Lordaeron & Icecrown Cross-Realm Discussion

[Mercy]

We would like to have proper feedback on the cross-realm feature (still in testing phase, but is live for now), from both sides of the spectrum - those who like and dislike it - and maybe ideas that can improve the system. It is important that we keep this discussion civil. It is an important one that needs to be had, but we don't need people using it as a platform to bash the staff or complain while not contributing anything to the discussion. Inappropriate behavior, "Wall of NO" (disagreeing without providing reasons, context, etc) posts and soap-boxing will be removed from the topic.

Please post here whether you like and/or enjoy the system in how it's playing out, how you think we may be able to improve upon the system, or other concerns you may want to address. Most importantly, please try to remain receptive to what others have to say - let it be a proper discussion/debate.

Edit: If you intend on posting just to be dramatic, please don't do that either.

Thank you!

[Avagg]

I personaly enjoy it so far.Ive playd a lot this day and can say both sides in bgs perform largly no difrent then players from icecrown (atlest those with atlest furios gear ore some starting pve) and some even stood out.I think its a good and refreshing thing it specaly when Loardeon catch up with gear maybe we can have some realm rivalry ore something like that in future.+ it also helps not only loardeon but icecrowns alliance side as well comning from horde my self que times for battlegraunds were not rly good but now its kind of ok .

[Dwyn]

Here's my impressions so far:

*I'm not sure if there's any point at all for a PvP-focused player to ever start on Lordaeron or continue playing here. There's just no reason to pick our realm over Icecrown where you get better gear and a lot faster/easier (like someone already mentioned earlier in the old thread).

*Right now the waiting times for battlegrounds are more or less the same as before crossrealm-battlegrounds. I've been in queue several times for up to 20-25 minutes today. Not sure how it affects Icecrown queues, but I don't see any difference on Lordaeron currently. This made me a bit surprised as I thought queues would be near instant.

*The first thing I noticed in my battlegrounds today was a large amount of toxicity and insults between Lordaeron and Icecrown-players. I recommend everyone to get the addon that increases the amount if ignores you can have, because the battleground chat is awful (at least in big battlegrounds like AV/Isle).


My suggestion to Warmane staff would be to re-think their strategy surrounding Lordaeron and crossrealms-battlegrounds. Not necessarily remove it, but rather make it worthwhile for PvP-players to be able to stick to Lordaeron.

Other than that, thank you for the continued development of your servers!

[Avagg]

If there is any way maybe make that its possible to que for cross realm and single realm battlegraunds so that ppl that cry and cant overcome progress play their game and ppl who want to play with other ppl regulary play cross realm maybe that's a soloution?

[SteelGrip]

I personaly enjoy it so far.Ive playd a lot this day and can say both sides in bgs perform largly no difrent then players from icecrown (atlest those with atlest furios gear ore some starting pve) and some even stood out.I think its a good and refreshing thing it specaly when Loardeon catch up with gear maybe we can have some realm rivalry ore something like that in future.+ it also helps not only loardeon but icecrowns alliance side as well comning from horde my self que times for battlegraunds were not rly good but now its kind of ok .

That's a good idea. Let people decide on their own.

[truthwow1]

I'm a BiS geared donor with Smourne from Icecrown and I have to say that I feel kinda sorry for the Lordaeron PvPer's.
Most of them put much more effort in their character than we on Icecrown did and yet we completely annihilate them in every BG because we outgear them badly.

I think it's a good idea to match players based on their gear like Proterean said.
For a while now there are no challenging and no competitive BGs whatsoever on Icecrown. Due to the gear differences there is always one side that is completely dominating over the other. If anything the merge with Lordaeron made BGs even more unbalanced and unfair.
I'd much rather like to be matched up exclusively with other donors that have like +6,2k GS and have a challenging battle than having this mix of low geared and BiS geared player's which leads to these uncompetitive BGs that we have right now.

[Avagg]

Another good thing I can think of is twink community.I don't know are they still existing but maybe now they can get some bgs since there is no cross realm character sending so it eliminates chance that if lets say alliance are stronger then horde goes to alliance and pretty mutch kills scene asp and other way araund .

[SteelGrip]

Okay so just logged in my dusty 2 months Old Lordareon PvP characters to see it from the other side. Played some BGs on my 5.8k PvP Retri Pally. Few things I noticed right away:

-- on Lord only BGs I used to be a God frequently killing people in 1v3s
-- on new crossrealm system I feel like a pleb in this gear :D that was some huge shock to my old Pally Lord ego :D

-- since I was actually only person from Lord in those few BGs I played - no toxicity there what so ever - no Icecrown player made fun of me
-- in fact only perosnal thing I got was a Horde player /wink on me when killing me which is kind of normal thing

- queue was almost instant so I guess that is really good especially now in morning hours when queue on Lordareon used to be abnormal

[SteelGrip]

I'm a BiS geared donor with Smourne from Icecrown and I have to say that I feel kinda sorry for the Lordaeron PvPer's.
Most of them put much more effort in their character than we on Icecrown did and yet we completely annihilate them in every BG because we outgear them badly.

