This 100%
10 chars
Yeah, like I said, sounds like a solution to a problem, and one that probably works quite nicely. But I think the idea of it is intrinsically incompatible with the idea of WoW.
WoW’s design of “stranding” players on their own islands and offering very little horizontal mobility may be a relatively outdated game design philosophy, but it’s a big part of what makes Classic different from other MMOs. Shifting this paradigm may have been the solution to a lot of problems on paper, but there were also some steep downsides to it that contributed to the game feeling totally different as time went on.
For Classic, I think this would be a terrible idea. You can’t really “go back to WoW’s roots” if you remove one of the coolest discrete aspects of it.
I mean, I kinda disagree. Server transfers have always been a thing in the past, it’s just that they’ve been something that’s been locked behind a monetary paywall. And I think a lot of what makes classic what it is is actually much of the design philosophy and game systems, not specifically the fact that servers are locked into some static, rigid thing, which clearly they’re not, because people are more willing than ever to fork out money to move from their “dying” medium pop server to a packed to the brim megaserver.
Server identity can very much be kept in tact as long as you KNOW that, “oh, im gonna go visit grobbulus today, that’s the rp-pvp server, with a long, storied history, and lots of active roleplay” or “oh, I’m gonna go visit benediction, that’s the alliance packed megaserver with XYZ streamer personalities on it, maybe I’ll be able to catch them while they’re there” and so on.
Imagine servers as cities and towns, some are big, some are small, and each has their own personality and culture. That doesn’t get lost becuase tourists can come visit. NYC isn’t gonna change becuase some tourists from LA came by to visit, and the same is true for classic servers.
It seems to me like you’re kinda downplaying how much of a big deal horizontal player mobility is, but I’d argue that people wouldn’t be asking for this if it wasn’t a pivotal change. Yeah, you’ve been able to move from realm to realm for most of WoW’s history, but there were some significant hurdles to it. Significant enough that the population doesn’t tend to move around like it would if they had full power to choose which realm they played on every day.
Oh no, for sure. It’s far from being the thing. I was just saying that it’s one of the big contributing factors. One of many.
I kinda disagree with this idea. Grobbulus, for example, wouldn’t have a long storied history if people were free to come and go at will. This is why we have terms like the “Grob mob”. When it’s difficult to move around, you tend to have a sort of pride for your home realm. I don’t play FFXIV, but I have a hard time believing its servers have any semblance of kind of community identity WoW’s servers have had before they started to trivialize realm choice.
And I could be wrong about this. But at the end of the day, I stand by my thoughts on it being a bad idea for Classic specifically.
I’d say the opposite, I think you’re overplaying it’s significance. People have proven in classic that they’re more than willing to throw cash around willy nilly for far more than just server transfers. The fact is, throwing some cash at blizzard has proven to not be a significant enough hurdle to avoid players willing to conglomerate into megaservers, however the potential of having to do it REPEATEDLY clearly is something that will stop players from wanting to transfer OFF megaservers.
In my opinion, you either get rid of the hurdle altogether, or you never let it happen in the first place, but since people have already either been forcably displaced, or displaced themselves many times already, it’s too late to say no, so the only option is to just make it open.
I agree that server identity is a contributing factor to wow classic, however I disagree that the proposed change would ruin classic server identity.
Grobbulus has a long and storied history because it’s an rp server, and rpers are the ones who push to make these sorts of stories. Grobbulus’ history began before classic even launched, with the massive effort people had to put in to even get an rp-pvp server in the first place. None of that has anything to do with how difficult it was to move to or from grobbulus.
As someone who DOES play ff14, I can tell you, the players on those servers have just as much pride in their home server as wow players do, even to the point of bantering with each other about their home servers (though not to the toxic level that wow players do, because toxicity and harassment in that game is actually managed). The thing is though, realm guesting in ff14 still keeps your realm tag on you, so it’s not like a full server transfer, it’s more like in retail when a friend invites you to a group and you get pulled over to their server and have your realm tag after your name.
The difference though, is that PLAYERS get to decide WHEN it happens, and WHERE they go. The reason why retail servers feel irrelevant is because anyone could end up anywhere with anyone else, so the whole thing feels like one homogenous gloop. If you have to make a conscious choice to go somewhere, and the people there are there by choice, then that still does develop a sense of server community and pride, even if people can come and go as they please.
As a side note, layers actually kill server identity far more than single layered, but free-to-move realms do, for the same reason that sharding killed it in retail wow. Players lose the sense of who they’re interacting with in the world around them, one moment you’re questing alongside “Joeschmoe69” and the next thing you know he’s gone and you see “xxkittyslayerxx” instead. Back when we had no layers, that person standing by the fountain advertising enchanting services, you’d see them every time, now you hardly ever see them cause they’re getting jerked around different layers by constant invites for their services.
Fact is, if you care about server identity, you should be pushing for no layers more than no open, free transfers. If you ask me, introduce realm guesting, limit realms to 1 layer, and cap the servers at that layer’s limit before introducing queues. That way, the people who just want to play the content can log in and play, when people want to play with their friends, but their friends/guildies are on a capped server, they can move to the lower pop sever without feeling like they’re having to give anything up, and when the population dies down after the launch hype, people can go back to their home servers without any problem or losing anything they had on those servers, like character names that they got during the 2 week name reservation period pre-classic launch.
50% of the people logged in are not afk renlmote queing .
Sorry. Its maaaaaaybe 5% and that would be a huge number, when you exaggerate by 10x you tend to lose credibility fast
It doesn’t have one now. Stop pretending anyone gives a crap about server identity.
sorry that your server doesn’t have an identity of its own and is probably a one faction megaserver of boring boringness
Neither does yours, except in your own little circle.
This was obviously going to happen from the start. LITERARY NOT A SURPRISE TO ANYONE
Have you ever played an MMO? Popular games have ques derp
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