Once outpost rush and maybe someday future other battleground type options become available, I would like to see cross server play at least for those types of things. I much prefer battleground/instanced play to have fast queues over being server locked. Nobody will tolerate waiting in an hour queue for a game like we had to in early WoW days due to faction imbalances and being limited to same-server populations.
We’ll still see our server people constantly out in the world and for territory related things, but for instanced PvP and maybe PvE if they change the dungeon system eventually, it would allow us to find players to do content at any time of day much easier.
No thanks. X-Realm play is the death knell for server-based communities and you provided a perfect example of what happens when it’s implemented. There is no server community in WoW and X-Realm killed it.
i felt from the start servers needed to be larger. maybe zones where each zone was a wall and you would enter transition from one zone to another server. kind of like foxhole does then you could try to get more players. only porblem is if one zone gets maxed that could be an issue like as in foxhole it does happen and you wait at a border.
It isn’t at all. People have been saying things like that in WoW for over a decade and they’re always wrong.
I played WoW since open beta of vanilla. I didn’t recognize people’s names in battlegrounds that much more before they added cross server games than after. You run into hundreds or thousands of different people over time either way. You’re not going to develop recognition of 90% of the people you encounter in an MMO. The small handful that you do maybe you add to your friends list or whatever.
With cross server games you can still queue as a group. You still run into the same people if you all happen to play at the same time on a regular basis. Even in a game like Overwatch with no individual servers I run into the same people all the time because they happen to be doing the same things I am around the same time on a regular basis. I played on Illidan in WoW, which was a very large server. Even in recent expansions I’d regularly end up in completely random dungeon groups that were all Illidan players or see several of them in battlegrounds. Still didn’t recognize most of their names even when they were from my server. Some of us just are never going to pay that much attention to people we have no intention of hanging out with regularly regardless of what server they’re from.
For content like Outpost Rush or other future similar queued content, fast queue times should be a much higher priority. The vast majority of the playerbase would likely like to actually play and not wait in long queues for the sake of “server community.”
edit: I’ll also add that in many cases you may not even like or want to be around certain people from your server that much. Maybe there’s a guild full of people you just wouldn’t get along with. Being able to play with people on other servers is actually a much better overall situation even from a social aspect because you have a larger total pool of people to potentially connect with.
I’ve seen probably dozens if not hundreds of rants in WoW about the importance of “server community” and how it “died.”
It’s almost 100% based on nonsensical fantasies that have no basis in reality whatsoever. It’s almost always entirely irrational as well, refusing to acknowledge that they’re essentially arguing in favor of sometimes hours long queue times for certain activities on many servers and that the tradeoff for the fantasy of “server community” justifies that situation.
People being unable to play the game in order to try to reinforce the delusional of a tight-knit server community simply isn’t something any game developer should ever give into.
The fantasy these people live in seems to be that people develop more or closer relationships because of being locked into one server with a smaller number of players. This does not happen in practice for most people. Many players don’t even develop super close relationships with most of their guildies (if they’re even in one) let alone that many other players on their servers. The friends list exists for a reason and it doesn’t harm your server if you can even place people on that list who aren’t on your server. My WoW friends list has people who play on several different servers which is far more useful for being able to find a group for a non-queuable type of content than being forced to try to find people on one server to form a group. Spamming recruitment chat for an hour to do activity X Y or Z isn’t going to make your server community stronger. It is going to drive players away from your game and make it a lot less fun due to people not being able to even participate in the game in the first place.
Being unable to find groups for things or waiting in long BG queues thanks to population or faction balance issues or because you’re trying to play at a time not many on your server are playing will kill a server community a lot faster than cross-server play due to them deciding to just not bother playing at all. Fast access to content should always take priority. Respect people’s time or they’ll just not play your game at all.
No, I explained very clearly why it’s irrational to jump on the “server community” bandwagon. I notice you don’t bother to even acknowledge or address how a lack of cross-server play has a detrimental effect on queue times for things like battlegrounds (outpost rush).
Anyone who tries to take this position that I’ve seen refuses to acknowledge or address the simple reality that opposing any cross-server queuing or grouping inevitably leads to long queue times and an inability to find groups for content. They refuse to accept that their position is detrimental to the health of the game or even understand the perspective of the players who end up waiting in long battleground queues for the sake of their server community fantasy that they can never even really articulate or explain sufficiently to demonstrate that it’s somehow real or harmed by cross-server play in the first place.
Content accessibility and being able to actually play trump some flawed conceptual feeling some people have about the importance of limited size server communities.
Awaiting a compelling server community argument that actually addresses the reality of the game and not just vague feelings. Never seen one in over a decade of people saying the same things about WoW, but you never know.
No, you explained why you think it’s irrational. You think the time to find groups is more important than server communities. You claim those communities are - or may as well be - nonexistent. You think content accessibility trump some you call “some flawed conceptual feeling”.
All you have is what you think.
You have opinions, so do others. Mine is opposed to yours. That doesn’t make me irrational, or a believer in nonsensical fantasies, or a proponent of flawed conceptual feelings. Now you can keep heading down this whole “If you don’t agree with me you’re wrong” line if you want to - but from my perspective that’s just going to lead to me blocking you and not having to look at this garbage from you any longer.
So you feel people waiting in an hour long queue for a battleground is a price worth paying for your community that is somehow benefitted by not being able to play with a larger playerbase?
That’s not why you’re wrong, you’re wrong because you think a vague concept of server community is a strong position vs. people having to wait in a queue for an hour. Which is totally realistic btw. Many WoW servers had hour long queue times for battlegrounds before they added xserver play. Even a ten or 20 minute queue time for content should be considered excessive (yes, that is an opinion).
Server populations are different. Faction populations are different. You can not reasonably expect a decent experience for queued content without cross-server play. This has been proven over several years of MMOs being played. It’s not just an opinion. Without cross-server play, some servers if not most will have long queue times for BG style content. Finding dungeon groups will also be very difficult for a lot of people as well. These are things the “server community” advocates never bother to address whenever these things are discussed.
