- Read some of ghostcrawlers dribble on twitter over the weekend.
- My opinion of him keeps getting lower.
- Did not think that was possible.
- Some asked about the hunter simming so low, something I have mentioned here.
- His response was, how well did 4.3 sim compared to actual numbers.
- Hey GC, it simmed pretty darn close.
- So that makes me wonder what the hell he meant by that.
- Did he mean that the hunter sim for mists is perfect also.
- Or did he think the sims for 4.3 were off and so are those.
- Well, the 4.3 sims were not off, so if he thinks that he is wrong.
- You know what would have been better?
- If he actually answered the question.
- Even if he lied.
- Say, we are looking into it, they seem a little off at the moment.
- Say, there are numbers they are not taking into account in those sims.
- Say, I have not seen them.
- The only thing GC would do worse than lead designer would be customer service.
- He has no clue how to pacify an audience about issues.
- He just answers the most important question the hunter class has right now for PvE in mists with another question that he apparently has false numbers about.
- Yeap, my opinion of him keep getting lower.
- I still have to ask that one huge question.
- How is he still employed?
- If I ran my company the way he did and lost over 20% of my customers in such a short time I would be on the unemployment line.
- And don't say he is not the only one responsible, I know that.
- He did say, anything wrong with the game you can blame me.
- Those were his own words.
- I say he should be held to them.
- So why is he not unemployed?
- He must have naked pictures of the owner with an underage donkey in a compromising position.
- There is no other explanation for why he has not been fired.
- For my other gripe of the day, cross realm zones.
- Remove them now, or at least give us the option to not participate in them.
- I have characters on high population servers and characters on low population servers.
- If I want to play on a high pop server I log into a high pop one.
- If I want to play on a low pop server I log into a low pop one.
- I want an opt out.
- I do not want to be put on someone elses server and I do not want anyone else put on my server.
- Just reading the horror stories on the forums is proof the cross realm zones are already a complete failure.
- Groups from high pop servers camping the darkmoon rabbit.
- Heard of one group that got the rabbit for all 40 of its members and extra to sell just this week alone.
- They created alts on low pop servers and camped it.
- When it appeared everyone switched to their mains and the alts invited them and they brought a whole raid team there to kill it.
- When it was done, they would all go back to camping different servers again and do it over and over.
- They would bug it out if someone else was trying to kill it and steal the kill.
- They did this all day long. Enough to get at least 50 bunnies for their group.
- 40 people camping 40 lower pop servers.
- Seems unfair.
- They are doing it with mount spawns as well.
- They are doing it to bounce from one server to the next to continuously fight wintergrasp and TB throwing off balance on low population servers.
- PvPers from PvP servers going and destroying everyone on PvE servers.
- Just does not seem like that is in the spirit of fair play.
- And it is not just what I read on the forums.
- I've experienced my fair share of griefers and so have my guild mates.
- One person from another server that kept picking someone to follow in darkmoon and standing on all the quest givers and standing in front of them while they tried to do the shooting game.
- Trying to level when there is a 40 man raid group destroying entire low level questing areas has made leveling on a small server near impossible now if you happen to be on one of the unlucky servers that the big servers decided to grief that day.
- Or how about my problem. Might even be unique, have not heard anyone else mention it on the forums.
- If I leave stormwind I get error #134. Not always, but enough to be annoying as sin.
- Seen a lot posting about error 134 on the forums but I don't think any of them have figured out what is causing it.
- For me, it is cross realm zones.
- If I leave SW and stay on my server, no problem.
- If I leave SW and switch servers, you know when you do that because you seem to relearn all your professions, I get error 134 and have to spend the next 20 minutes trying to get back to SW so I can connect again.
- It goes something like this.
- I leave SW and fly a zone or two away and crash to error 134 after I pass another realm or two.
- I try to log in and crash instantly while loading.
- Took me a bit to figure out how to get back in.
- I could log on my alts, that were not in a cross realm zone, but not anyone that was.
- I switch to 32 bit and it would allow me to log in, for roughly 30 seconds at a time.
