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Breakfast Topic: Potential Virtual Realm headaches
We're looking forward to Virtual Realms, which will solve low population problems and make it even easier to play with friends. However, it probably won't be all fun and games. With multiple realms acting as a single realm, you can expect more competition to buy and sell on the auction house; more crowds vying for quest drops and rare spawns; and more players trying to get, well, everything World of Warcraft has to offer. So while cooperative efforts, like world bosses, dungeons, and guilds will most certainly get easier because of the expanded pool of players to pull from, solitary tasks like farming are likely to be a bit more challenging because of those same players. So we ask you, readers: 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?
Officers' Quarters: One realm's solution to low population
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. Low population realms have been a problem in WoW as far back as 2007 and they continue to be. Blizzard has opted not to merge realms like other aging MMO's have done. For a long time, players asked for these mergers. They've watched their already low-pop realms bleed more players because of the population problem, making the issue worse and worse. Recently, Blizzard unveiled their solution this ongoing issue: virtual realms. Potentially slated to arrive in patch 5.4, virtual realms could be the answer that we've been waiting for. In the meantime, however, one low-pop realm has taken matters into their own hands by organizing their guilds and creating a better experience. They call it the Kargath Guild Council on Kargath-US. I had the pleasure of interviewing two of the minds behind the KGC -- Battlevixen, officer of Bloodsworn, and Merciful, guild leader of The Iron Fist -- about why they founded the council and the challenges they've faced along the way. What was your realm like prior to the formation of the KGC? Battlevixen: Prior to KGC, Kargath suffered from attendance issues that did not allow a lot of guilds and groups to raid. We had a lot of smaller guilds/groups that could not fill a 10man roster. Very few players were able to even pug because of this. There was also almost no communication between all the various guilds. Each guild kept to themselves for the most part. Merciful: In addition to people who just stopped playing WoW, we were losing good players to other realms. The notion is that Kargath is a dying realm, and once that takes root in people's minds, they self-select themselves off the realm.
Do we need a cross-realm Auction House?
I live on a dying server. It's not quite dead, but it's slowly withering away. I'm not sure what happened, exactly, but I have an idea of when -- at the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King, Dalaran was packed. By the end of the expansion, there were far fewer people running around. Orgrimmar in Cataclysm was a quiet place to be, and in Mists, the Horde shrine is populated by a few handful of players. As I said, I don't know what happened, but for some reason the masses that were on my server when I rolled there in Burning Crusade have all but evaporated. On the one hand, it makes Pandaria a pretty quiet, idyllic place to be. There's hardly any competition for rare spawns, and you don't really have to compete with anyone for quest mobs or ore nodes or herbs, either. There's hardly any drama on the server, by and large because there really aren't enough people around to generate it. Sure, there are a few jerks, but it seems like everyone on the realm is generally relaxed and well-behaved -- as long as you stay out of Trade Chat. On the other hand, it makes trying to buy or sell anything on the auction house an absolute nightmare.
A cautionary tale of lockouts and low-pop realms
Imagine if you will that you are in a raid guild that has enjoyed some small amount of success. You've quietly managed to successfully raid your way through each tier of content, and you've managed to snag every realm-first kill of an end boss along the way. Now imagine you are working on a realm-first kill of a boss, wiping endlessly and working on individual performance and tightening up the execution of the fight. Suddenly, another guild grabs that realm-first kill before you do. Frustrating? Yes -- but it's all part of progression raiding. Only this time, it's different. This time, the realm first was taken by a guild that wasn't really a raiding guild at all. The guild that nabbed the golden ring used a method that skipped all progression fights and instead plopped them at the feet of the final boss, the only one whose death counted for that realm first achievement. How would that make you feel? How would that make your guild feel? This isn't a far-fetched situation at all. It's already happened. And it spells a bleak future for low-pop realms and the raiders that diligently work at content -- only to have a realm first taken away due to the cross-realm raiding feature.
Wings Over Atreia: Bribing for Balance
Nope, this isn't a new game show on a cable network but rather the idea behind the latest program from NCsoft to help increase and balance the populations of the servers in Aion. In a game heralded for its PvPvE, keeping enough enemies around to ensure PvP is more than just a passing fancy -- it's vital to the welfare of the game. And of late, on some servers it almost seems as if Asmodians are just mythical creatures that Elyos tell stories about. Although I won't speculate (here at least) on the decline, Asmodian populations have dwindled across many servers as has their participation in PvP. Besides the universal events that celebrated the release of patch 2.5, Aion has aimed some new (or revamped) events specifically at reversing this population trend. The basic premise is this: If you bribe them, they will come. The plan, unveiled in May, would encourage players to return to their furry-backed roots or even try some claws on for the first time by offering special faction incentives. Couple this with the free trial and the hope was that servers would see an influx of Asmodians and a return to the days of faction warfare glory. Just what exactly are the incentives and -- more importantly -- how well are they working? Glide past the cut for details and to join in a discussion on the matter.
