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Cross Realm Zones hurting WOW & MOP sales???
sunset9
Member Posts: 2
As a former WOW subscriber, I recently bought 30 days of game time to see if MOP was going to be better than Cataclysm, & maybe worth playing again... Blizzard implemented a "feature" shortly before the MOP release called "Cross Realm Zones". Many did not feel it was a feature at all as it brought a wagonload of gamebreaking bugs & gameplay issues, and there was/is no way to "Opt-Out" of it. I personally will not re-subscribe or buy MOP as long as CRZ is live in WOW, and there are SO many others who feel the same. We have been told it is here to stay, suck it up. Thoughts?
Has it cost Blizzard MOP sales & lost subscriptions? I think so. To what extent, I am not certain. There are several threads on this issue with 20,000+ posts detailing issues & requests to Blizzard to remove CRZ entirely. There is a "Remove CRZ" petition out for folks to sign at: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/blizzard-please-remove-cross-realm-zones-from
Links to the 20,000+ Remove CRZ Posts:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6521292325?page=546#10914
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6679517893
Here is one ex-WOW-player's feelings on CRZ and the state of WOW/MOP:
When I was 9 yrs old, our neighbor’s wife brought home a young puppy. It was a shepherd/collie mix, happy & eager to please (I know this because she let me play with it & bring it home on occasion). Her husband didn’t like dogs or was (looking back now) unhappy or just plain sadistic.
Long story short: the husband began keeping the puppy outside 24/7 tied to a post. At first, he gave the puppy a chain that was pretty long, and the puppy learned how far he could run to greet me without getting stop-choked. Well, the husband would occasionally shorten the pup’s chain by 3 or 4 feet, then wait for him to happily race to someone for pets or food and choke/flip as his paramaters had been altered and more of his freedom was just gone. He would laugh every time.
This is how WOW feels to me today. During BC & Wrath, we were given portals in Shatt & Dalaran so we could spend less time traveling & more time actually enjoying our game time. As groups were not always easy to find, quests were made more soloable and our enjoyment grew. Rares and Spirit Beasts were added for taming and , yes, good drops. It was a challenge even then to tame them, but OH was it ever something to look forward to!!! We were out exploring, taming, gathering, BGing questing, dungeoning, raiding etc. Our choice of servers meant a great deal to us. There was something for EVERYONE and we had CHOICES in how we liked to play the game we were paying for.
With Cata, someone decided we would have to spend most of our game time traveling (20 min to Northrend) etc. as they took away our portals. Look! They made a whole new beautiful world to explore, but everyone MUST stay in the home cities ALL THE TIME, because that was “moving forward”.
Come CRZs & MOP…We will force group questing & lower your xp gains, we will present the ILLUSION of populated realms, we will smile as you reach for that node or rare that is phased (you really can’t touch it as it disappears when you get close), we will laugh as you get flagged & camped involuntarily on PVE only servers, we will change time zones & realms randomly without warning and impassively watch you lose the chance to turn in or accept dailies, plan an event, participate in the Darkmoon Faire (because in your new time zone it is already gone). Fishing tournaments don’t work anymore because someone from another realm fished up the winners on their realm & turned them in on yours seconds after the tourney started, or you got a winner and can’t turn it in because on the random realm you are playing on now, the tournament is over before it began? We will disable the fishing tournaments!!! We will chuckle as the passenger you carry on your 2 person mount is rudely dimounted & falls to their death at each invisible CRZ crossover border. We will see that each quest takes 15-30 minutes to complete because all of the drops/mobs are dead, and you will continue to spend 20 minutes traveling to northrend because you don’t get the portals back! So get OUT into the world & enjoy the game. Huh???!
This is working as intended according to whom again???
My Dad went next door and talked the neighbor into letting us have that puppy. We had him for 13 years & he was my dear friend until the day he passed. Thankfully, WOW is just a digital form of entertainment that I can abandon. I will not pay to be stop-choked.
And to those in charge who think Cross Realm Zones is a good idea and WILL STAY, we say, GC & cohorts, if you are burned out or you simply hate puppies, PLEASE, hand the job over to someone else! This is NOT moving forward
Comments
the OP post is SO sad
(
sz
Cross realms won't hurt most of their revenue from server transfers and in some cases it might even push someone to use it - n example one os server from cross-server group has guild(s) that try to make everyone else game miserable.
That's why there is number of "features" implemented for years now instead of merging deserted / low pop servers.