- So I log in and fly back for 30 seconds and get error 134.
- I log in again and fly for 30 seconds and get error 134.
- I can not hearth instead because the second I click it I get error 134.
- So I do this over and over until I get back to stormwind.
- Then I can switch back to 64 bit and have no problems.
- So blizzard wants us to go out in the world more, but doesn't want us to be able to play if we go out in the world?
- It doesn't always happened but sometimes it does.
- Sometimes it is near instantly, sometimes it happens after an hour.
- Either way, I am afraid to go out in the world now because I never know when they are going to put me on a server that will error 134 me causing me to spend forever getting somewhere safe to log in again.
- So now I can never leave stormwind.
- Nice way to get me back in the world blizzard.
- How about that poor guy I read about on the forums that server transferred to the lowest population server he could find just to camp rares.
- He said he does not do much any more in game but would log in every day and sit there camping a rare.
- That is how he has his fun with the game.
- Nothing wrong with that right?
- Apparently blizzard thinks there is something wrong with that.
- So he spent money to transfer to make what he does easier on him to do.
- Said he was camping one spawn for nine months and still had not gotten it.
- In those 9 months he had never seen anyone else camping it.
- That is the beauty of a low population server.
- This came, he said he counted 24 people camping that spawn.
- Gee, thanks blizzard for making him waste his money.
- And none of them show on the who list, so he can't even use that to judge who else is camping, it could have been more.
- He actually saw the 24 and spoke to a few.
- So he paid money and spent nine months trying to get it and did not.
- Now, he has high competition and wasted his money.
- I bet he is a really happy customer now.
- I look at it this way, if blizzard wants me to play on a high population server they can pay my 15 a month but as long as I am paying my 15 a month I will play on the server I want to play.
- Seems fair right?
- My money, so I choose what server I play on.
- Keep me off cross realm zones and keep others off the server I am on.
- I pay my 15 bucks to choose the server I am on.
- If you want to chose the server I play on, you can pay the 15 bucks, simple as that.
- Cross realm zones need to die and die fast.
- I urge everyone to put in a ticket asking how you can turn off cross realm zones.
- The more people they get asking for it the more likely they will do something about it.
- Unless you get a GM like a few guild mates did.
- Makes me wonder if having brain damage is a requirement for being a GM.
- He just asked, how do I disable cross realm zones.
- That is it, one super simple question.
- They responded something about giving back old items.
- Do they even read the mails or do they just randomly cut and paste responses?
- How does asking about turning off cross realm have anything to do with restoring items?
- Another GM responded to another friend that asked to disable cross realm zones that there was no way to delevel a character.
- WTF?
- How is asking to disable cross realm zones and deleveling a character even remotely close to each other where a misunderstanding of the question could happen?
- That is blizzard customer service for you, totally ignore the question and say whatever you want.
- Just like GC did when asked about hunter DPS, totally ignored the question and answered whatever he liked.
- I lost my faith in this game during the Zul phase and I swear, they are making no efforts trying to earn it back.
- Customer service is useless.
- Choice is being removed left and right being we can not even choose what realm to play on any more.
- And the person in charge can't even answer one simple question about hunter DPS.
- Yeap, this game is on its last legs.
- Without a doubt, mists is make or break.
- Have a great day all, don't think about warcraft, it will just depress you.
Blizzard Watch Podcast: WoW Winter Veil rewards we must have
57 minutes ago
I had the "useless customer answer" as well. My trial account could login, but my paid account would freeze after I selected my character and hit "enter world."
ReplyDeleteThe reply? Please see the following thread regarding issues with downloading patch 5.0.4. and troubleshooting errors that are prevented you from getting past the account login. -_-
Did you ever get it worked out? Seems like what my guy was doing when I kept getting the 134. I would enter and the screen would not load and error 134 about half loaded.
DeletePerhaps your issue was the same. Maybe try logging in with 32 bit if you are using 64 bit. Not a fix of course, but it might get you in.
