#38 - Jan. 21, 2015, 10:03 p.m.
01/21/2015 01:26 PMPosted by
Mvura ...
What do you mean by this?
Meaning that things take longer because more people are competing for stuff, with no benefits. Rather than beneficial collision like Connected realms, where you can invite people to guilds, and they don't significantly add to zone populations.
That's a perception issue, though. If we hid realm names there would be no real difference in that person being from your home realm or from another. You can make the argument those resources are going somewhere else, but again, you're going to get the resources you're going to get. People from your realm are likely CRZd to someone else's realm, and mining their nodes, and bringing it back to your server. It's a perception issue more so than an actual gameplay impact.
As for guilds, plenty of people have RealID friends cross-realm, and then actually transfer if necessary to be in their friends' guild--but the advent of flex and both Normal and Heroic being cross-realm means you can stay in your same guilds and have a lot of additional options on how you play the game.
Some realms need to be merged, CRZ does not solve this.
No, and it's not intended to. Connected Realms allow for a lot of the benefits you're probably referring to, and that was an undertaking that happened before Warlords launch (all planned connections were completed back in August). But connecting realms and CRZ offer different benefits, and aren't mutually exclusive. Connecting realms means, for all intents and purposes, a shared population. The vast majority of players (even on lower population realms) are at level cap, or at least leveling through the latest expansion, and so there's essentially always glut of players at the top and in those zones. Connecting realms is limited by that high end concentration of players and what those zones can comfortably support. Meanwhile the lower level zones are probably still very empty. What CRZ allows us to do is set a desired number of players in a zone at a time, and bring players together from many realms into that zone, without also impacting player numbers elsewhere in the game.
it does nothing to help gameplay.
Creating a multiplayer environment where there's both cooperation and disagreements (or groups and pvp, or competition and interaction) between players is largely what MMOs are about, and so I think we'd fundamentally disagree that having more players around in low level zones is, as you put it, anything but unhelpful. We think it is decidedly helpful to the support of a multiplayer gaming environment.
All that said, we'd be interested in hearing specific feedback on situations or issues you're having, experiences and stories about what has made the experience worse, or even better! Nice stories are nice, too. ;)