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Newest WOW-coup: Cross-Realm Zones
Elikal
Member UncommonPosts: 7,912
Blizzard with it's monster MMO WOW has once again proven to be in the front line of change and tackling issues, by introducint cross realm zones.
http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/05/10/world-of-warcraft-unveils-cross-realm-zones/
"The feature does exactly what it says on the tin: When a zone is underpopulated, the players in that zone will be given the option to form a group with players from a select pool of realms (presumably the server's battlegroup) with whom they can run about and quest as usual."
Great idea! I wish all MMOs had this. *cough* SWTOR *cough* But noooo, Bioware with it's 100-300 million dollars wasn't able to plan something to work with the issue of unpopulation. Bah.
Chapeau to Blizzard.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Comments
The concept is not new, i'm glad they are doing it.
Propably means more upcoming mmos let the "Server" thing finally die and develope a framework who works with instances of zones primary.
Which MMO with a persistant open world and server based design has done this before? I know of none.
CO and STO have a one-server only with inifite shards, which isn't the same and has a disadvantage that is doesn't allow regional language servers. To me this concept from WOW is pretty new. And I have seen close to all MMOs out there.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
It's a 2 pronged advancement as it allows for x-server zones as well as same-server copies of zones.
Multi-phased zones are common in a lot of games, used particularly in F2P games starter areas to avoid overcrowding.
Using a x-server zone is a new tech though, how it plays out will be interesting, if it ends up being just you & your group in an instanced version of a zone it'll be crap in view, if however it manages to put a whole bunch of groups & even some solo players into a zone with a good but not overcrowded population it will be great, that feeling of being in a deserted game wont be quite so bad.
I also think the tech would work really well in other games & as I still playit yes SWTOR would benefit from this tech greatly, but I'm not under any illusions it'll make it into that title any time soon, eventually though.
This tech is sort of a hybrid between sharded servers & a "single server tech" so it will be interesting to see how it changes the genre.
You're praising WOW. Give it some time. Someone will be along shortly to state how WOW is yet again destroying/ dumbing down mmo's with this horrible step in the wrong direction.
I suggest you look up guesting in GW2
This only works in MMOs with a static world. If your MMO has dynamic content that can modify an area per server it does not work. You walk into the zone and see the evil villian of the world has taken everything, you leave and come back and find it never happened.
Questing in GW2 isn't cross server.
Welcome to the instancing of MMORPG genre. Thanks for nothing GW2. The days of connected zones and open worlds are now dead. This is just a sad way of merging servers without having to admit it.
Why they even bother doing that, everything is soloable, they have removed group requirements from teh game except instances and thats got group finder anyways. Unless blizard are goign to be placing group required quests back into the game there is absolutly no need to do this.
It's guesting and yes it is, that's the whole point of guesting
He's talking about the overflow server.
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I'll give Blizzard credit for trying to make an awful server system substantially less bad. But let's not confuse that for having a server system that is actually good. It's far better to scale the number of instances of a given zone to fit the total number of players in the zone, rather than exactly the same number for all zones. See how Champions Online does this, for example. Someone above brought up the possibility of different languages, but if CO had a large enough playerbase to justify it, it would be easy to specify English language zones, French language zones, Spanish language zones, and so forth--and scale each up or down to have as many as needed. Guild Wars already does exactly that for towns and outposts.
Wouldn´t it just be better to let players change servers for free and merging a few?
Then if you can't find players on your server you can change to another one instead.
The idea is not bad or anything but it seems like a complicated solution for problem that isn't that hard.
This is just another gimmick just like dungeon finder was so they don't have to merge servers and cause mass panic on the interenet. Blizzard desperately trying to stop the bleeding.
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No he's not... that's the opposite. GW2 has a couple things going on...
Guesting. If you have a friend on a different server, you can play on that server as a guest if you wish. You won't eb able to get into the WvW for the server you're guested on, but you can have the full run of the PvE world.
Overflow servers (Humorously not something WoW needs...) are servers that are always running but "technically" unnamed. If your home server is full you have the option of playing on an overflow server instead of waiting in a queue. This also works at the zone level, if a zone is full you can go into an overflow server (with your party) rather than wait in a queue. When space is available you'll have the option to go back to your home server.
Blizzard's a little behind the times on this.
Oderint, dum metuant.
GW2s idea is just to avoid waiting to log in on the server for 5 hours or whatever, you will get into the server as soon as a spot opens. Few if any MMOs can take an almost infinite players in the same zone. It is a good idea and I would be surprised if other games wont copy it. You can imagine being in a zone made for 150 players with 10 000 players if it was even technological possible.
I do agree that Blizzard needs to merge some servers though, low population servers suck.
Nothing to see here, just the same old Blizzard coppying everyone else's great ideas. I swear that company is as intellectually bankrupt as one can get.
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I could argue that there isn't a reason to NOT do it. Believe it or not, there are still new folks joining WoW, my guild alone has picked up 4-5 complete WoW noobs in the past 6 weeks or so. The one thing all of them have commented on is how dead the leveling zones are, and they are right. Leveling zones die as soon as the majority of the population hits end cap. It's not uncommon to not see anyone else while leveling, and that can be discouraging. If among all of their servers there are 50 people leveling in Stranglethorn Vale, why not clump a bunch of them together in a common zone?
Beyond all that, it will reinvigorate world pvp on pvp servers.
Out of curiosity... what MMO has done something like this before?
What can men do against such reckless hate?
Concepts of cloud computing are coming to MMOs. In IT, you often don't think of servers as individual entities any more, just as an abstract package of resources you order from the farm of hardware.
There's no reason to have X distinct copies of the entire world when you're really only trying to load-balance a few zones where most of the players are concentrated.
Now personally, it rubs the world-integrity side of me the wrong way that there is no objective version of the map I'm walking through, but games with phasing and instances and private questlines have already burned that bridge so long ago.
There's group content in WoW zones? When did this happen?
Seriously, why would I want to group up for solo content? If my zone is empty, all the better. There's no one there to steal my kills and loot my nodes. So long as they have cross-server dungeons, this seems a bit redundant. I can see other games benefiting from this kind of technology, but I would think that WoW would be one those that would benefit the least.
Guild Wars 2 already has it with "Guesting". The difference is that you can choose to guest over to a friends server at any time, not only during low-pop times, and I believe having a friend on that server is a pre-requisitie.
Oderint, dum metuant.
Unless you have server vs. server vs. server PvP scenarios.
Oderint, dum metuant.
Guesting is something different. Basically, guesting is to go to another server and play there, like a free server transfer (excluding WvW, of course...), from what I've read you could practically play the whole game on another server if you wanted to. This is (from what I understand) staying in your server and creating a group with people on different servers.
BTW, do you have a source on the thing about needing to have a friend on that server as a requisite?... Completely out of curiosity, since it's the first time I heard of it.
What can men do against such reckless hate?
Right, so all Blizzard is doing is removing the "friend required" pre-requisite. Yah, it's not "multi-server instances", it's you being able to temporarily change servers to play with a friend, for free. You still maintain your home server as is.
Oderint, dum metuant.