Anon, Grumpy's GL:
ReplyDeleteI don't really care for the idea of cross-realm servers. If this was the older version of WoW, pre-cataclysm style, with elite mobs and more PvE group quests still around, it might make sense. This isn't that game though, not anymore.
What is there in the game for leveling that can't be soloed? Or if soloing it at level is to hard, then it can be returned to in a few levels and blown away.
I don't need anyone else around taking mobs I want to kill, and I am sure they don't want me doing the same to them. It sometimes looks like it did back in vanilla with so many folks around as I level my hidden alt toon, but it has none of the advantages of that time and all the disadvantages.
If the idea is to increase the population, then be honest about it and announce server merges. This half-way merging is crap, and I normally don't talk that way, but it is what it is and it is crap.
I really think this is their way of "closing" servers without closing them. They think closing servers will get the doom and gloom people into a frenzy so instead they are turning it into a case of look at this awesome idea instead of what it really is, wow is shrinking and we need to condense things.
DeleteYups.
DeleteThere is an old-and-going big Thread on the EU Forums about Dying Servers, and the Blues did precisely that: peddle CRZ as a partial solution.
The strinking part? No one saw that as a solution, people from low pops and people who had transfered to high pop.
The hurting part: a couple of months back they announced that they would do server mergers in Asia 'as an experiment' - raising awhole bundle of new questions.
I think I read some of that thread, there was not a lot of people that liked the idea even before they saw it implemented if I remember correctly, and it seems they were right.
DeleteI hate cross server realms too. I really wish we could disable them. I mostly play on a low population server for a reason, if I want a high pop realm I have characters there. My favourite thing to do is herb and kill rares, collect treasure chests and fish. There were no flowers, no rares,nothing and Thee only solution I had was having my son log on alts on various servers till I could find a zone to herb on.
ReplyDeleteThat is my argument about it.
DeleteMost people play on a low population server because they want to. Why force them to do something they don't want to when they are paying you for the right to be on a low population server.
Blizzard is just wrong with this. There is no right to it.
Anon, Grumpy's GL:
ReplyDeleteI don't know, maybe I am overly conservative about it, but CRZ is about as close to a game breaker for me as I have seen yet from Blizzard. I survived Cata, unhappily on a personal playing note, but still in a positive sense as I saw our guild prosper and grow. I just find the concept of CRZ to be a silly way to address a problem of low population servers. The obvious and serious way to address the issue is to merge the low population servers.
Name duplication will have to be resolved, but that is a case of simply going in order of creation. First named, stays the same, while all the subsequent characters and guilds have to change the name.
Any other solution to low population servers is a non-serious effort to address the fact that Blizzard has a shrinking WoW player base. CRZ attempts to hide this fact. It is not a serious solution to it.
Merge low population servers. Then make a game people want to play in the future so that the player base grows again.
MoP may well be the beginning of that, following the less than grand Cataclysm, but until there are no more low population servers and no more medium population servers, don't try to hide the lower population by using the flawed technology of CRZ.
It's gets even sillier where e.g. the EU is concerned, as we can use a wide array of apostrophes etc. in our character-names, meaning you can bascially always get pretty much the name you want (unless being highly unimaginative).
Delete@ Netherlands - I hate when people do that to their name. If your name is not there pick another. A few servers I am on I could not have my name, I grumbled about it a bit and took another name. I have not and never will use anything but standard letters.
DeleteNow, in your case, some of those letters are standard letters. Still do not like them. There is no reason I should be stuck learning all these alt codes for them when we are have perfectly good alphabet to work with.
@ Anon - The CRZ is flawed for a few reasons, one was the me getting error 134 when I go in the world. Another is the massive and constant lag spikes. Those can be fixed, but it would still be flawed.
As long as blizzard does not moderate their own content, and we know they don't, it just creates a whole new world to be taken advantage of by griefers. That is my biggest problem with it.
I agree with this entire post! CRZ is the biggest bunch of BS to ever go live since I've been playing. It was poorly thought out, terribly designed, and so does nothing to actually solve the "problems" of low pop servers. All it does is open up a giant window for griefing, exploits, and drastically slash the amount of rare spawns and chances at achs like the Fishing Tourneys. Blizzard should be embarrassed that they allowed something so shoddy to hit live servers.
