Why can we still not add friends cross-realm?

Community General Discussion
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If you’re connecting realms, a larger and larger percent of the players I’ll interact with are going to be on other servers. However I still get “player not found” when trying to add them.

I have great conversations with other hunters while camping spawns. I’ll never see them again unless I add their Bnet tag. I can’t just “add friend”. So this person I’ve adventured with will vanish into the aether never to be seen again.

This is silly. If we’re playing along side them, talking with them, interacting with them, we should be able to add them as a friend. The server tag is arbitrary at this point as far as day to day play goes. Please figure out a way to remove this and we can have some semblance of meaningful social interaction in this game.

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is there other resin u dont want add them friend of bnet ? just of curious , i getit if u un comfortbale

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Agreed 100%. I’m not interested in sharing my bnet tag - maybe I don’t privacy on other characters, maybe I just don’t want to give out half the information people need to hack me - so we need character level friending.

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plus this real help lik when u friend of 1 person on 1 char , enemy of same ppl on 1 char , want not let them no u same

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They do need to do this. The reason you’re getting it is while the servers are connected, they are still operating like separate servers. People on the servers you’re connected to can use your character name if it’s not taken on their server.

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Yep. This is definitely one of the reasons. People go through hoops just to target and grief others. Why make it easy? Show someone where you are and what you do, so they can spend their day ganking you on a different toon? There are tons of reasons not to use the Btag. One of them is it’s just cumbersome. I want to click “add friend” and be done with it.

I get the technical reasoning behind it, but honestly that’s already solved by having the server name attached. This modifier can be what they use to remove redundancy so long as the friends list accounts for it. Oxossa-Dalaran and Oxossa-Ysera are different strings and there are definitely ways to handle this.

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Oh I totally agree with you. Why it hasn’t happen yet is a good question. They’ve been connect servers since MoP.

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Yeah. I don’t get it. They have openly discussed they have an issue with social interaction in the game. This wouldn’t fix it but it would certainly help.

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Why wouldn’t you battletag someone? I mean that’s what I do if I like someone enough that I want to continue talking to them or getting to know them it works way better that way whether you are on the same server or different servers.

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Probably never in WoW because that implies significant re-engineering, but if Blizzard ever spins another MMO they need to arrive in 2020: do single regional mega-servers. And let characters share names, players interacting through a unique ID, while they’re at it.

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I honestly don’t have an interest in letting everyone have access to all of my characters. I don’t feel the need for that either. Plus it’s really just easier and cleaner. People I work well with as a hunter aren not the same ones I want to group with on my priest. I have some characters that are serious business and others that are exclusively for messing around. The people I want to share all of that with are in my guild. That exists already. Ironically, my guildies DON’T get as much info as someone with my btag.

A character based friends list is far more flexible than a btag list. Which is why the friends list and guild list work the way they do. All I’m saying is that the friends list worked before server merges happened, and it can work fine again so long as it treats joined realms as a single realm to reflect your in game experience.

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you are confusing cross realm zoning and realm connections. cross realm zoning is when an older zone has different realms all funneled into it.

connected realms are those realms where you can actually friend people because, while they still have a realm name connected to it, they are now basically one realm. they share an AH, you can join the guilds, etc.

as an example to try to explain it better:

I am on Magtheridon, which is connected to Altarofstorms, Anetheron, and Ysondre. I have toons across all four realms, and all of them are in the same guild, which is on the magtherion realm.

now, I regularly see people from Stormrage, Alexstraza, sargeras, etc as I play. this is because of cross realm zoning, which was implemented to make zones seem more populated as you level. it also occurs when you join a group where the leader is on another realm. this is the reason you see people from realms that aren’t connected to yours in major cities. you will not be able to trade gold, join guilds, or friend people from these realms.

so the people you are trying to friend are not on a realm connected to yours, they are just zoned into the same instance of the zone you are in.

I hope this helped you. I tend to get longwinded and confusing when trying to explain things.

Edit to add: it just occured to me, you may be trying to friend someone on the same realmset as you, but are forgetting to add the realm name onto it. for example, if someone on Ysondre tried to friend my DK after working with me, but just typed “Silvine” then they’d get the “character not found” message because, while Silvine-Ysondre does exist, she is not logged in. because thats my DH. typing just the name, and not including the realm suffix automaticaaly looks for the character with the name you typed on the server you are on. a person on Ysondre wanting to friend my DK would have to type Silvine-Magtheridon.

they kept the server names so that people would not have to rename all their toons when the servers were connected. because some have had the same name since vanilla (not me. I started in wrath.) it can make it a bit confusing at times, especially when one in your guild basically copies everything about your toon and joins the guild to confuse the heck out of you and the guild when you ding every ten levels… (not me… okay, yeah i did that, lol. try it sometime. it gets amusing.)

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I see and fair enough, I guess I just see battletagging someone as a much easier solution given I’ll usually play with someone on any character of mine if I actually want to play with them in game, I can however see your point if you aren’t into that or comfortable with that so I won’t judge you for wanting another option.

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You’re right. I did know the difference but wasn’t considering it and was conflating the two. That being said, it kind of still brings me back to my original point. If I can play with them, I should be able to friend them. That’s really all there is to it in my eyes.
If they want me to be more social in the game, let me keep talking to and playing with the people I’ve encountered and get along with. Otherwise, they could populate the realms with NPCs and it wouldn’t make a difference.

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I’m not gonna argue with that. i would like to be able to friend people from other realms as well. perhaps the reason they can’t is because of data storage on the servers or something… like perhaps the servers draw the zone assets from the same data center, but the character data are stored only with those that are also on the same realmset.

take this idea with a grain of salt, as I am not well versed in how server and data storage work together. its just an errant thought. but if this is the case, it might be complicated and convoluted to fix it and perhaps take a much longer down time than usual… again, I don’t know, I’m just talking out my tail here.