does any heroics outside of the daily and MGT (again, different if you are on a mega-server but certainly true for Arugal). With the current tool they have, players will only really be running targeted dungeons and this again vastly depletes the available players to queue with.
The merging of the OCE time zone also pads the off-peak hours, meaning that groups will be easier to come by regardless of what time-zone you are playing in.
In the end, I feel it is REALLY silly that blizzard are trying to promote the social experience in dungeons. Dungeons largely are there for players to learn their class in a group environment so that they can transition into raiding, which should be where players look for guilds and build actual communities. If anything they should be looking to tackle GDKPs and be trying to incentivize guild raiding as opposed to pugging.
This is what I was responding to:
As long as this didn’t have the aforementioned mandatory time gating for the opposite (either explicit or practical due to server-prioritization effects on dps), I think we’re on the same page.
Going an an off-topic related tangent, LFD/RDF removal is just one symptom of a mindset the devs have that I personally have a problem with for Wrath. I want the original game, and I haven’t seen any compelling arguments not to do that.
What this gives to the RDF camp is random grouping, cross server so groups that couldn’t form locally can still form, teleportation to dungeons, reward system for tanks etc.
To the LFG camp, the ability to mostly get groups with local players.
Sounds like a fair compromise to me, if not overly accommodating to the RDF crowd. The problem is that some of the RDF crowd just won’t accept anything short of RDF as it was in the backend of WotLK. This is completely unreasonable.
With this mindset if both sides were to give nothing and want everything this argument will just go around in circles and get nowhere and a larger proportion of the player base will get a crap deal than if compromises are made.
I feel like a better compromise would simply be enable RDF as it was for content 1-70 and then incrementally add the content to the RDF tool as the game progresses and people no start to no longer run older content.
If content is being actively run by the majority of raiders, then there is no need for RDF or X-server. But as normal dungeons stop getting run because everyone is in TOC gear and have 3+ alts in naxx gear or better… it makes sense to add normal dungeons to the RDF tool as that content is no longer being run by majority of players. That way people still have agency over their groups for content that matters to a lot of players, where as those who are just trying to catch up or gear an alt have access to a much bigger pool of players to help them catch up.
Why not cover all bases from the get go? Also they have stated that they want to make heroics relevant for longer.
Toggles rarely works tbh. Toggle = always on most of the time. If something exist and is the easiest solution/path, it’s gonna be the default even for people that are against it. Eventually they won’t even remember it was a toggle. (Referring to a crossrealm toggle in LFD).
I’m very pro-RDF. I can get behind this.
I never really cared if RDF was cross realm or not because I’m on a good sized server but I knew it would hurt the small servers if Cross-realm wasn’t activated. So this sounds like a good compromise that helps those small servers too.
I’d be quite happy with the toggle alone. I’d always leave it to never, others would leave it to immediate, and some might switch.
For many, it would be “Switch it off once, and never turn it on.”. And while that is acceptable, it’s also still “never change it”.
IDC if it’s crossrealm, or not crossrealm, sends you flowers in the mail, or beats you up, I just want RDF so I can get a freaking group.
As a healer I spent 4 hours yesterday trying to find a group, and got nothing but 1 mgt normal (that I did need to get into Heroic)