ReplyDeleteI forgot about the fishing one, read someone post on that too. People jumping in groups from time zone to time zone to do it over and over again. Another point against it.
DeleteIt was a horrible idea. They should just bite the bullet and do what rift does, allow one free server transfer per month. Tada, server issues fixed.
I've not noticed the error number, but been having lots of those crashes when flying into new zones. of course this is almost always on my toon with the heirlooms on and then i can't do anything for about 30 minutes each time.
ReplyDeleteJoyous....
Might not be the error 134, but it very well could be. Seems like I am not the only one that "enjoying" the full world thanks to their horrible implementation.
DeleteHave you noticed the near constant lag spikes too when in the world now? Gee, thanks for that blizzard.
I play on a low pop PVP server. Now having said that I know it is a PVP server and what that entails; however, I am used to rarely seeing ANYONE from either faction. Griefing and ganking rarely happens and when it does, you usually can take care of it quickly. That is not the case with these cross realm zones. Suddenly there are scores of high level toons in my lowbie zones ganking alts and killing npcs for the heck of it.
ReplyDeleteThere is a reason I didn't mind leveling an alt on a low pop PVP server. This just kind of kills the urge to level.
Thanks for the info on the error. I couldn't understand why I kept crashing and now it makes sense.
I have a hunter, as I have so many, on a PvP server and I knew exactly where you are coming from. I have never, not once, been attacked while leveling in the open world except by someone usually within 5 or so levels of myself. Now, I would not even try to go out in the world. Not worth it. And before, they would kill you and leave, these cross server jerks camp you, like they are saying that an 85 can kill a 35 so that is proof their server is better.
DeleteYeap, most likely that is why. Try going on with 32 bit, it sometimes will let you stay on for a little bit.
Get back to Org or SW, because those are the only two places not part of the CRZ I believe. Being you are on a PvP server, I suggest going to your own city, wouldn't be advisable going to Org if you are human. lol
" He must have naked pictures of the owner with an underage donkey in a compromising position."
ReplyDeleteThis made me LOL, especially because I have been aksing myself the same question. People like to say 'Activision this, Activision that' but let's be frank, any Gordon Gekko (wannabe) had kicked GC on the curb ages ago.
The frightening thought is however that the head designer may indeed have been chosen because he's simply the most qualified. GC may have his issues, but he doesn't go Jay Wilson on people for example.
I wouldn't be too harsh on CS. Sure they can be air-headed at times but remember that they lost the most people due to the subs diving, have to deal with the extra issues GC creates, and of course the usual ones (potentially increased to the changed player demographic).
CRZ seems to be a real horro. So far on the EU it hasn't been entirely implemented though it's already (ofc) causing discussions. Not surprisingly, people from High Pop PvP realms tend to love the idea, others -esp. low pops and RP's - tend to hate it.
There was actually an article on WoWInsider predicting that it would be a griefers paradise, though the extent you described is even more shocking.
Meanwhile, in the EU the first Accountwide side-effects are becoming apparant, with illegal traficking of characters between 'loaner' accounts and such to acquire Rare mounts and Titles (esp those with FoS attached to them). It will be just a matter of time IMO before people's accounts get hacked for this purpose. Of course character- and account trafficking happened before, but now there is a giant incentive to do so.
Frankly they could at least partially have prevented this by keeping the Achievement Rewards (Titles etc.) character bound, which would also have made a lot more sense (no Explorers that never left the Starte Zone, no Guardians of Cenarius that never met a Druid in their life etc.) - though knowing GC they'll probably barf up some silly Minimum Character Levels for Titles idea, which won't stop that trafficking for a bit and would still have a lot of nonsense rewards.
I never thought about the character hacking for shared mounts and achievements and stuff but you are dead on, I can see that really heating up now. More reason to buy things like that for the people that would.
DeleteThey could have fixed it the way I suggested a while back. Share them but keep them individual at the same time.
