Community Blog Topic Results: Merging servers and Virtual Realms

Last week's Community Blog Topic was whether or not servers should be merged to alleviate the problem with low population servers. With the announcement that Virtual Realms will be tested on the patch 5.4 PTR, this subject became very timely, if not a little belated. Blizzard's answer to whether or not servers should be merged seems to be yes ... kinda. Rather than merging servers into several bigger servers, Virtual Realms will cluster several separate realms together into one big meta server with a shared AH and the ability to join guilds and groups cross realm. I assume that like servers will be put together, just like CRZ, so that PVE and PVP players won't be mixed.

If Virtual Realms make it to the live realms and work, it seems like an excellent solution to the problem of dead and imbalanced servers. But how will it be implemented? And what if Virtual Realms don't work? Should servers be merged?

They predicted it

Dead Gnomes Society's alykii actually predicted virtual consolidation. Looking very prescient, alykii described what it looks like we'll be testing.

Cross-realm Guilds – the ability to join a guild physically located on another realm without having to transfer characters.One AH for each faction (yes, it would change the economy as we know it, but the AH interface needs a makeover anyway).Cross realm grouping for ALL content without necessarily having to go through the battletag system.The ability to mail items across realms to other toons.The ability to send tells to players not on your battletag or in your group by typing the name-realm.

The only thing not mentioned in the patch notes about Virtual Realms so far is mail, but it only makes sense that with cross-realm guilds and auction houses that we'll have cross-realm mail.

Jeff LaBowski at Sportsbard also suggested cross-realm everything as a solution, but is reticent to try it.

This option makes me shudder a little. I think I would feel more like a number than a name. They would need to update the UI in the auction house. They would also need to start moderating public chats. If you don't know what I am talking about- roll a toon on Cenarion Circle or Argent Dawn and wander over to Goldshire. Read /1 general chat for a minute. You will only need a minute. This is what we can come to expect more of if we get more CRZ or "super servers". Not really looking forward to that.

I admit that the Elwynn Forest general chat is pretty awful on just about any decently populated server. It's not just the infamous erotic roleplayers on certain RP servers. The general tendency toward Barrens Chat or worse exists in Goldshire for some reason.

It will be interesting to see how the chat channels will be handled on Virtual Realms. Perhaps the zones will be instanced as many other MMOs do. In both City of Heroes and Star Wars: The Old Republic, zones would be instanced but you could go to any zone you wished if you wanted to meet up with friends. Carmelo at Clever Musings did not like the way Guild Wars 2 handled overpopulated zones and is not looking forward to any possible implementation of overflow zones in WoW.

Blizzard could clearly design a better system, but I'm wary of the logistics. What happens when someone switches zones? Could you voluntarily switch to a different zone instance like TERA allows players to? Would that open the potential for abuse? People already complain about CRZ making it impossible to find rare NPCs. Would players constantly begin swapping between zone instances looking for the Time Lost Proto-Drake? Would spawn timers need to be adjusted to compensate for the dramatic increase to players in a zone?

At The Golden Crusade, xsinthis2 also discussed Cross Realm Zones and the possibility of expanding it to the AH and guilds as being the only way to make CRZ work to alleviate the issues in low population realms. Anastrace said something similar in the comments.

Single player appeal

While most people agreed that either merging servers or expanding CRZ was the right thing to do, some are happy on their low pop servers. Although World of Warcraft is a multiplayer game, Jimmy and others like to play it like a single player game. Jordan is also a proponent.

WoW may technically be an MMO-rpg, but it is still a phenomenal single-player RPG. The amount of hours and quality solo play I've gotten out of WoW outstrip any rpg I've ever played in my life. Whatever console rpg I pick up, no matter how much I like it, I can only clock in about 100 hours before I get bored with it and need to put it down for 1-3 years. But I haven't put WoW down since 2007!

Names

Quite a few people mentioned the inherent problem with names when merging servers together. Whether as one big meta realm or merging two or more realms into one, keeping one's identity is very important to most players. Many people, including shawneesue, thought that using the original server name as a sort of surname would allow people to keep their preferred names. I assume that is how it will be done on the Virtual Realms.

Login to the character, not the realm

A few people, such as Yoshihito, would like to see the realm choice come after logging into a character, rather than merging the realms. This system is used in Toontown Online, where you could choose non-full servers and teleport to friends as necessary.

What about the economy?

There was much discussion about what would happen to the economy, should the Auction House go cross realm. For example, gamer4279 thinks that prices would bottom out. But jemjem.nightfall believes that people will be selling more at the lower price, therefor making up for the difference with volume instead of high prices. On the other hand, shawneesue is afraid that auctions would come and go too fast to be clicked on. It's hard to say what a cross-realmed AH will be like for WoW before we actually see it.

Merge away

Regardless of the method used, most people believed that some kind of merging of the realms, whether virtually or physically, was needed to fix the problems of low population realms. I, for one, am very excited about Virtual Realms and hope they make it to the live servers. And I think that this solution is better than merging servers. We'll have to see what patch 5.4 ends up delivering to us. Tags: community-blog-topic, community-blog-topic-results, crz, featured, game-discussion, gamer-discussion, merge-servers, virtual-realms, world-of-warcraft-discussion, world-of-warcraft-topics, wow-discussion, wow-hot-topics, wow-issues, wow-topics

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

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Community Blog Topic: Should servers be merged?

The last Community Blog Topic discussed what features we wish WoW had. Many people had wishes that would be solutions for the current low population server problem. Mine was to have one free character transfer per month. Others suggested that realms be merged and there was also much talk about making WoW one giant server.

