Tuesday night arrives, so I go to Zereth Mortis for the world boss and weekly quest on this character.
The zone feels dead. Many of the rares that I would expect to die moments after spawning (the ones with the skull icons in the map), are still just chilling for 10+ minutes with MAYBE two players nearby on flying mounts.
I switch to my alt on a full server, and those rares are killed within moments of spawning.
I know Dragonblight is a dead server, but wasn’t the reason for CRZ was to prevent the open world from feeling empty?
Does CRZ only “link” a couple servers together, possibly just having dead servers interacting with other dead servers?
Was CRZ not working out and was abandoned in favor of the bulk discount server transfer service?
I was noticing this a couple days ago too. In ZM there were like 3 or 4 bosses and a crapton of rares up and only like 6 other people in the zone (the 5 Alliance I saw in /who, the random Horde warlock I saw waiting for a boss fight to start, and myself).
Wasn’t sure if it is was the new content sucking everybody away or what, but it was like night and day compared to the day before where most bosses were dead before you could fly across the map.
CRZ is never enabled in new zones. It never has been. It gets enabled once the zone is no longer current - AKA they added it to the main 4 Shadowlands Zones in 9.2.
Zereth Mortis’s “CRZ” was only because people would make groups for rares, and some people would become “trapped” in another realm’s shard. However, people are doing other things this week due to 9.2.5 - such as cross-faction raids, M+, working on their Torghast achievements since all 6 wings are open, etc. which makes for less groups in Zereth Mortis, and thus, less people from other realms being encountered.
I think they’ve completely given up on low pop servers. They’re deader than ever, and even if they were to CRZ them together, the whole would still be dead. Instead what I see is high and full servers being CRZ’d together, maybe in an attempt to make certain areas of the game (like capital cities) look busy. I’ve never seen so many servers together in Org when on Zul’jin, yet on a low pop realm you can go into it and see maybe 1 person.
Since they added Shards in Legion. CRZ before then was their way of helping ease the server load for populated servers. Now they have sharding - so they only have CRZ enabled in old zones where there won’t be a lot of people in an attempt to populate the zone.
“Never has been” was a bit of an over-assertion lol. But since sharding has been in the game, CRZ has been restricted to old zones only.
Not sure if Korthia got CRZ yet, but I know the other 4 zones have. I don’t think Korthia/Maw have, because I rarely see people in the Maw when I go there now.
I think sharding was acting a little wonky on Tuesday night.
At one point, the game was acting like it was lagging out and then dropped me into a new shard instance in the middle of the Otaris fight without ever fully taking me out of the game or relocating the other people I had been fighting Otaris with. Before that, I hadn’t had the game swap shards on me in the middle of a fight in quite a while.
The purpose of sharding is to deal with overflow caused by too many players in a zone. It is of no help to low pop servers whatever for them to be isolated and empty.
This is false. Low pop realms have been CRZ’d in Shadowlands for a long time.
It’s not. It’s for low population zones. CRZ will kick in at thresholds. The issue is that both CRZ and sharding will kick in and you can find yourself in a shard with no one from your server. It used to happen to me all the time in BfA. I’d log into Boralus and everyone there would be from ED or Scarlet Crusade or something, but everyone in my guild on my server in Boralus was in a different shard, CRZ’d with Argent Dawn and Earthen Ring.
I have toons on Earthen Ring and Argent Dawn. I’m pretty sure that anytime I log into either I am on the same server through CRZ. ER has never been connected to any other realm, AD is connected with The Scryers. Oribose, Borallus (when current and now) ZM there are always plenty form both servers. The only place that is unique is Stormwind.
This does not seem correct. I’m on a set of “dead realms” and I am frequently put in CRZ with players outside of my realm group. Was this posted somewhere officially that CRZ is not active in “new” areas? Because your claims really dont seem to align with my or others experiences in this thread.
edit: CRZ is seeming wonky on my alts in old zones as well since the patch. I.E. going to goldshire and it being a ghost town. Not normal pre-patch.