Like my priest would say I have 4800/12400 meaning she has 4800 achievement points but I, the player over all my characters, has 12400. See, an easy fix.
Glad you liked that. And I so agree. Anyone that wants to make money will not keep someone on board that is sinking the ship but like you said, he might be the best they have. For all we know his replacement could be 10 times worse. A case of be careful what you wish for really. We could get rid of him and end up in a worse situation.
I'm not a fan of the cross realm servers either. My gripe at the time was the difficulty for rares like camping the TLPD when it was already hard to find and the fishing tournament. Not to mention people taking your nodes, herbs, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe other day I was a passenger going from Mulgore to Org. Ordinarily a short trip but with cross realms I was automatically getting kicked out of the rocket and standing in mid air (until I realised I had dc'ed the first time). Other times I would get a parachute and not dc. Either way it's really annoying esp since we are both from the same server... I tweeted GC just after it happened three times in two mins but never got a response.
I had that happen to me as well. Had a friend on my refer a friend rocket, changed zones and asked him, where the hell did you go, he said, kicked me out.
DeleteI thought it was funny once, but when it happens every zone it is annoying.
I personally hate the CRZ for many reasons but the rare spawn thing is probably neat the top as a hunter. Not to mention I have been tying for time lost since wrath and have never seen it before, how the hell am I going to get it now.
I still say, if I choose to be on a small server that is my right and they should not be allowed to force me on to a larger one just so they can pretend the game isn't losing subscribers.
With the whole slow down at the end of an expansion I have not been out and about much in WoW, so have not noticed if CRZ is active on my server or not.
ReplyDeleteI can see some of the problems it could cause. I think more down to being transferred to a different time zone.
Yes CRZ's are probably a way to deal with low population servers without actually closing any down. I am not sure if a lot of people realise you would have similar issues if they did start to merge servers. Low population servers would go to medium or high population.
Making some of the examples people have given happen anyway. Camping, ganking etc. More people just makes things harder. So people that wanted the quiet life won't get their wish anymore.
Unless MoP turns around the decline in subs, I can see servers eventually being merged anyway. Just because of the cost of running them. So sooner or later everyone will have to deal with having a lot more people around.
I wonder if maybe people should look on the positives of this though. I have camped some rare spawns before (being a hunter). Yeah it is harder with more people around. Is it not also more satisfying when you achieve your goals though? Being one of the few people to have that new pet (mount/epic etc) from Molten Core (or MoP).
I remember how awesome it felt when I had the new turtle from Hyjal. Everyone was like 'whoa, where did you get that'. There are always positives to take from things.
I do agree based on your experiences that things could indeed be better. I hope they will fix the issues before I start to encounter them.
A merge would have been a better way to handle it in my opinion. That way, we could still find the smallest server and move there afterwards. This this is a no choice option and as long as I pay to play I should be allowed to play on the server I wish to.
DeleteIf I want to be on proudmore I will log into one of my characters that is on that server, do not put me on that server otherwise. That is what I am talking about.
This is a lazy fix and a way for them to not have to admit they are having subscription issues.
If they merge servers there is no denying that there are problems, but with this they can pass it off as saying they are just trying to improve the game for lower levels because less people are in older areas. See, they do not need to admit that they are losing subscribers that way.
It is a save face move, not a good for the game move. Perhaps they should start thinking what is best for the game and stop trying to cover up the fact they are not doing as well as they were 2 years ago. We all know that, who do they think they are hiding it from? Just merge servers, allows everyone a free transfer so they can move if they do not like the server they get put on, and be done with it. Remove the CRZ, it is bad for the game.
How do you "pick" which server you can go to? They way people are making it sound is you can pick the server you want to merge with.
ReplyDeleteYou do not pick, the game picks for you. Just my luck but it has put me on a really buggy server with huge lag. I want CRZs gone already. I want to go back to a lag free life.
DeleteAs for pick, if you wanted to go on a server, have someone make a level one on that server, have them invite you to a group, when you leave your main city you will be on the server of the group leader.