World of Warcraft cross-realm dungeon parties planned
Blizzard plans to allow friends from different World of Warcraft servers to play in dungeons together, with vague "premium" features.
It's always unfortunate in World of Warcraft when a friend chooses, for whatever reason, to play on a different server than you. However, 1up spotted that Blizzard is now working on a feature which will allow you to reunite with your chums on any server to slay monsters together.
A post by World of Warcraft community manager 'Nethaera' on the forums explains that a "cross-realm Real ID party system" will allow players of the same faction on any Realm, who are Real ID friends, to party up and queue to play 5-person regular and Heroic dungeons together.
While friendship is free, playing with friends will not be entirely so.
"It's important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service," the post explained.
As the cross-realm party system is mostly a mystery for now, it's unsurprisingly unclear exactly how usable the feature will be if nobody in your party has paid for the premium service.
Blizzard promises more details "as development progresses" and notes that "certain elements of the feature" may begin to appear on the Public Test Realms. "As this is a fairly complex service to develop, we don't have a release date to share quite yet," it explained.
World of Warcraft already offers cross-realm dungeons and PvP battlegrounds, but players can only go in grouped with others already on their own server, then the rest of the party is selected at random from all Realms.
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replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, World of Warcraft cross-realm dungeon parties planned.
Blizzard plans to allow friends from different World of Warcraft servers to play in dungeons together, with vague "premium" features.-
next up, for a moderate fee you can do instances with friends from the opposing faction!
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So people paying $15 a month isn't a premium member? This sounds like something a free to play mmo would do to get some revenue, like world of tanks and how you need a prem to party with friends. This does not, I repeat, does not sound like something a company should do that is doing perfectly well.
They especially shouldn't do it right now since a lot of people are unhappy with the newest expansion. This just makes you look like another money hungry corporation to your fans milking anything you can from them.
Anyway, I'm getting disgusting at the many ways Blizzard is milking WoW. I miss the old Blizzard.-
Hmm, can't edit, I just missed something...
Anyway, one last thought. I think it would be better business wise to have it free. You may convince people to come back if they can play with their friends that are on different realms without charging them that $25 fee to transfer. And who knows? After the friends play together I'm sure a lot will decide to do the full transfer so they can quest, trade, and raid together, after they've done a few dungeons.
Anyway, final thought. I think it would be much more effective tool to entice people to come back. -
gimme a break. If this was standard stuff that was already developed and able to work with their current infrastructure, you think they would wait 6 years before releasing it? Oh yeah you're dead wrong, this is new stuff that has to be developed, and if it's so important for you to play with your friends, go jump on the same server and roll a new character.
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It's new stuff that has to be developed, sure...but we're paying $15 a month for explicitly that, maintaining the game and developing new features.
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Seems like a good argument. You are paying for a service.
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I don't get how they can justify making this a premium service when they were proud of the fact they were releasing the redone old world to all it's paying users. I'm sure that took a lot of work and yet they pushed that out for free.
It's probably because we didn't ask for that, but people are asking to play with friends so Bilzz knows there are people out there that want it, and if people want something some of them would be willling to play for it-
Lucy and baddnus have the right idea. People are leaving wow because they are running out of content. They may buy the expansion but when they exhaust that content, if blizzard wants to keep that subscription, they have to provide more content.
The content they provide isn't even necessarily worth anything if you aren't interested as a player, they hardly ever release new PvP content.
So all the trouble they go through to keep raiders happy isn't worth a dime to the people only wanting pvp, so you can't say the subscription fee is for them to provide new content, the $15 a month must be for providing the service, cause the initial cost of expansions covers the extent of the new content that PvPers utilize.
The initial network/software development costs to set this up will be a 1-time thing, just like content development. It most likely won't require anymore bandwidth or other maintenance costs to maintain, but they want to label it as a premium service. This isn't really unprecedented for them though, server transfers are in the same situation, but they milk you of a hefty bucket full of tit milk every time you transfer a character.
To me, if I were a money grubbing soulless corporate farmer, milking my patrons of their tit milk daily, I would fear jading my current dairy cows by providing "premium" services for "premium" cows.
That does not feel right for people already paying $15/mo. People berate the wow players that bought the spectral horses, its because they are angry that blizzard is withholding content from them when they've already invested hundreds if not thousands of dollars into the game.
Apparently no matter how much you spend, you still aren't good enough for blizzard.
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I don't play anymore... but I've done the transfer with a character. Three times! And everytime I do it I'm angry because I'm thinking "All they are doing is having a program transfer some data over, this shouldn' cost me $25."
Sure in the beginning, they need to make they're investment back with putting the man hours into the code, but come on! I think they made that money back. Plus with the game out so long, a lot of people have quit. So you either play alone or transfer to a server where you know you have friends.
