Whats the solution then to low pop servers then. I’m curious. are they just out of luck to pvp?
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Classic launched? I guess I must have missed it.
You don’t know there’s going to be low pop servers (which isn’t the reason for long bg queues anyway…except maybe AV). It’s faction imbalance, and you don’t know that will exist either.
One of the other posters Apocalypse, I think it was; had a well laid out idea.
Make sever population figures known on the server selection page; this way people joining can see exactly where things are at.
Include a warning with imbalanced realms that describe the advantage and disadvantage of playing on an imbalanced faction, because there are advantages and obviously disadvantages.
If the overall game stops growing after a certain point, and there are under populated realms or imbalanced realms open up free and specifically well thought out transfers to remedy the problem. The result will be the closing of some realms while bolstering the populations of others / factions.
There are ways to deal with these issues outside of CRBG.
The problem with CRBG is that it strongly encourages faction stacking. This is what has happened on Modern WoW. Things are so bad now that Blizzard on a certain map that they cannot apparently get alliance to play is using AI so that the Horde have some one to fight.
I assure you CRBG does not end well, it’s only stop gap measure that only delays the death of PVP balanced for a short time.
After CRBG 2 things will happen, just as they did in original TBC and onward.
New players will accumulate on whatever faction they READ or are told is best.
New old players will either re-roll for PVP because they’re tired of getting rolled by pre-mades, or better players and will saying things like XXXXX faction never wins, YYYYYY faction is better.
Thus everyone will eventually end up on YYYYYY faction where they cant get a Q to pop because no one is playing XXXXXX faction just like on Modern WoW.
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But I do know, seeing how people want to keep server caps low, will result in the same issue we had today dating back since vanilla. Initial burst of player base. More servers open cause que time. Month goes by, population decrease in result some servers bleeding out more then others.
We all seen it happen, why do it yet again
Crbg didn’t encourage faction stacking. Blizz buffing and nerfing racials played the biggest role in that
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Players were all going Horde in TBC and Wrath because the racials were “better” Nothing has changed, people are still doing the same things now days, they just follow the trends.
Blizzard buffed alliance racials in WoD I hear, and as a result everyone transfered to Alliance for that expansion, then then flopped it back the other way… I don’t see where this is any different from TBC where we just rolled new characters.
We all know horde racials are superior for vanilla BG’s, and most PVP players gravitate toward Horde naturally any how.
Knowing this in advance clearly points out that no matter what they do, it’s only going to be a really long Q for CRBG as Horde after the dust settles because the Alliance players will cry about never winning while the Horde will cry about never getting a game to pop.
Clearly CRBG’s do not solve the problem; in some ways they will actually make things much worse over time because everyone serious about PVP will be playing Horde.
How do we fix that? By encouraging local balance on the individual server.
Have a look at the BG forum, its a mess with all the same complaints that people had about original Vanilla in this same forum…
I am telling you from the bottom of my heart that CRBG will fix nothing, it’s not going to solve the problem… Have a look below.
This horde player is complaining about his Q times being too long… 55 min and he’s in modern wow where they have CRBG…
That player is alliance and he’s tired of getting stomped by what he thinks are horde pre-mades…
This guy is complaining about Twink BG players and how it’s unfair…
This guy is complaining about Faction balance being horrible.
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Server-only PVP had some awesome advantages. If you were good you became locally famous on your server. And it was fun when you saw a particularly formidable opponent with a name you recognized.
The downside was the awful queue time.
Back in Vanilla, I was on an RP server (Silver Hand). We had a 10:1 Alliance:Horde player ratio. For battlegrounds PVP this meant the Alliance queue ranged anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, with about an hour being most commmon. While waiting for the queue most players just went AFK outside the BG entrance.
Horde queue on Silver Hand was pretty much always instant, but usually there was just one Horde team running PVP at any given time. When you faced that team they usually won since they often won as they were used to running as a group and always had far more pvp experience than any Alliance team.
