Cross-Realm Zones

I know, I've been meaning to get back to the lore stuff about Warchiefs and High Kings, but this seemed like it could use a bit of commentary. As I was sitting, downloading the Diablo 3 client, I came across Blizzard's new announcement that there will now be "Cross-Realm Zones."

This is pretty interesting. The idea is that, if you are in a zone that has few people in it (sometimes just you) the game will basically toss you in with people from other realms. These people will be able to fight the same monsters (or you, if you're on opposite factions) and group up with you (if not.) Essentially, the purpose of this is to fill out those zones where you feel like you're playing a solo game.

Now, admittedly, I actually think WoW's leveling game works pretty well as a solo game. Sure, you do still have your "kill 8 spiders" quests, but especially with the Cataclysm revamp, I have fun soloing my way through the world. That said, this is an MMO, and having an outer world devoid of other players does betray some of the central conceit of the genre. Certainly, you can't really do much at the level cap without grouping up, but I think that this is another method they're employing to fight the "the game begins at the level cap" mentality some people have. (Questing was actually always my favorite part of the game, hence the name of the blog, but I know that a lot of people would prefer to interact with others in the questing experience and get their open-world RPG from Elder Scrolls or Fallout.)

Another one of the motivations for this, I'm sure, is World PvP. I've always played on a PvE server, but even then, in the old days, a fair number of people would do things like raiding Crossroads. You could flag yourself if you wanted to fight them off (though as a level 17 guy in Crossroads fighting a bunch of level 60s you didn't stand much of a chance.) Personally, I hated it when they went after my quest givers, but on another level it adds to the dynamic nature of an MMO world.

By tossing more people together in those low-level areas, the potential for combat between equals, rather than some asshole ganker with full arena gear smashing a guy in crappy green gear, goes up.

Now, all this is good, but I'll tell you the thing that excites me the most by far:

They can do this in reverse. Apparently, this technology will allow them to split zones on a single realm. Overpopulation is not often an issue - especially after the first month or so of a new expansion - but if you've played on the Beta and tried to quest in the very first part of Pandaria or in the Pandaren starting zone, kill-stealing is absolutely rampant. In fact, because of the mechanism that increases the rate at which enemies respawn when they're being killed so quickly, you sometimes find yourself unable to move from one spot because the moment you've killed an enemy, it respawns and starts attacking you (this is part of the reason I stopped questing in Protection spec, because Consecration can't be turned off.)

Anyway, I certainly think it's ok to have one or two people competing with you for kills on a quest, but when you have those situations where there are hundreds of people all trying to, say, burn the same scroll, it'd be nice if the zone could split the population up a bit.