Many pointed out that my idea of free transfers would help people leave low pop realms, but everyone might move to the same popular realms that already have queues. Leaving it up to each individual player might be too haphazard a way to handle it. But there is a certain appeal to letting people chose where they want to move their characters. Perhaps the highest population servers would not be available for free transfers.

What about merging servers? One of the main problems is perception. If Blizzard decides to save low pop servers by merging them, they will be admitting two things: that Cross Realm Zones aren't working for what they're trying to do and that subscriptions are so low they have to adjust the realms accordingly. Merging servers would definitely hype up "the sky is falling" mentality.

What if Blizzard put us all together on one big server? This would be a major change, but wouldn't necessarily mean that WoW's decline is inevitable. It would mean a new direction for how they view massively multiplayer. Of course, we all couldn't be in the same zone at the same time, but games like City of Heroes and Star Wars: The Old Republic instanced zones just for that purpose.

The way it would work, if done the same way as those games, is that once too many people fill Orgrimmar-1, Orgrimmar-2 through whatever would be created. You could still talk to your friends in another instance, but you couldn't see them unless one of you requested to change instances from a simple drop-down menu option. It worked well for the populations on those game's servers, but World of Warcraft's millions might be too much for that to work. I really don't know. A problem with both merging servers and having just one enormous server would be names. We get very attached to our character names and would like to keep them even when moving. One way that this could be accomplished would be the addition of surnames. So my goblin mage could be Tizzi Sparklepants and therefore be able to keep her name even if there are many other Tizzis out there.

I like CRZ because I do feel like I'm in a multiplayer game when I'm having to fight for the same quest mobs while leveling instead of being all by my lonesome. But it doesn't solve poor local economies and it doesn't promote local communities. Merging servers, if done properly, would help both. But what about CRZ AHs and/or CRZ guilds. Perhaps that would solve low pop problems without having to lose server identity and still have room for returning subscribers.

Should Blizzard merge servers in order to get rid of empty servers? Or is there another solution? Would it be better to merge them all into one big server? How should that be handled? Or should servers just be left as they are and let CRZ work its magic -- if you can call it that?

Blog about your answer and post a link in the comments below. Or if you don't have a WoW-related blog, just leave a comment with your response. Tags: community-blog-topic, featured, game-discussion, gamer-discussion, realms, servers, world-of-warcraft-discussion, world-of-warcraft-topics, wow-discussion, wow-hot-topics, wow-issues, wow-topics

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

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EU Servers back up after lengthy downtime

Problems began late last night in the EU, with players reporting on the forums that they had been seeing battle.net friends disconnecting in large groups from their servers, 20 or more at a time. These issues eventually turned into random disconnects for ever larger numbers of players, followed by players being unable to connect at all.

As WoW Insider's EU spy, I tried to connect myself, and received an error saying that my characters could not be found. Don't be alarmed if you received the same error, simply check your characters on the armory, if you can access it, and ensure they're still there.

Blizzard Community Manager Lurdlespor took to the forums at 10:51 GMT, some eight hours after initial reports came in, to inform players of what was going on, and has provided hourly updates since then. There is not a resolution, nor is a timescale available, leaving many players frustrated after a reported 17 hours downtime. WoW Insider will continue to update this post with new details as they appear.

The technical issues that we were experiencing earlier have now been resolved. Apologies for the inconvenience.

- Blizzard CS EU (@BlizzardCSEU_EN) December 29, 2012

The technical issues are now resolved, with a fairly epic 20+ hours of downtime for some EU players. Lurdlespor's posts remain after the break.
LurdlesporUpdate 18:00 GMT: The issues restricting access to World of Warcraft continue, we are still liaising with our network partners to resolve this issue but we have no updates at this time regarding an estimated time for a solution.

This issue will continue to be investigated and is our top priority. We apologise for the disruption this has caused.

Update 17:00 GMT: We continue to work with our network partners to resolve this issue, however we do not have any updated info on this at this time. The forum and website access continues to be intermittent, which is also under investigation.

Update 16:00 GMT: We are still working with our network providers to resolve this issue, however we do not have an ETA for a fix for this just yet. When we get more concrete information, we will let you know.

We are also experiencing slowdown and some errors with our community sites, which may prevent players from reaching the Account Management and Forum pages, this is also under investigation.

Update 15:00 GMT: This is still being worked on, however we do not have an estimated time just yet for a fix. Please check back on this thread later, we will update as soon as we have more information.

Update 14:00 GMT: We do not have any firm updates to share with you regarding a time for a resolution of this issue, it is still under investigation and we are working closely with our network partners in order to resolve this. We will let you know as soon as we have further information.

Update 13:00 GMT: We are still working on this issue in liaison with our network partners, no estimated time for a resolution just yet. We apologise for the delay in this being resolved.

Update 12:00 GMT: This issue is still being investigated and worked on, and our network team is working with our network partners to resolve this issue as soon as possible. We do not have an estimated time for a solution yet, and will update you with further information as soon as we have it.

Update 11:22 GMT: Please note this issue is also affecting emails sent from us, so if you have requested a password reset or require another form of email from our support team, it may be delayed while this issue is being worked on.

Update 10:51 GMT: We do not have an estimated time for a resolution on this issue yet, we continue to liaise with the affected parties, and we will let you know as soon as we have further information on this issue.

We are currently experiencing external general connectivity issues which started on the night of the 28 - 29/12

Symptoms of this issue include either being unable to connect properly to a character, i.e. being stuck on a loading screen, or being disconnected once in-game.

Our network technicians are investigating this issue, and we will update here when we have further information regarding this issue.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this issue

Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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