WoW lost over 3 mln of subs, even if 60% of that loss if from China it still HAD to make many western servers deserted.
Guess what? WoW China servers were merged, USA & EU weren't.
your math doesnt quite cut it though.. from peak of around 11 million to current of 9.2 million = -2 million.. not as you seem to think, over 3 million, and while your probably correct that the larger proportion of those losses were from china, the game is a long long way from having to merge servers, if anything, the cross server bits make it a little too crowded at peak times, probably would have been a good idea to allow servers to 'decouple' at peak times though i've no idea if they can do that.
Sorry but you're wrong.
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=2847881
Peak was at over 12 milion.
For the most blunt post i give you a thumbs up
/thread anyone ???
i was under the impression that it was a little over 11 million. over 12 million does seem a bit unbelievable.. while pre MoP subs base was 9.2m i did wonder if the game would draw back enough for it to reach 10 million again.. but it doesnt change things that much, at peak times on moonglade it is way too crowded, and i don't mean in stormwind, but out in the wilds, sometimes its a race to grab a mob before someone else does
You do have a good point, lol!
WOW was the very first game i ever played. Some friends got me into BC with them & it was a blast.
I quit playing shortly into Cataclysm because of the game's direction, but I still check back every now & again to see if there have been any changes for the better.
Sadly, although what I did manage to see of the music & starting areas of MOP appear to be well done, the direction of the game itself & the implementation of CRZs far outweighs any chance of my returning.
Call it nostalgia, I play & enjoy other games now, but WOW had a special immersion for me, and one can always hope, right?
Very nice OP, though how anyone can actually treat a dog like that, especially a puppy, is beyond me.
Yeah, I do not like the CRZ at the moment. Pre-MoP it was okish in the sense that I actually got to see one or two people out in the old world. It introduced a few bugs and lag though.
Post-MoP is bordering on disaster as now with all of the bazillion panda monks, it is impossible to level out in the old world. I also got the very annoying things-disappearing-under-my-nose thing. People were getting surly with each other, thanks to all of the mob stealing and pushing others around. It got to the point that it was completely unfun and I logged out frustrated.
I think they should have waited a month or two after MoP's release to put it into effect. They had to have known that the expansion would have brought in a lot of people wanting to play the new class.
About your other comments, it does seem really ill-thought out. PvE servers and PvP servers should not be clustered. I didn't see that at all so far on mine thank goodness.
I did not try the Darkmoon Faire or the fishing extravaganzas so I did not know about that. That seems very bizarre, I thought that the Darkmoon Faire always starts and stops at the same time every month for everyone.
I am one of the fools who bought MoP, but I prepurchased it before I knew they were implementing CRZ's. I really wish now that I hadn't (edit - but for reasons other than the CRZ to be honest).
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.
What in the hell is wrong with people? So many zones were completely dead and lifeless, and now withthe CRZ I am seeing people all over the place. I even made a friend with someone from another realm while just randomly out grouping, added him as a friend, and now we can pretty much play the game together at any time even being from separate realms.
In essence, this brings groups of servers together so they're like one massive server. How is this a BAD thing? Why is this even an ISSUE!?
If you're so anti-social that you prefer to play the game without running into many people, then go play a single player game and leave the MMO genre to the people that actually enjoy multiplayer.
Thanks.
Why would we need facts?
MMO players have been successful at creating three fully-functioning machines; the "Speculation Machine", the "Hate Machine", and the "Fanboy Machine". None of them require fuel (facts), rarely break down, and seemingly make their users happy.
http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/09/24/blizzard-clarifies-cross-realm-zones/
Read.
Didn't you READ the multiple terrible bugs that come with CRZs, at least right now until and IF they're fixed? Did you read the OP at all? There's another link in this thread that will also detail some of the issues and the responses beneath it are even MORE eye-opening.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
CRZ's aren't perfect yet...there's no way they could be, as adequate testing for the live environment just wouldn't be feasible on the test servers alone I don't think. However, many of the problems are slowly vanishing (not all, not yet) as the kinks are worked out. CRZ is nothing more than the second step in a multi-tiered approach to altering how game servers work in a fundamental way, in my opinion. The first step was phasing. Cross-Realm AH's will follow, and one might consider the Cross-Realm Battlegroups to have even been the first step (although I think that's pushing it). Like any new technology, it will require time to perfect. When phasing first hit it was a nightmare; now it's generally very smooth, and transitions don't even require you to leave the area. There was the 'disappearing node' problem -really- bad early in Cata with phasing, but now I haven't seen a node dephase since I've been back and have only had a couple dezone from CRZ's (usually ones right at a national/zone border, like Wetlands --> Twilight HIghlands). Even then, you only know about it not because you can see the node, but because you can see it's marker on your minimap.