Cross-realm BGs fixed the queue time. Instead of waiting 2 hours for a queue, now we only had to wait 5 minutes. In my opinion, this was a vast improvement.
The loss of local server fame was regrettable, but more than made up for by being able to actually play the game and not spend most our time watching the queue. It was also fun to face some different opponents we hadn’t already fought 50x before.
Admittedly I might have a different opinion had my server had more balanced faction distribution. But from my perspective CRBGs helped alot.
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Giving ctrl to the players definitely wont solve anything. That suggestion is pretty much a hope that ppl roll on w.e faction due to warnings… We are in a heavy meta era of gaming. Once top players are established and guides come out ppl follow suit
Very true, people are sheep like that and they copy those they worship.
The point in making them aware of their choice is that it eliminates their right to complain and garner any respect or sympathy because they made that choice to play on a very imbalanced server faction.
Example without CRBG each server would be its own community and that community would be unique to any other server… Sure the meta would cross server boarders to a degree, but not as strongly as it does now in modern WoW with CRBG.
There is a place for CRBG, but it should NEVER be allowed in AV or level 60 PVP.
That place is low level PVP for WSG / AB from level 10 to 59, this allows low level players to get BG Q’s, because the populations of these players is so low that actually getting a Q is typically long even with CRBG.
@ level 60 however the community should be 100% local. There are ways to manage the issues of level 60 PVP Q’s, and CRBG only expands the problem for that bracket because of its competitive factor.
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I feel you and in a perfect world that would b dope. Server i was on in vanilla was awesome for bgs. Community etc i get the want for that but draw backs are for those who just happened to roll on a server at launch for example and that server died out. Now billy joe cant get ques popping or a full game
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That’s why we need to find a good solution because the present solution CRBG is not working as demonstrated by modern WoW.
Do we really want to go down that path again? I don’t…
How do we deal with this problem? I don’t know, but CRBG just does not work out in the end, and has the added negative of harming the PVP community.
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They can cut off rolling a faction thats to heavily populated on a server. But that may have big consequences as well
Trading community for convenience.
We’ve gone through this once already, classic is about NOT making the same mistakes that got us to retail and made people scream and petition for classic.
Can we not let history repeat itself, please? Actually learn from our mistakes?
How about mercenary queueing which has existed for a few expansions now in Retail?
Now looking back on Vanilla in hindsight I STILL feel that CRBGs were the right thing to do.
WoW is a game and should be fun. Important to that is being able to actually PLAY the game.
Sitting in front of the instance portal AFK for 2 hours waiting for your queue was NOT fun, no matter how much of a community there was.
Due to the excessive queue times, much of Vanilla PVP until CRGBs felt more like a chatroom where you chatted with other guild members or people on the server, listened on Teamspeak or just plain went AFK. You didn’t need WoW to do any of that. It was a place where chatted… but didn’t really feel like a game as you weren’t actually playing.
WoW is much better when there is something fun to do. Waiting is not fun.
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Being in a PVP queue does not stop you from doing:
Fishing
World PvP
Crafting
Gathering
Farming open world
Questing
Dueling outside org
Talking in trade chat
Looking at the AH
etc etc
Which btw, are the same things you’d do while waiting for your dungeon group to fill up in Vanilla.
Instant queues are also very bad and frustrating for anyone getting rank14. You go from 10-45m of downtime between every match to constant 24/7 playing where you’re actively playing and PvPing the entire day instead of having lots of off time to do other stuff while waiting in queues. This makes the grind pretty unbearable and unhealthy.
Long queues positively effect the entire world, as it creates more reason for players to go out and do things, or participate in the community(trade chat, /say chat. etc). You’re creating more world PvP and socializing and perhaps making new friends by having to sit there and wait. Believe it or not, waiting in a queue is beneficial to the entire game. I’m sure some EQ/FFXI(75 cap)/SWG and Vanilla wow devs have made podcasts/videos/interviews on saying this exact thing around public transportation systems taking long encouraged and fostered community and social interactions which led to a healther game.
