From the producer letter:
Remember what I said about focusing on the present? Well, we couldn’t let a producer’s letter go by without giving you at least a small peak at the future, now could we? Well, here’s the bombshell: By 1.3.6 players will have the capability to play as both Order and Destruction on the same server.
I am honestly very surprised by this bomb of an announcement. I guess right off the bat, I am not seeing the benefit to this, just the negatives.
1) Most importantly, this is a huge blow to realm pride. It is a bit funny, because I was just about to start doing some articles on the blog about restoring realm pride to Warhammer. Obviously one of the biggest problems with the city seige being participation based is you need to rely on realm pride to be greater then the desire to just roll over and let the enemy take your lands if you are locked out on offensive city timer and can get loot for defensive city timer. I know for a fact the devs agree with that as well, and this seems to be a HUGE GIANT step backwards making things even worse.
2) Your cross realming community is already cross-realming. They are also paying for 2 accounts to do it.
3) A large amount of the people not cross-realming are not cross-realming for a reason. This is a strong subject for many people, and this is where Mythic must have different information then my assumptions, but I would definately assume they will lose a good number of subscriptions over this, and gain very few.
4) It is going to hurt some guilds that have members jump to the other side with their main account, then be locked out of their current guild.
Obviously this is a very snapshot opinion as this information was just released. I will do another entry in a month or so, after I have heard some information and tried to determine what would prompt this by Mythic.
Grimnir
April 30, 2010 at 7:53 am
I can deal with this, adding a “significant lockout timer” for playing the other realm is fine with me I suppose… Also, people with more than one account have them because they were bought/given away from players leaving the game. Fully geared and leveled toons aren’t going to go away simply because you can play both sides on one account.
Wasdstomp
April 30, 2010 at 8:36 am
I can understand it from my perspective. I have rerolled so many times, and as each server merger happens I know have a 40 on each server. The next merger would mean I would probably have to delete one of my characters.
Tyanon
April 30, 2010 at 8:36 am
A lot of the xrealmers I know leveled up their own chars from a demo account. Only a couple actually were given characters by the other realm.
I would be pretty pissed about double paying for something that gets featured into the game.
Tyanon
April 30, 2010 at 9:23 am
@wasd: My next post will be more of the pros, which I am learning. Some of the more interesting pros (which is interesting to look at shrinking population as a pro) but they cant do more server merges without a lot of collisions on accounts with chars on both sides. Also, a few people are hinting that it could also be a pre-req to a third realm. haha
mahkra
April 30, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Not to be a negative nancy, but I find the obvious answer here that this is a prelude to a single remaining live server.
Rikker
April 30, 2010 at 12:58 pm
I can see the “significant lockout timer” helping (It would be annoying to make it easier for people to jump back and forth across accounts).
But mostly, I agree with Ty’s first point. It really, really weakens realm pride, and I think it will take a lot of fun out of the high-end oRVR.
Third realm would be cool, I might be ok with it for that reason. Anything else, though, and I think we’re looking at a game that could die quickly.
Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy WAR, but I think it really needs that sense of “the other guys” in order to keep the RVR strong.
Fight on the Flag » Blog Archive » April producer’s letter: Same server, different faction
May 4, 2010 at 6:43 am
[...] at Backseatdev, Tyanon writes that people who want to cross realm are already doing it, and “paying for two accounts to do [...]