Why Cross-realm BG's are a bad idea

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I want to make a simple and direct argument for why Cross-realm Battlegrounds is a bad idea. I realize it was in the last patch of retail Vanilla. I also believe it was a bad idea and eventually contributed to the death of battlegrounds.

Positives of Cross-realm BG’s include:

  1. Faster BG ques

Negatives of Cross-realm BG’s include:

  1. Destroys the community aspect of PvP
  2. Makes battlegrounds an impersonal experience

I remember when cross-realm came out when I was playing retail Vanilla. I remember going into a battleground and seeing a warrior with a hand of ragnaros. Prior to that time I had NEVER even seen the weapon, but upon my first cross-realm que I saw one.

I remember never knowing my opponents anymore.

I remember knowing who I played against. The rivalries that form. The guild vs guild drama that happened.

Cross-realm bg’s dramatically alter the battleground experience in Vanilla. There are some positives and negatives. How important to the community is it for there to be an actual PvP community?

I would be interested to hear arguments in favor of cross-realm bg’s. What am I not seeing as a positive other than faster que’s? It may not always even be faster…btw. The real thing that made que’s faster on retail is making alliance play vs alliance and horde vs horde. That BETTER not happen. That would be absurd.

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On my server in vanilla, it was not uncommon to have 1 hour queues for WSG and AB, with 3-5 hour queues for AV. After cross realm was implemented, it was much more tolerable queues of 5-10 min and 45 min, respectively.

I liked the community for PvP per server, but those queue times are not worth it.

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I understand that sometimes the que is bad. The thing about Vanilla was you could also world pvp. It was actually viable.

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It depends on the server. On my server, world PvP pretty much ended when BGs released, and it was wait in absurdly long queues or don’t PvP.

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The longer the que, the more viable world pvp is.

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I disagree highly with those negatives.

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I’m fine with the queues trying to prioritize same realm matches but not at the expense of queue times.

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Why would you Ehma?

if you have 20 realms in your battlegroup then you no longer know your enemy. Did you actually experience WoW Vanilla retail? I don’t think someone who did or even played on private servers, would say such a thing.

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Playing Classic WoW is more than just playing a game for it’s fun PVP, but because the entire game is good, not just the PVP…

The fact that people worry about the Q’s being long is kinda silly when you have an entire world you can actually make use of and enjoy.

CRBG’s also encourrage that best players to stack on a single faction resting on the comfort of knowing that they can still get reasonable Q times…

This CRBG system actually takes some of the burden off the player to select the faction that works BEST for them as a player rather than simply stacking on a side for PVP.

As we know players will gravitate to whatever is the “META” of the time, and that for Vanilla / Classic is Horde for PVP.

As a result all the best talent will go horde; in return the alliance will QQ because they overall will not win battles on an even basis…

PLEASE DO NOT MISTAKE THIS AS ME TELLING YOU ALLIANCE CANNOT WIN AND DO NOT WIN, this is only talking about the typical solo player…

Speaking of the Typical Solo player, CRBG’s do not promote team play, they are an empty place full of faces you will not likely see again.

In the time that I played WoW seriously after CRBG was introduced being essentially TBC and Wrath because in Vanilla CRBG was such a short period that it’s not even worth mentioning…

I made essentially 3 friends in the CRBG over the 4 years of TBC and Wrath… 3 that’s it…

As far as Arena fiends went, these were all people I played with in Vanilla that carried over…

However lets contrast CRBG WoW to Vanilla without CRBG.

I had a friends list of people that literally filled the entire list… I had so many friends that I had a paper list for a time before the thing was expanded to hold more. (they lost our friends lists in 1.12 I think it was… I was mad as hell!)

Any way, in Vanilla I made tons of friends both in the world and because of the BG’s… That was only possible because of the community aspect of the game and the constant exposure to the same players on a regular basis.

Removing that community element is very harmful to Classic WoW and CRBG’s are the destruction of the PVP community.

The answer to long server Q’s for PVP is not CRBG, it’s better server management.