“I can’t play the game” is not accurate, you’re choosing not to play it and just sitting in town waiting on a queue to “make your fun happen” - which sounds like a retail WoW mindset.
- Back in Vanilla: I was on an RP PVE server - world PVP pretty much didn’t exist after BGs came out so that wasn’t an option.
- The queue would occasionally crap out forcing us to requeue. It was important to stick next to the portal so we could requeue if needed.
- Since we were stuck waiting near the BG instance portal that pretty much ruled out all of the other activities you listed.
- I didn’t have any professions back in Vanilla. My Bad. However, even today where I do have gathering alts I never found it much fun. Same for fishing.
- I wasn’t good at making gold back in Vanilla, probably because I had no professions. As such, there wasn’t much need for the auction house or trade channel.
- Trade channel itself was virtually unusable for much of vanilla. Any legitimate WTS or WTB posts would get whisked off the screen in less than a second by the mountain of spam from leveling and gold selling services.
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If you want to log on, press a button, and immediately get put into a PvP match against essentially NPC’s you’ll never see again, well, I’ve got great news for you! You can do that, and have been able to do that, for over a decade on retail WoW.
Give us OUR version of an authentic classic experience, you know, the one that didn’t have cross server BGs for the vast majority of it’s lifespan.
We really shouldn’t even be arguing about this, it should be a no brainer. We’ve had over a decade of seeing the effect of cross-server on the game. We all know how it’s bad, we all know why it shouldn’t exist. At Blizzcon, iirc, Blizzard said “NO CROSS SERVER ANYTHING!” for announcing Classic WOW, did they not?
It’s one of the most hated, and biggest reasons for the big push for Classic WoW from a dedicated fanbase. Not Classic TBC, Not Classic WOTLK, but Classic WOW. There is one main reason for that - the world and COMMUNITY. Cross server destroys both the community, and the world.
edit: Found it:
Blizzcon 2018 vanilla panel:
Cross realm grouping? Never.
“Realm identity, reputation ,seeing the same people over and over again, knowing who the best geared player on your server is. Those are important elements in the classic experience. That needs to be maintained” - Ion
pc gamer this-is-how-blizzard-plans-to-finally-bring-back-vanilla-wow-servers/
Brack is clear that using modern server architecture doesn’t mean that these Classic servers will have the same features that current World of Warcraft does. There won’t be cross-realm servers or Looking For Raid and Dungeon Finder automatic party matchmaking. There’s still a lot of questions about how the team will tackle it, but Brack says they’re committed to recreating an authentic Vanilla World of Warcraft experience. “One of the tenets of Classic WoW is none of the cross-server realms and different [server] sharding options that we have available to us today. There’s a lot of desire on part of the community that this is something that they don’t want.”
And left lower pop servers scrambling for 5v3 matches. Fantastic experience, really brings a community together.
- In Vanilla CRBG did fix the Q times. It honestly did, that’s a fact. They were much longer before they were implemented, much shorter afterwards.
The long term damage from CRBG? Very real. Also, another topic.
But CRBG did drastically reduce Q times when implemented. Was it worth it?
Debateable.
But can anyone find a solution to server imbalances that would preclude the need for CRBG?
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Interesting posts Shiyoakemi.
But the quotes you posted seem to be referring mostly to things like cross-realm raids and dungeon groups, which exist today, but not in Vanilla.
The examples in those quotes do not seem to refer to cross-realm battlegrounds, which DID exist back in Vanilla.
That said, I think no-cross-realm BGs could work for Classic, so long as:
- Server size is increased. Vanilla realms had 3500 players max. If that were increased to say 10,000 for Classic, queues should be shorter.
- Faction ratios are balanced. The problem with this is Blizzard has no way to balance factions in Classic without changing the Vanilla experience. Back then Horde had no “pretty” races and the population heavily favored Alliance. On the other hand, this might not be as big an issue today as many players will probably come from Retail where there is a heavy Horde bias.