As a player who has played on RPPVP realms since '05, the systems which have been implemented in the past couple expansions have led to me seeing more people from these communities leave the game than all previous xpacs combined.
Prior to sharding/crz and warmode being implemented, these servers used to have very active and strong communities. Guilds would coordinate attacks and defenses as well as several month long campaigns involving multiple guilds on both factions and they could last for several months and lead to hundreds, if not thousands of hours of game play. Even when customers were unhappy or unenthusiastic about Blizzards writing or in-game content, these communities could create their own content and be perfectly contented to continue paying a subscription.
A guild could attack a city and expect a rival guild from their server to respond or guilds could meet each other at a predetermined location for a slug fest. Now with the removal of world defense channel, guilds can’t know when their territory is being attacked or know which areas out in the world might be getting hit. If a raid attacks a city, they’re sharded off to who knows where and their friendly rivals in their community have no way to responding/retaliating because they’ll be thrown onto a separate shard.
Then you add in warmode which results in droves of players not interested in pvp being bribed into joining cross server raids and it just extrapolates the problems facing the RPPVP/WPVP communities which used to exist on these servers. I am in favor of players on all realms having the option to opt out of pvp as i understand many players on pvp servers had no interest in pvp and rolled there to play with friends. It seems like a much more logical and less detrimental solution to this problem would have been to simply allow players to toggle off pvp.
If your realms are to the point that crz is necessary to keep servers from feeling dead, then merge some servers. Prior to the removal of the PVP server distinction, every non-Emerald Dream RPPVP realm could have been merged to form a server with a population nearly identical to Emerald Dream (the highest pop RPPVP server by a long shot). Destroying communities and play styles isn’t the answer to driving sales and retaining subscriptions, neither is leaving realms to more or less die while covering it with a crz/sharding band-aid to keep up appearances of high server numbers.
It’s because Alliance likes to pick on RP shards where there’s less resistance. Ragnaros & Quelthas (however it’s spelled) had an uprising recently. The alliance came and camped Org. The horde was so miffed they made their own raid with their own server peeps and steam rolled SW. WRA is hit daily just about. They have a thing for one of our healers apparently. ED has always had a lot of pvper’s, that didn’t change. Sounds like you all need to join the local defense or shut off WM.
Hitting their capital when they attack ours is not even remotely the same as forming a defense raid and pushing them out of our capital. This used to be possible. Joining local defense don’t solve the problem of kicking you to another shard as soon as your raid matches the size of the enemies. As soon as two large raids enter the same city, one is thrown to another shard. This doesn’t promote WPVP/RPPVP community interaction as it actively prevents large groups from from the same realm from interacting with one another. Do you play on Emerald Dream? If so, you’d know that with the removal of the PVP tag, many of the RPPVP guilds transferred to WrA or MG to find more RP since they can now PVP there. Implementing these backwards systems isn’t how you support server communities.
The whole reason RPPVP servers developed their own cultures was exactly because people could not toggle PVP off. Anything you could have had by letting people toggle PVP off on RPPVP servers you could have had by just being on a regular RP server.
War mode already waters down RPPVP and PVP servers. Sharding is critical to this, because the whole point of RPPVP servers has always been the ability to attack all enemies, rather than having them be protected by blue names. If you don’t like sharding and CRZ, advocate for RPPVP servers being returned to being separate RPPVP servers, not for them being turned into RPPVE servers.
Horde does this at least as much as Alliance does. The initial invasion of Emerald Dream, which was probably the biggest instance of it, was Horde PVP people wanting easy Alliance RP targets. Of course, that’s what created the culture that the ED folks like so much, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
It’s still possible, as Orgrimmar and Stormwind are still realm locked on RP servers. Just coordinate the defense in /trade. Not that I would mind having a real world defense channel back.
Blue walling has always been a tactic on RPPVP realms unfortunately. So I’m not at all against players being allowed to toggle PVP off if that’s their desire so long as it comes with a long cooldown or can only be done in the capitals so it can’t be abused to wait on a raid to form. As for servers bing made strictly PVE, nobody mentioned that? An end to crz/sharding and warmode is exactly what I am suggesting. That and server mergers to populate some of these dead realms.
That’s great and all but I really miss the days when WPVP resulted in me getting to fight people I know from my own realm, not a raid of people from off-realm who bring little to nothing to the realm community.
If you allow toggling of PVP off on a RPPVP server, the rule set becomes the RPPVE rule set. The fact that you start with the toggle on rather than off makes no difference once you’ve toggled once.
Unless you’re talking about toggling PVP off causing you to be sharded into a separate PVE shard? Then you’re back to sharding.
There was a guardian druid (on ED, I think…the history of the few servers I play on melts together after a while) who would show up everywhere and absolutely wreck whole groups. It was a lot of fun seeing her out in the world and hearing that “woosh” when a stealther would pass you by and your butt clenches because you immediately assume it’s her stalking you
![:smiley:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")