Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Server Transferring - Don't do it! ...yet.

This post will be featured in Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival, now hosted by Selltacular.  Check out the other great posts, which will be live at the time of me posting this, as I'm a day late! 

If you haven't heard yet (and it's pretty hard not to), the 5.4 PTR Patch Notes have been released, and they're causing quite a stir.  Today I'm going to be focusing in on the most prolific one, at least for those of us who currently play on low-pop realms:

  • Virtual Realms are sets of realms that are fused together, and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Players on the same Virtual Realm will be able to join guilds, access a single Auction House, join arena teams and raids, as well run dungeons or group up to complete quests.
Source

Cross Realm AH
First of all I believe some apologies are in order.  I can't find the post where I ranted about how the rampant speculation about this type of change was premature, and although I still think it was to some extent, it was not as far off as I thought it would be honestly.  I truly did not believe that Blizzard would try to integrate this before dropping a new expansion, but it seems I was dead wrong.

That being said, if you didn't transfer your toons last week during the half off sale (and wasn't that just so perfectly timed to end 2 days before this announcement), then I'd suggest waiting to learn about how they'll implement this before you decide to transfer servers at all, especially if the economy is why you'll be moving.   What it seems like (at least right now) is that they're going to group a few servers together and combine them into one meta-server ("Virtual Realms").  Honestly, we don't know much yet about how they'll combine servers, I'm hoping they'll join multiple small realms together, but we'll see as they release more info.  This is a game changer though.  What they're doing is basically combining realms, without having to change the "home realm" you're on, which I think they did so that people did not have to change overlapping guild and player names.

This change, no matter how they implement it, will be a great and welcome change for small realms with struggling economies, and I look forward to having more sales and increased competition.  There are very few bad repercussions that could come from this, but the one I think Blizzard will struggle with most is the "smooth transition" phase.  They're just not good at that part of things, usually struggling when changes go live.  However, this change will give you more ability to sell, and less reliance on being the lowest auction out there.  I honestly feel like a kid on Christmas hearing these changes, small realmers rejoice!

Patch 5.4 Goldmaking
I'll probably be posting more about the changes, because these sorts of things get me excited, but there are 2 really good discussion threads you should check out on The Consortium forums in the mean time: Scaling Item Enhancements and Fused Realms, there's already a lot of good discussion going on about these changes there, with no doubt more to come as more info is released.

EDIT: 
Additional information!!   Blizzard said they will be releasing a blog post Soon™ on these changes:

We're working on an article currently that will explain more about Virtual Realms in detail. We're hoping to have it out to you all soon and will do our best to answer as many questions as you have as possible.

Keep in mind, we've only released the PTR notes at this point and still have testing, refining, more testing, gathering constructive feedback, testing, and then... when we think it's actually ready, releasing this live. While we have an idea of when we think we are going to have the patch go live, it's no guarantee that everything will go as expected (*crosses her fingers*). This isn't something that's going to be out in a week or anything.
Source

I'll post the link to the article when it goes live, but it will most likely be on the front page of the WoW website.  It will be interesting to see how Blizzard is currently planning on implementing these changes.  Also don't get your hopes up too high because all I keep seeing Blizzard employees saying is "anything can change before live, this is just PTR".  Grain of salt.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you like my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!!

4 comments:

  1. I wonder how it will handle imbalanced realms (horde- or alliance-heavy). Take Silvermoon-EU. Its probably 90-95% alliance and high-population. High population should mean it does not need to be joined with other realms, but due to the low horde population its perhaps necessary anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Maybe they should just merge Alliance and Horde auction houses on all realms as most realms have heavy imbalance anyway?
    This would help the side with the low amount of players.

    I play on EU Silvermoon btw :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Shudder. I don't know if you've ever scanned an AH on a larger server - but the Mega mart ah would be basically unscannable. Even searching would present difficulties. As soon as you found the item you were looking for, prices would have changed for items where there are large numbers being turned over per minute - eg comodoties for crafting etc.

      There have to be some realistic caps - or a complete rehaul of their system to allow it to be done in that way - other game do have high populations using a single market interface - but for bliz to implement something like that.. the word cataclysm springs to mind personally. Without great tools in advance the AH isn't something you could "play" and would avoid probably.

      Delete
  3. I see a lot of bugs at release, Blizzard just won't be able to fully test it on a large scale until it goes live. I also see a lot of AH addons being broken.

    That being said, I play on both a low/medium pop realm and a low pop realm. I'm definitely looking forward to this change. I have 1.7 million on my medium pop server, but only 200k on my low pop and look forward to having many more customers.

    I don't look forward to the fact that they will be making my rather large inventory of old world mats worthless though. I guess I'll have to put all that stuff on sale, or find stuff to craft with it soon.

    I wonder how the BMAH will work though. Will they merge those too? Will he bids skyrocket? It does it's job for me, I've already sunk about 1 million (give or take 100k) on it altogether, but I don't want to have to pay a gold cap for everything that I might want off it.

    ReplyDelete

Don't Call it a Comeback

Okay. You can probably call it a comeback in this case. I've been gone a long time. So if you follow my Twitter you'll know I recent...