Everyone is still anonymous now, Mega Server has zero identity and no one knows anyone.
Cross Realm also existed in Wrath, you are fighting against the entire premise of Classic by not wanting features from the original game.
You are right, CRZ is where you can see people from different zones from other realms but with Battlegroups you could invite people to group from other servers if you had them added. Part of what made it good on top of BGs/LFD was the fact that dead server populations had a shot at raiding and finding groups in the merged battlegroup cities and chat.
This is literally how Classic is right now, I have done over 50 groups while leveling and no one talks in groups aside from telling people how long it’ll take them to get to the summoning stone and for the rest of the time they just mindlessly run through, say GG and disband.
I’ll agree with you there, Cata’s changes def. did open up the floodgates and for better or worse it catered more to the casual crowd which led to the issues of anonymity.
But I don’t really think that would be an issue if they didn’t already get Classic to the point of mega servers because most people are now anonymous anyways even without the QoL features of CR.
I don’t want to contrast my anecdotal experience vs yours because it’s pointless and we disagree about groups. Maybe your servers different, mine sure doesn’t have this problem.
I wish there was a way to fix this, but I don’t see CRZ as the solution to people being too anonymous and not caring about social interactions. Going full steam would just double down on these problems. I just hope that the distributed server populations encourage people to try and be part of the community by carrot or stick and that it doesn’t need to be nuked because of bad actors and experiences.
I don’t remember Wrath working that way and I can’t find anything in the 3.3 patch notes that would suggest you can invite cross realm players to your groups for doing raids or arenas or anything like that but maybe I’m missing it?
What server are you on if you don’t mind me asking?
I will share your sentiment there, I don’t want CRZ but Cross Realm Servers would def. be ideal to alleviate the stress of the current problems. We can agree to disagree on that topic, but something def. has to be done about this.
Oh you might be right, I just looked it up and it comes out a little later in Cata. The Cross Realm Battlegroup was more so to aid the LFD and BGs which we already have now.
I think honestly the solution is to implement Cross Server Grouping and lump it in with the current system we have now, they already used that technology from the start of Classic despite it coming out in Cata so not sure why that QoL feature had not already been implemented since it’s a no-brainer when it comes to fixing server issues.
I think the existing retail solution of everyone can group and do any content with anyone else (except mythic raids for the first month or 2 which I don’t think should happen) in all aspects of the game is the best final solution.
Everyone in the whole game is a potential team member and friend. It’s easy to make and find groups even at odd hours.
Piling on the mega servers is essentially trying to create this type of game by sheer numbers.
Maybe then they could have not gutted the world and removed all the elites from questing since it would have been a lot easier to find people.
Yeah, ultimately I think people give Retail systems a lot of grief in the Classic community but they only implemented them because even back in the day they ran into the same issues we’re running into now.
Imagine if we had Cross Realms from the start, you could be still be on your old Classic server with like 3k players and still queue in with me on my 10k server and queues would become non existent as people can freely move around without feeling like they are forced to be on one mega server.
If they did this though, it would mean less money for Classic Devs in the form of losing out on mass transfers and level boosts as it’ll make grouping far easier and could create less of an incentive to buy their services and we wouldn’t want Blizzard losing any money now would we haha.
Good news, this perfect world that you want, already exists. And thanks to the latest in QOL technology, you can even level in wrath!
But it’s not here, it’s in retail. They’ve already stated that a fundamental pillar of classic, is server identity and community. There’s no meaningful community when you are talking about 100k+ people in a pool. You’ll never see the same randoms, ever. There’s no incentive to be nice to other players, because they’re disposable, you’ll never run out of people, so why behave?
Considering most players like the mega servers it seems like most of the classic community prefers this as well…
If they didn’t then the classic population wouldn’t continue to merge into a few servers while Blizzard had to do something it’s never done before and actually close servers.
It’s clear that players hate cross realm, yet due to lack of cross realm are piling into the same place so they maximize the number of potential people to play with, which is a crude way of just having cross realm.
And there somehow supposed to be a community on 30k+ mega servers?
You cannot get rid of mega servers by imposing restrictions, you get rid of it by doing cross realm like they did in 2008 which Classic is based off of.
Everyone moving from mega servers with free transfers will xfer back once server queues die because that’s the whole point of a mega server, safety in numbers.
I’m not talking about CRZ, they already implemented Cross Realm with BGs since the start of Classic and that came out in Cata. It’s obvious they aren’t consistent with the timeline, what I’m asking for is Cross Realm Servers where someone from a low pop server can still play with someone on a high pop server.
This would give an incentive for people to leave mega servers, solve queue times as well as fixing faction imbalances.
You can check the timeline for Cross Realm features, the first one was across Realm Battlegroups which came out in ICC patch and then Cross Realm Servers which came out in early Cata and CRZ which came out mid way in Cata.
They implemented Cross Realm BGs which also released in Cata all the way back in early Classic, they have the technology.
I’m just saying it would help us avoid a lot of the issues we have now.
