This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Virtual Realms, at least from what I have read so far is what cross realm zones should have been in the first place, because after it is implemented I know the people I see from other realms (they will have a # beside their name) will be an actual member of my community and not just some ephemeral apparition.VR on paper promises to be the most clever solution to low pop realms I have heard of and I am looking forward to their implementation.I also feel anyone that feels closing servers and merging others has a very limited imagination and should consider expanding their mind to the possibilities involved with VR.All this coming from a player that absolutely hates cross realm zones in its current iteration.
Olivia: It's pretty obvious that VRs and CRZ will co-exist. As you point out, CRZ is to populate zones, whereas VRs are to populate Realms (most notably in areas that don't have CRZ).Indeed, I would suggest that the set of Realms you're VRed with will be a subset of those you're CRZed with.And, another point. You seem to be presuming that every single Realm will be VRed with at least one other and that the end result will be more massive VRs than the current Huge servers. I don't see that. I would presume that High pop, and High-Med pop realms will not even be VRed with any other realms. Thus, fusing all the Low Pop and Low-Med pop realms will just create more Med-High pop VRs. So all this talk of World Boss spawn and everything will be moot.Finally, I think the big unannounced feature is either VR or FlexRaid. I don't think any other new big feature is coming in 5.4.Cheers.
If his 'cunning' is turning out like this, Kil'jaedan must be a moron.
On a different topic, provided that the VRs are properly handled, I think they will work out very well for low-pop realms. It is a big improvement over CRZs. With CRZs we have resource competition between different realms, which would be fine except that if someone from a different realm takes our resources, they don't end up on our AH, but disappear from our realm entirely. VRs alleviate this problem and will allow low-pop server players to have a much richer AH selection, as well as more people to do world quests with.There could be potential lag issues, but my hope (without doing any looking into it all) would be that they would allow instances to be handled by a single server at a time, which would mean raids and dungeons (and arenas/bgs) shouldn't see much difference.
I don't think that the flex raiding will work quite the way that you describe, though I have nothing to back this up. Why wouldn't it work similar to the current lock-outs, where the raid is set to the lockout of the player who leads the group? If the 'Thursday Rogue' starts the group, then everyone has to do the bosses again, but if the raid leader from Wednesday starts the group with new players then they can skip those first bosses.This just seems to flow better with their current models.
i kinda hope that large realms will not be added too virtual realms at the start.im playing on Draenor EU, and its crowded as hell nowadays after the reduce transfer cost.and it was crowded before that also.so adding even more too that pool would be a bit overkill.however for empty/small/medium realms the virtual realms would be a big improvement and for those servers i support it.
Another nail......
What I want to know is whether there will be a whole new form of tracking guild raid progressoin through this Flex raiding feature. I haven't found anything written about that. Our guild is supposedly switching to this form of raiding in 5.4 and I want to be able to invite anyone and everyone so they have an opportunity to raid, however, I have a Guild/Raid Leader that cringes at the thought of raiding with non-guildies. One of his biggest reasons was because of our guild progression. If there will be no tracking at all of guild progression for Flex raids, then there is no reason to require a player join to our guild in order to raid. They would be free to join if or when they choose to.