As CRZ increases camping complaints, should Blizzard be taking action?
Mists of Pandaria marked a decided change of pace for Blizzard. The latest expansion of WoW pushed players out of the cities where they’d grown comfortable nesting in Cataclysm and Wrath, and into the world. Pushing players out of the cities meant that there were suddenly more higher level players roaming the world, hunting battle pets, doing dailies, and the like.
More importantly, with the addition of Cross-Realm-Zones (CRZ) to the game, players no longer really had to worry so much about the ramifications of actions such as ganking lower-level players, or corpse-camping, as they’d just be spirited away by the realm matching, and likely never see that player again. Many have complained of the difficulty of maintaining “kill on sight” lists for players such as these, given how rare it is to run into the same players repeatedly across different days, and some players have even asserted that their friends are transported into a different Tanaris or a different Twilight Highlands when coming to help.
But, PvP servers have always held these risks.
It’s not news that players on PvP realms get ganked, but over the years that have passed since Vanilla, and certainly since the Burning Crusade, some PvP realms have been PvP realms only in name. Massive faction imbalances or low populations, or the aforementioned focus on players sitting in cities waiting for queues has meant that even seeing a member of the opposite faction is a rarity. Players who roll on these servers have had a nasty surprise, particularly with the appearance of CRZ, and Twitter and the forums are awash with stories of how players’ servers have changed.
But what should be done, if anything?
I’ve got a couple of ideas, which I will explain better in the video above, but something along the lines of a dishonor debuff, where killing a player more than five or ten levels below you would put a resurrection sickness-esque debuff on your character, and each repetition of that action would worsen the debuff. More simply perhaps, have CRZ draw from a smaller pool of servers, to make it easier to hunt down the player who keeps killing your lowbies. Perhaps, if Blizzard really don’t want to change their ways, as it seems from their current position, they should offer free character transfers from PvP realms to low-population PvE realms.
What do you think?
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