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Yes I did. And I frequently would recognize people all the time and high quite a bit of rivals from different servers. Maybe you didn’t pvp enough in vanilla.

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I don’t particularly care about seeing the same names again in BG’s over having fast queue times. It’s not particularly relevant to the BG.

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Good post, I’m feelin’ ya. But…

This is it, right here. If WPvP isn’t cutting it for me, this is going to get me that fix. Sooner, rather than later, I hope.

Not really. I’m destroying Alliance. But I do understand that some players, not only want to be recognized within their own community as hardcore elite, they thrive on the fear they strike into the hearts of their enemy within their respective realm. CR-BGs takes that away from them, cuz now they become one in a million.

Vanity, my favorite sin.

Trust me, the guy I’m repeatedly destroying every match doesn’t care anymore about me as I do about him. In fact, he probably hates me and my pre-made, that is regularly stomping their pre-made over and over again.

I care more about the feel of the community within my own faction, whether tha’d be in a premade or dungeon, which is why CRBG is not the same as those that argue “How can you be against LFD/LFR, but in favor of CRBG?”

I can pick and choose my friends within my faction, but I can’t pick my enemies, CRBG or not, so it makes little difference to me.

Anyway, I’m all for same realm BGs, but I just don’t want to sit in queue either. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of meeting like-minded PvPers from my realm inside a BG, but if you’re on a PvP server, you’ll meet these folks everywhere.

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Well Ehma, people do have different opinions.

As for your insinuation that I didn’t play it enough…well ask my wife. hahahaha

I had many 60’s in Vanilla. One of my last 60’s I had was an orc warrior who got to rank 11 #2 on the server in weekly rating. I burned out and quit for a while. I pvp’d on all my characters also. Then I got gladiator multiple times in TBC.

I understand the desire to try to put down people who disagree with you, but trying to insinuate that I am simply ignorant of vanilla pvp…well…sorry you just can’t.

Back to the actual discussion though…

Common sense dictates that if you have 1,000,000 players in a pool vs 1,000 players in a pool, you are going to know personally more in the 1,000 player pool. It is the same reason they made servers cap at a lower amount. More players dilutes the experience. The same thing is true in PvP.

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I understand. I also feel the weight of faster ques.

I just feel like if you take a step back and think about what you are trading…it simply is too much.

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On the CRBG side of the argument, I think it’s a bit of a stretch. On the LFD/LFR side of the argument, absolutely it does.

Again, the shorter queue times is what it boils down to. If it honestly destroyed the community, I would not be in favor of any type of CRBG.

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I think a decent compromise/middle ground here is small battlegroups. If they’re only 2-4 servers it won’t be terrible. You’ll get faster queue times and still be able to recognize other players.

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If we could guarantee a good faction ratio on each server then I would be all for no CRBGs, but I feel that with the Twitch culture that is so prominent now days, many servers are going to be immensely lopsided. Faction balance is already going to take a big hit due to everyone pretty much knowing how good the horde racials are for PvP.

This is going to lead to massive que discrepancies between both factions on a lot of servers. While you make the point that world PvP is a viable pathway, the fact is a lot of people really love BGs. Having there experienced completely ruined because they were unlucky and rolled on a server that ends up having terrible faction balance is just going to amplify the faction imbalances as players will just migrate to a server where they can get BG que times that work for them. This will result in servers not only having extraordinarily long quest for Bgs but World PvP will be very dead as there simply won’t be enough of the opposing faction to fight.

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Hmm you know I can check this stuff man lol. You got it exactly 0 times.

How did I put you down? I just said maybe you didn’t pvp enough. And the post before that you asked if I played at all. So was that your attempt to put me down? I’m lost.

Common sense tells you those numbers are extremely blown out of proportion. Just because I could remember names and you couldn’t doesn’t mean the community aspect was gone. It just means you have a limited memory

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No no, it was totally on the account that is now banned that he can’t post on, noone would ever lie about that.

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Yeah yeah that one. He just happened to also get his vanilla ranks on his alt account just in case that main one got banned. Lol