by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Cross-realm zones have been around for over a year now, making their first appearance in patch 5.0.4.  For many players, they’ve been a major point of contention since day 1, an example of good intentions on paper not translating smoothly into actual implementation.

The term “cross-realm zones,” often abbreviated as “CRZ,” refers to areas of the game where players on one server are able to interact with players from other realms.  If you’ve run past a player with an asterisk (*) after their name, you’ve encountered CRZ — the asterisk indicates that the player is from a different server.  Developers hoped that implementing this system would grant lower-level zones a population closer to what would be found in endgame areas, and here they’ve gained a measure of success, but often at the cost of major aggravation to those on realms already boasting a higher number of active players.  The algorithm to determine how many cross-realm slots will be open in a particular zone is inelegant, not taking into account the number of players who are trying to navigate smaller questing areas within the zone itself.  For example, CRZ will see that it has room for 15 players within a particular zone and place them there.  It will not, however, see that of those 15 players it just added, 12 of them are appearing in the same cave and being forced to compete for quest mob kills or item gathers.

It’s true that mob and gathering node spawn timers are now dependent on frequency and volume of kill or gather, but on certain high-population servers, even this is not enough to keep up with the overcrowding at these chokepoints that only exist because of CRZ, especially at peak hours.  I spent 45 minutes on Lightbringer last night trying to kill just eight fire elementals at Direforge Hill in the Wetlands, most of that time making circuits on my mount to try and get to the mobs I needed before the onslaught of players from other realms got to them first.  This kind of aggravation leads to the type of behaviors that Blizzard has been trying to discourage with their emphasis on “play nice, play fair” — kill-stealing, grabbing physical pickup items while someone is fighting the mob guarding them, and spawn-camping.  I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since its release date and I can safely say that I never saw these kinds of actions so widespread until CRZ was implemented.  The introduction of “tap-to-all” or even “tap-to-faction” mobs hasn’t even been enough to prevent lines to kill named quest mobs from forming; though named mobs related to a particular quest are now designated by a yellow exclamation point on their nameplate portrait no matter where in Azeroth you are, it seems that the tap-to-x improvements only made it to Pandaria.  For the rest of the continents, the execution is extremely inconsistent, if it even appears at all.

Okay, so this might be a tiny exaggeration.

Possibly the most frustrating aspect is that the removal of most group quests outside of dungeons with the old-world revamps of Cataclysm means that there is no real reason to put up with CRZ beyond superficiality — it makes the zones look fuller.  Some players may enjoy having people to talk to as they level, but just as many, if not more, remain unconcerned with the social aspect of the game.  Before Cataclysm, cross-realm zones would have been a godsend for completing the “elite” quests of days gone by, but even then, an addition to the dungeon finder tool allowing players to find groups for those quests could have fulfilled the same purpose without all of the struggle.

Now connected realms are starting to appear, and so far they seem to be balancing populations with a few added bonuses that CRZ itself is unable to provide.  Guilds and auction houses on connected servers function as one through this new system, and the trade restrictions between players previously seen in cross-realm zones have been lifted.  Though built using the groundwork of the systems behind CRZ and a cautious implementation on a handful of realms, the telltale asterisks are still showing up on servers judged to be too densely populated for inclusion in realm connections, which begs the question: do those servers really need CRZ to begin with?  The beauty of connected realms is that they can be more finely targeted to areas that really need the population boost, rather than the cross-realm carpet-bombing we’ve been seeing.  Realm connections are still far from complete, so it’s quite possible that once this newer system is a bit more firmly in place, basic CRZ will be removed from high-population servers.  At least, we can hope it will.