I think it's a good idea to match players based on their gear like Proterean said.
For a while now there are no challenging and no competitive BGs whatsoever on Icecrown. Due to the gear differences there is always one side that is completely dominating over the other. If anything the merge with Lordaeron made BGs even more unbalanced and unfair.
I'd much rather like to be matched up exclusively with other donors that have like +6,2k GS and have a challenging battle than having this mix of low geared and BiS geared player's which leads to these uncompetitive BGs that we have right now.

Hey man! Got to disagree in here. I actually only started playing on Icecrown recently. Only got about 2 days /played on 80. But even though I only have 5.4k PvP gear. Mostly PvE pieces and only 300 resi. I was able to kill a bunch of Horde Smourne Warirors in 1v1s in AB on Farm and LM.

I definitely think gear is important. But if you outsmart oyur opponents :)) gear is not such a big deal ... but I can imagine geared and smart player can bring some serious havoc into undergeared enemies indeed ... but haven't met many like that yet in RBGs ... I guess they spend most of their time in Arenas probably?

Though is a valid point - especially when I played on my old Lord chat as I mentioned in other post - I could feel my super-duber gear all of a sudden feeling pretty average in cross realm matchu up :D

[Evangelion]

It's alright. After a 3 month break it's a bit of a fresh air.

Figures it's a testing phase considering some of the glitches like group disbanding, getting random DC + deserter after clicking "Enter Battleground" etc. Also I hope that we'll get back the 3-4 minute timer that prevented you from getting kicked from bg/getting deserter if you got a DC and managed to log back within minutes.

As far as balance issues go:
Purge all donated Shadowmournes kek
Don't forget to refund 150 coins to everyone tho. kek#2

[ske94]

-Shared battlegrounds don't bother me. At the end of the day battlegrounds are not a measure of skill and i do not mind playing with people who have more/less gear then me. I think nobody ever when inspecting a player with 50k, 100k, 150k, 200k or even more HK's whent "oh look at this good player". It's more of a grind then anything else and to be honest getting 3v1'd, 4v1'd, 5v1'd in battlegrounds by people who are geared to the bone won't make any difference. Getting one shot by 3 players with 6.6k GS or by 3 players with 5.8k gs won't matter if you get my drift, you will probably die in both situations (if not facing complete *****s). That being said, if the shared battlegrounds improve the quality of life for both Icecrown and Lordaeron players i don't mind it. Battlegrounds are for grinding out honor to buy items, for casual PVP'ing and fun.
-Arenas are a different story and is what i'm interested in here. The arenas are the real deal and a show of skill a person has. Whats going to happen if you merge arenas? Will players from Lordaeron have to queue and play against players from Icecrown and compete with their level of gear? How are you going to create equal ground for players to compete on?
-Why not have item restrictions to queue for arena? It used to be a thing on Blackrock/AT to suppress the major flaw the game has on this patch, which is that some classes benefit more and get really hard to deal with with the heroic ICC/RS parts. Warriors(first in line) are a great example and there is no debating it, just look at the brackets and the ladder and you will see that almost 40%-50% of top 50 teams are teams with a warrior in it (WP dominating among those). Is it a coincidence? Are warrior players just better than players who play other classes at the game. The answer is no. It's just a broken state of PVP the game is in now, since nobody planned for this patch to be played 10 years after and nobody planned for people to have this much gear, people accumulated gear/donated for it and it's a problem for PVP.
-Enabling people to queue arenas with only having the normal variants of PVE items equipped (or scaling down the HC versions to normal versions of an item) will make the arena environment a fair place for Lordaeron and Icecrown players to compete on, solving some issues with the gear balance along the way.
-This would mean that the heroic gear can only be used in Battlegrounds and PVE. Of course that this solution means some people who spent money/grinded the heroic gear or even SM's in the game will be upset that they can't use their heroic variants in arenas, and this will be whats going to make or break my playing on this server after a long time of playing on it.
-Will you guys grab this golden opportunity to make arenas great again, or will it continue to be a **** fest (pardon my language)?
*Also i would like to address some things people are talking about in this post. First is the toxicity. Look it's simple, toxic people will always exist in online gaming (not just this game). It's the internet that gives people safety to say what ever they want to other people online. Second thing about 95% of the people who have BIS gear and SM's not being a problem and "just get good" to beat them. No offense, but what rating do you play on? Maybe they are not a problem on 1400, but it gets harder 2k+ and against someone who knows what they are doing - see what happens. Thats all from me, cheers!

