The End of WOW

Yea thats right this game will be the end.

Hur de hur.

It certainly won't end WoW, but I expect it will take a good bite out of it. The ongoing cross realm zone debacle is disenfranchising more players every day, and I've started seeing players on WoW's forums suggesting alternatives to one another, RIFT being a prominent one.

Side note: the free weekend was a blast! Nonstop PA XP.

valkod23 posted...

Cross realm zone debacle? Can you enlighten me as to what that is?

Basically, it was a pseudo server merge. All of the overworld zones from Classic to Cataclysm are now shared between any number of realms.

Problem is it has degraded the game's performance, broken previously working features, and made questing in those zones a headache, for technical and social reasons. Auto reporting of players from other realms is broken, and people know it, so jerks can grief to their heart's content. You still can't trade or guild with players from off realm, so it really did nothing to help low population servers, other than introduce all the negatives of high population, like extra competition for mobs and nodes. Players who had paid for transfers to low population servers for their former benefits are especially incensed.

It was done to make zones look more populated and presumably to reduce their server footprint. Perhaps worst of all is that while it was done mainly to cut costs and save face, Blizzard is mostly ignoring all the feedback and still trying to spin it as a benefit. What little they've said on the issue amounts to "we know stuff's broke, it'll be difficult or impossible to fix, sorry". There's been no indication that the feature will be rolled back.

There's a stickied complaint thread on their general forum with thousands of posts, itself a continuation of about a dozen other capped threads. At this point players suspect that someone high up the ladder wants cross realm zones kept in the game, and the CMs and customer service have been ordered to keep silent.