Final Fantasy XI devs threaten players with forced server moves
Server populations in massively multiplayer online games can be a delicate balancing act. Popular servers are very much the hubs of these games, where players can easily forge bonds with one another in a lively social environment. But log into a desolate server and you'll wonder what the point of playing an MMO is when there's no one else around. Many developers try to balance server populations by offering free server transfers, and sometimes bonuses of one type or another as a reward for making the jump. This has been an issue for developer Square Enix with Final Fantasy XI and the overcrowded Odin server. However, their efforts to disperse the crowds have been unsuccessful, leading them to take a more drastic measure: forced emigration. FFXI-centric website Petfoodalpha suggests that Square Enix's deportation solution (or alternately, world splitting) creates more problems than it solves. Fusionx writes, "Surely there has to be a better way to deal with this than randomly distributing people from the server to others. Friendships would be broken, linkshells would be destroyed. More importantly though for Square Enix: They would lose subscribers." When a developer identifies a high server population as being a problem, and when players don't take advantage of free server transfers or other incentives, do the devs really have any other choice but to take away choice?
Free character transfers announced for Warhammer Online
Free character transfers were just announced for Warhammer Online, for characters on low population servers who'd like to move to high population servers. The service will be put into place in the coming days. The character transfers will be done in the Mythic Account Center, which will have a Character Transfer button, just below "Activate a Key" and "Validate your Email Address." In addition to Free Character Transfers, Mythic also announced Guild Transfers. This comes with its own set of caveats as the transfer cannot be reversed, with details to be listed on the Character Transfer page.There's an added bonus for characters moved to higher pop servers -- a Realm Population Bonus of 20% experience and renown. The Warhammer Online Herald will update the playerbase once the Free Character Transfer service goes into effect. Until then, see the WAR Herald announcement, which lists further details on the transfers and lists the source and destination servers eligible for Character Transfers for North American and Oceanic regions. Did you enjoy this? Make sure to check out our Warhammer guides: Massively's Character Creation Guide and our WoW Player's Guide to Warhammer. Plus, don't miss any of our ongoing coverage as Massively goes to WAR!
Breakfast Topic: There goes the neighborhood
Whenever I see free character transfers, I always check to see if my realm is on the list. It never is, probably because it's medium population (though apparently it also has to do with queue times). I don't think I would seriously consider transferring, even for free. At one point I tried rolling on a low population server. I had a good group of friends to play with, but it was hard to PuG anything. I wound up transferring two characters from that server to my main realm. Several friends did the same. Unless it's an entirely new type of server, I think I'll stay where I am. Some realms like Ghostlands have really taken off, others remain on the recommended and low population lists indefinitely. Hats off to those willing to colonize new and underpopulated realms, I have no idea how you do it. What would make you change servers?
Ever-enlarging WoW realms spell continued success
In a forum post about the ultimate downfall of WoW, Drysc pops in to explain that WoW still has a long lifespan ahead of it. People who say that the lack of new servers proves there are fewer and fewer new players in the game are missing the big picture. Back before The Burning Crusade was launched, Blizzard did a series of server upgrades that left each realm down for a few days. At the time, they said this was to make things ready for the expansion, but little did we know it would be to such an extent. Apparently these upgrades allowed Blizzard to keep pushing the maximum realm population up all this time, as more and more players joined the game. There are some relatively "low" population realms, of course, but only in comparison to the new much-increased maximum limit. As Drysc says, "aside from literally a handful of realms (I could count them on one hand), every other realm has a population that would have been considered high to overpopulated before the launch of Burning Crusade." Only recently have certain realms become truly crowded enough to merit free transfers to other realms.People always like to talk about the eventual downfall of the strongest player in any arena, but the steady growth Drysc is talking about continues, it looks like WoW will be the biggest 800-pound gorilla in the MMO jungle for a good long time to come.
Totem Talk: The Endangered Shaman
Totem Talk is the column for shamans. Matthew Rossi plays a shaman, and he wants more people to play them. Why? Well, if as many people played shamans as play, say, hunters, maybe we would see some better mail for shamans out there. He's a selfish jerk, that Matthew Rossi.Why are there so few shamans in the game? If you look at the numbers we first saw in Mike's post this week, it's glaringly obvious that there are fewer shamans than any other class in the game by a huge margin. The next two lowest classes, fellow hybrids both in the form of druids and paladins, each have 2% or so more of the player base both in general and at level 70 than do shamans, roughly 40 to 50 thousand players at level 70 per class. Why is this? Why are people staying away from the shaman in droves?Part of the problem might lie in the original class balance: shamans were the horde only class, and paladins were the alliance only class, so it makes sense that fewer people played either class than classes that either faction could make use of. Similarly, while druids (the third hybrid) also had a low population, to some degree that was caused by the fact that they had such a limited racial selection. If you want to play a druid, you're a night elf or a tauren, and that's it.Similarly, since shamans and paladins were originally faction limited, that meant that dungeons and raids had to be balanced around the idea that there would either be a shaman or a paladin, but never both, and that a large percentage of the player base would be unable to have one or the other on a run. You can't make a boss who is practically unbeatable unless you can Earth Shock him reliably when there's no way an alliance raid can bring a shaman along.Still, since the release of The Burning Crusade, shaman population clearly hasn't taken off. Why? It may be true that there's always going to be a class at the bottom of the totem pole (ouch, sorry, that was bad) is there a reason beyond simple demographics to explain why shamans are dead last? If they're so amazingly overpowered (as people still maintain from time to time) then why isn't anyone playing them? Are those of us playing shamans at 70 just stubborn? Why are shaman players so upset that they riot on their forums and start guilds that have every class but shamans?