I know it's still a bit rough OP, but you don't throw out an incredibly useful technology because it has a few bugs in it, even when those bugs are highly annoying. CRZ's have the potential to put the massive in the world in a way we've never dreamed of, and this would perforce lead to bigger, more extravagant worlds and other changes, like GW's node-sharing for instance. The potential is amazing, but we have to help it along. Don't let a few smallish (in the long run) things turn you away; besides, there are no CRZ's in Pandaria proper yet. You'll love it! Nodes EVERYWHERE! I got 290 ore just questing 1/3rd of a zone yesterday!
You really do hate them dont you?
I think more important here is, that WoW had perfectly fine seamless open world that worked like a dream, and then they butchered it simply to dodge the embarassing process of server merging. With this another community scattering "feature" they now can have servers up and running even if they only have a handful of people in them, no mergers, no doomsayers!
This is another feature added just to keep business side of things going strong, meh. It's funny to even think they say "CRZ is there so low pop areas have more people to play with" when the whole leveling experience to max level is designed as a SOLO trek. How about "CRZ is there to spice up world PvP" when there's no world PvP objectives or rewards after 8 years other than feeling good about chain one shotting lowbies from other realms on your max char? Obvious lies is a good way to insult your customers.
i agree
for PVE -- anyone who says CRZ is helpful for quests is overlooking changes made last year (patch 4.3) which nerfed almost all outdoor group quests under level 80 as solo now
heres two good quotes from battlenet thread
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6521292325?page=546
I'm trying to level my baby Shaman (only level 8). I'm in Goldshire, and it's a packed. I picked up the quests and headed to Fargodeep Mines. There are 15 people there from all different servers on the same quest. Everyone is competing to kill the Kobolds, and the mines are empty. Yeah..."I no take candle" is right.
I'm irritated at the people from the other servers even though it's not their fault. We're all trying to tag the same mobs as they spawn way too slow for the amount of people doing the quest.
My goal is to get to level 10 so I can do bgs until level 15. Then I can park my butt in Stormwind and sit in LFD.
- Blizzard's goal of getting people out into the world failed.
- Bilzzard's goal of making zones more populated worked a little too well (resulting in a fail)
- And there is NO socializing going on in the zones because everyone is annoyed, and they just want to complete their freakin' quests and move on.
----------------------------------------------------
I just started feeling the effects of CRZ on Wrymrest Accord, while leveling a Druid in Northrend, and further into the Cataclysm zones.
Here's my beef with it:
1) Group quests. The only group quests left in the game now are the ones in Icecrown, Ring of Blood in Nagrand, Ampitheatre of Anguish in Zul'Drak and the Crucible of Carnage in the Twilight Highlands. If there are so few group quests, why do I need to see people from other servers? Especially when WRA is a high population RP server, and it is linked with every other PvE RP server. And yes, I have seen people from every PvE RP server since I set foot off the boat in Borean Tundra.
2) I quest so I don't have to deal with other people. I prefer questing, this is one reason why. If I wanted to deal with other people while leveling, I would sit my !@# in a city, trolling trade while waiting for my dungeon queue to pop, just so I can deal with 4 other people, I do not know, where most of the time they are complaining that the tank or healer suck, that someone keeps pulling, or they're spamming recount in a level 25 dungeon.
3) Farming to level my profession. I like to level my profession while I level my character, it gives me more to do. Now I have to deal with every other person on every other RP server that is also farming. Again, WRA is a high pop server, I don't need to see Sisters of Elune, Moon Guard, Silver Hand etc, etc. I'm okay with seeing people just from my realm.
EQ2 fan sites
More because of launch than anything. It was the same way when Death Knights were released, and CRZ's didn't exist back then. The only difference is that some small number of servers -- those with the lowest populations -- were spared the nightmare. Outlands was horrific at the time; groups of 4 Death Knights and a healer were not just common, they were the -norm-. Much as it is now with the new Pandaren and Monks. Having both a new race -and- class is almost a double-whammy. In a couple weeks it will all be back to normal again from the levelling rush though. My baby Pandaren is waiting for that time now while I level my other characters.