[Lerroyy60]

Ok I read a few replies here but didn't want to shift my opinion by reading more. Here is my 100% honest opinion. The change is both good as well as bad and here is a list of the sort of pro/con of this in my opinion.

Good:
Queue times MUCH faster (I play at NA times where Lordaeron is lacking)
TEAMS are evenly matched
Lordaeron players get BGs other then WSG and Arathi

Bad:
Every game I am in has at least 3-7 Shadowmourne and BiS players (I inspected too...Shadowmourne but no ICC achieves)
Being in basic PvP gear now feels like i'm wearing greens
Lost the greater sense of community (Lordaeron PvP community is small so it is sad to see I don't know anyone on either side of the BG)

Overall my final take is as an NA player the change is great because I can actually do BGs during my peak hours without Horde just dominating us, BUT I do not believe it should be implemented. It gives no incentive for new or even current members to come/stay here. Why would I want to continue playing here where I get 2 shotted by a ret pally in BiS when I can just go to Icecrown and buy the same gear to compete. At least on Lordaeron I know I can work hard, climb the ladder, clear some PVE content to get gear and challenge others.

There is a reason you separate Lordaeron from Icecrown and there is a reason players pick between the servers.

[NovaOne3]

BUT I do not believe it should be implemented. It gives no incentive for new or even current members to come/stay here. Why would I want to continue playing here where I get 2 shotted by a ret pally in BiS when I can just go to Icecrown and buy the same gear to compete. At least on Lordaeron I know I can work hard, climb the ladder, clear some PVE content to get gear and challenge others.

There is a reason you separate Lordaeron from Icecrown and there is a reason players pick between the servers.

Exactly. I know Warmane try to be Blizzlike but telling us we're wrong about what we think we want is taking it too far. If you were unhappy about the state of pvp on Lord ("a realm with challenging pve content"), you can roll a toon on Icecrown.

Warmane is not going to change this. The vast majority of players are not going to give negative feedback about this, the lord PvP community was small and we're the only ones affected by this, and then only a subset of us are actually unhappy with the change. As a dev I know I'd be upset if something I was working on for a year got shelved because of some angry forum nerds.

So PLEASE, can we make some sort of compromise? The number of smournes are already ruining my "blizzlike" experience, and we know you've added transmog before so can we implement some non-blizzlike features that can keep everybody happy? I'd love a choice to be able to queue crossrealm or with only players from my realm. That way I can still do AV from time to time but most of the time I'll be able to get bgs with my own realm (albeit with slower queue times). Also, please allow blacklisting a couple of specific battlegrounds when you're doing RBGs. Yesterday I queued about 8 times and 6 of those were 40v40 and it never used to be like this.

I also want to second the reports of toxicity. The very first BG I joined had a Lord player ****ting on Icecrown. I don't agree with it but I understand the frustration when our bgs have essentially been cannibalized by icecrown and all of our gear that we've worked for has suddenly become much less meaningful. I only started playing on Lord this year and with about 300 hours on my DK I've got up to about 5.4k gs. I was starting to feel powerful in BGs and had plans for my character, but now I regularly encounter people who outgear me by nearly 1000gs. It's going to take me at least another year to grind up to that sort of gear, if I'm lucky with my ICC drops, just so I can be *on par* with many of the other players.

Also, please for the love of god don't implement cross-realm arena, or at least balance it somehow.

[Bleu]

• Lordearon has shorter queue time, and as I enjoy playing pvp, that's a huge thumb up. Getting 800HK on a Tuesday is something I never saw before on Lordearon, let alone playing 1 AV and 2 IoC in the same day.
  
• BG outcomes ended-up more balanced. Before the x-realm, Alliance side on Lordaeron was winning around 95% from my bg statistics. The Horde was bleeding its players, seen a lot of PVP player transfer Alliance, while I never ever noticed a single Alliance player switching to Horde. x-realm will help a lot since it felt way more balanced. I timed-out 2 Warsong Gulch, 2-2 and 1-0 yesterday, don't tell me things ain't balanced.
  
• Shadowmourne donor are not an issue. I like playing full pve caster DPS. I didn't end up dying more often then usual. If you end up in a 5vs10 you'll lose no matter the gear, if you end up in a 10vs5 you win, and on a 5vs5 or 10vs10 the smater/better players will balance their sides. Press the correct buttons on the correct times, and you don't die. Oh, and always outrange DK's grip. That's it. If you die, don't bash donor. Read guides, practice your binds, learn to control enemy players, play full pve (that way any mistake kills you and you'll soon figure out your way to live). Playing full PVE in BG's wasn't an easy life to start with for me, but yesterday, I ended up s***ing on everyone's damage in AV by loads while being "AFK capping towers" 95% of my time.
  
