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Sunday 14 July 2013

Breakfast Topic Thoughts: Potential Virtual Realm Headaches

Todays WoW Insider Breakfast Topic is about Potential Virtual Realm Headaches. Elizabeth Harper asks:
"are you looking forward to virtual realms or are you frustrated that they'll crowd your realm? Are you racing to get farming done before patch 5.4 -- and virtual realms -- arrive?"
I'm really looking forward to virtual realms!

My Alliance home server is medium population and it suits me just fine as it is. But it's quite stagnant. It's the same names selling the majority of stuff on the AH at stupid prices. There's the same trolls spamming anal jokes (though I don't find them particularly funny). The guilds are much the same aswell with the odd new one popping up and dying off.

Virtual realms will add new blood - new sellers, new guilds, new trolls (they'll still be trolls but hopefully they'll have some different jokes!) etc. Of course this assumes that this new blood itself is good - but I feel there's a fairly good chance.

I understand that a lot of peope are wary of this new venture and that it may not work out for every realm. Full realms may not feel they need more comeptition etc. but dead servers will almost certianly welcome it!

My new found Horde home is one such low population, verging on dead server. I was shocked to see that the AH had just two pages of pets listed! Sure, it'd be a great way for me to make money or would it... you'd think I could sell pets for big money but do the players actually have that sort of gold!? I don't know. I haven't yet tried to sell anything. But as far as servers go it's a prime example of how an injection of new life could bring it back to a thriving hub of activity.

I think that Blizzard will be thinking very carefully about how they implement virtual realms. I'm hoping they will take on board a little of the player feed back regarding cross-realm zones and use it to make virtual servers a real success.

I'm optimistic that they'll try to balance out populations across the board as well as balance out the factions. By this I mean not simply making a random two servers one virtual relams but take a more detailed look. For example, putting a low population heavily Horde server with a medium population heavily Alliance server to create a nicely populated and balanced server.

Of course only time will tell if this is the case...

Oh, and as for farming - I tend to constantly farm what ever I fly over or run past. No matter what level materials it is - no point in wasting it! A little bit of extra competition will liven things up a little. After all the game is a MMO!!

2 comments:

  1. I am excited for Virtual Realms I think. I was initially really bothered by the idea of CRZ but when they introduced it, it was awesome! When they put in time-zone restrictions to the cross-realm grouping, I no longer loved it but I didn't have any issue with it. I suppose I currently 'nothing' CRZ but welcome the chance to meet new people with VR!

    Oh, my one concern... Will the BMAH be shared between the grouped realms!? Must find this out!

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    1. I think there's a lot of people who are in the same 'not bothered' boat. But the drama-queens who keep saying virtual realms are going to be terrible tend to edge those neutral people towards being negative.
      I have no idea about the BMAH. I've only seen info about the normal AH. But it would be interesting to know.

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