Cross Realm Raiding

Current tier content cannot be raided with people from other realms at the moment. According to Greg Street 'Ghostcrawler', Blizzard worries about what that would do to guilds.

You wantz raidz?

With the shortage of people our 10man has been experiencing I have often wished we could cross-realm raid. We seem to be getting into a bit calmer weather now with 2 new people joining us on a more regular basis (we found them in trade, can you imagine!), but there are still times that I would love to invite someone from a different realm.

Imagine only how much easier it would be to trial people and how much bigger the recruitment pool would be for guilds that do actively recruit through these means.

And I keep wondering...wouldn't it be possible for blizzard to make realms not matter?

Worry about guilds, well...if guilds were cross-realm that wouldn't matter, right? The sense of identity would be placed even more on guilds.

Of course there are people who have, so to speak, 'grown up' on a certain realm. Personally I have grown up on Icecrown-US, and while I would be a tiny bit sad to see that part of my game identity become more vague, the advantages would far outweigh the disadvantages for me.

So why then is it so important to keep realms separate for current content?

Might it be maybe because people need to be able to identify themselves on sites like WoWProgress?



Being 16th in realm-wide progress sounds much better than being number 13943 world-wide.



But would the player base not find another way to measure how they are doing in the competition? Would in the end it not be better actually that you're not measuring apples against pears?

There is no possible way that FP can compete with Dream Paragon for example.



And doing so is only leading to disappointment in the end.

And even comparing ourselves against the number 1 on our own server is not a fair comparison. We raid 10s, they raid 25s. We raid only 8 hours per week, casually. They raid for 16+ hours.

Yet, these sort of sites compare the two guilds together and say how much better one is above the other.

I believe that if it would actually become possible to compare experience with experience, and time invested with same time invested with each other, it would become a lot more satisfactory, for a lot of players. It would feel good to be the best in your own league, the best in what you do. The best when all is set to even footing.

After all if FP would transfer to certain realms, we would suddenly be realm number 1...looks nice, but it is in no way an indication that we have improved.

Maybe Blizzard likes the income from the realm transfers too much?

Maybe, but I find this hard to believe. If there is anything that Cataclysm, and now Mists has shown me, it is that Blizzard designs the game the way they believe will work out, not the way they believe will make the most money.

Of course, quite often those two go hand in hand, but I strongly believe that if it would come down to a developer vs sales battle at Blizzard, the designers would win in the end.

So I'm getting to the end of this post, and while I have been turning this back and forth in my head, I find the argument that Ghostcrawler gave on twitter a bit weak and shallow. They must have a better reason, but I haven't figured it out yet.