• I also have a ret paladin, granted, with some gear (Bane weapon, double DV), but not full Wrathfull since I started to PVP as paladin last month. I'm horribly bad but I solo'ed a few SM players, and some BGs my damage remained competitively high on the ladder. Of course, some players are trashing my damage, but hey, a good player is a good player, SM or not he'd trash my noob damage anyday. If they perform better than me, then I just need to improve. I'm sure I can outplay 99% of the people playing this game, and if I can, I'm bad, that's all. Not going to blame someone for being better - donated gear doesn't make you better at any rate.
  
• Lordearon people were hard-taunting Icecrown players about donated gear. I suppose that's because donated gear is a new thing here. Hopefully will stop anyway. Besides 1-2 stupid Icecrown player taunting us, most of the ****talk came from Lordearon players, then degenerated. I hate bad atmosphere in my raids, but in my raids "I'm da king" so I can decide to stop the nonsense, but I can't control Lordearon players' behavior in BGs... I hope they'll be smart enough to make the BG atmosphere enjoyable. Though I highly doubt, cause all the trash atmosphere in raid was coming 500% from (trash)-pvp wannnabe...
  
• Lordaeron pvp community was so small I can tell you 99% of regular horde players name, along as their spec... Now that we get to see x-realm, sure the pvp community got instantaneously bigger and any sense of pvp community you could have is lost, but to be fair, new faces ain't bad at all in my eyes.
  
• To all players afraid of the balance loss in the arena brackets. MMR. Match-Making Rating. This system matches against players of same skill, gear factored in. A SM noobdonor that looses 50% of its game will stick to 1500 MMR, and it means that any 1500 MMR rated player will win that guy 50% of the time (regardless of him having SM), and that 1600 rated players will win more than that 1700+ rated players are destroying the guy (again, regardless of him having SM). So no, arena balance will not be destroyed. And if you are afraid of these SM-Valanyr war pal that will sit on top of the ladder... Well Lordaeron used to have one such team. Now go play a counter and **** on them. And Lordaeron has Shadowmournes too, so well yes there will be warpal on top, but that's same as now, (if the current Shadowmourne players were to play), right? And anyway, in the Arena bracket, Blackrock players will trash everyone so who cares about Icecrown donated gear?
  
• Now is were it gets toxic. Lordearon has low gear. Get good, get gear. If you're going for it, that ain't hard, even on Lord. Granted, getting LoD weapon is hard, but don't tell me that any decent Lordaeron player can't have access to the normal version of DV, Solace, STS, DBW, PNL, DFO, CTS, Bauble. Don't tell me than Lordaeron player can't have acces to 4/5 Wrathfull set. Don't tell me that Lordaeron players can't have acces to Shadow's Edge, Bryn'toll, Wrathfull Offhand and Wrathfull main hand. Invest a bit of time, farm BG's and you get some Wrathfull offset as well as Furious gear, find an arena mate and queue up to 1500 and you'll get full Wrathfull offset + some set. Keep going and you'll eventually get the full thingie. If you're good, you'll get the gear. If you're good, you'll outplay a noob SM player, but a better player will always outplay you....

Take all what is written with a grain of salt. I'm one of these elitist jerks of Lordearon... Amongst the most geared, playing in the guild that farms Bane & LoD weekly, having acces to all the gear that's awailable in game, besides the PVP shoulders (and T2 legs cause Ragnaros ya know). I'm the sort of ******* raid leader that gets mad at my raid when people start to clown... (but now my raiders are behaving, and we have super duper cool raids where loot rains on us and on our alts).

As for suggestions:

• Do not ever implement any sort of downgrading upon entering arena (like turn all allset items to ilvl 264), that will destroy itemization and force people to have double sets, the BG ilvl 277 set and the arena "fake" ilvl 264 set, and while gear is obtainable, it's harded to get on Lordearon.
• You cannot make x-realm optional, at least not for Lordearon, since Lordaeron players who would queue "Lordearon only" would never get to see a queue popin'...

[Obnoxious]

So, with a bunch of posts deleted, let's have a refresher on the intent of the topic: a civil discussion with opinions about the new system being tested.

If your post is going to contain...

- little besides agreeing with one of the types listed below, or quoting/addressing one and continuing that sort of discussion;
- insults at the players from one of the servers or at their opinions posted here in any way;
- complains regarding the locked threads so we could have a fresh start, showing the concept of "fresh start" completely eludes you;
- something that can be summed up by the following video by claiming "PvP is destroyed" and such:

Spoiler: Show

... just don't post. This isn't a plea or just a suggestion. This is an important subject, and the thread will be kept civil one way or another.