I'm just saying, wouldn't you try wow again if you could group together with your friends for free and try out the new dungeons. I bet your experience would be 100x better with your friends than with a random group. I'm sure the wow community scares away a lot of people. I know I got tired dealing with it.-
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How would it be broken? If server transfers were free and say limited to once a month, I'm sure they would have more subs. If group of friends A leave game, said person could transfer freely to group of friends B. However, with current system in place that same person has the choices, play alone (and try and get new friends, however that is harder with the way the game works now with random dungeon finder and the way guilds level up now) or pay $25 to transfer on top of your $15 a month.
Or you could have my situation. Cata is coming out soon and your friends that still play want you to play as well. However they play on a different server and different faction. You can either level a new toon (oh god! not that grind again of kill off x amount of mobs, collect x amount, deilver x to a then traval to b) or you can have a start up cost of $60. $15 for the first month, $20 for the server transfer, $25 for the faction change. $60 to just start up and play with friends?! I could buy a new game for that!
Yes, after a month of debating my friends convinced me cata would be great and we would have a fun time. One month after cata was out, my account was cancelled. I'm so mad I wasted my money. Now I don't want anthing to do with Blizzard. Their namebrand is garbage to me now. If they had a free way to transfer so I could have fun and play with friends, I would still regard Blizzard as a great company even though I did not like cata because all it cost me was $15 plus the expansion. Instead I got hassled out of $60 plus the price of the expansion. I feel like I was cheated, and I think I was.
Long story short, Blizzard isn't getting my money again.-
Sounds like your mad but that isn't blizzards fault or their problem.
Even with PAID transfers (and / or faction changes) Blizzard has had to put several blocks on servers and factions to keep things under control. If people were allowed to do it for free then it would get abused into non-sense and every server would either be empty or over crowded while one faction completely dominated the other.-
Plus if you just go to their forums you already see there are dead servers or low pop servers. Again, just set a limit, once a month or once every other month. It's better to keep your customers around to get that $15 a month than to have them leave because of something as simple as a transfer.
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Because there are over 230 servers for each of the US and the EU, and if you and your friend didn't coordinate in advance, the odds are ~99.5% that you wound up on different servers.
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Maybe you started playing at different times? I know most of my characters are where the Shackguilds have been over the years, whereas most of my real life friends that play are spread out over several other servers, with only a rare few that are in the same place who play together (say, couples or housemates).
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I like PVP servers. One of my best friends plays PVE. Simple as that.
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I'm sure everything is vague because sites like MMO Champion are going to mine upcoming test realm data and find references about it, and the community will go hog-wild speculating. This is just Blizzard getting ahead of the story.
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If your sick of WoW you should try Rift, graphics are awesome, instances are fun, Rift can only go up from here. If you want a guess pass PM me, Rift just started a friends thing, I think of everyone on the shack as a friend =) plus if you like it you get stuff just for using my code. Well anyone friends code can do the same...
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Everyone I know who went to try it has already quit Rift :(
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how shockingly predictable, not unlike every other MMO ever since WoW was released. I'm sure the next MMO will change everything though, it's gotta work this time!!!
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Also this "premium service" would be taking advantage of Facebook.
Facebook allowed you to bring all your friends into view with real id, and now more wow players than ever have been using server transfers to get to the servers with their friends, but thats not a full solution.
A full solution would be this cross-realm grouping.
Making additional funds off of something that Facebook allowed you to do in the first place, hrmm...
Lawsuit time? -
They're sure sucking this dry...
I postulate, along with a few other people, that Blizzard is doing this to open up the way for Titan. WotLK was the highlight of the entire Warcraft franchise and Blizzard knows it. For Cata they shifted all their experienced devs to Titan and they put on a rookie team. Basically they turned WoW into a test bed for gaining experience for their new developers and trying out new things to see what they can and can't do to suck money out of people.
Obviously you can't keep WoW going forever and they pretty much beat it to death with the same content over and over again, it needed a place to end. All you have to do is take one look at the blue posts and the forum posts to realize the outlash players are having against what they devs are doing. They're simply ignoring them too and practicing damage control to make sure their name doesn't get smoked too much.
It makes complete sense if you think about it. No matter how great the game is it will eventually lose to something that it is simply so outclassed by it has no hope of competing with on a multitude of levels (such as RIFT). All WoW has running for it in comparison is the shear amount of outdated content no one does anymore and a rabid playerbase.
So after the very plyable players leave, all that will be left is the hardcore players that will never quit and will buy pretty much anything WoW (such as the sameway it worked with EQ, DaoC, EQ2, etc.). The plyable mass will then be looking for something to satiate their desires, they'll play something in the meantime, and then when Titan comes out they'll remember all the fun they had playing WoW and shift to it.
It's pretty igneous if you ask me. They win on a multitude of levels and most players are too retarded to notice trends or what is happening on a bigger scale.-
none of what you said makes sense, no matter how much i think about it.
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Blizzard.... once again fails to impress... 10+ years and NOW you implement this ??? failed...
