Almost nothing irks me more than not being able to play with my friends in any particular game on any particular day because we’re all spread out across different servers. I know, servers used to be (and perhaps still are) the ‘norm’ in video games – but honestly, I feel that a better way should be found. Sure, WoW has come leaps and bounds in allowing people to group together by faction so long as they’re on your bnet, and by server cluster, but it’s not enough.
The whole reason this comes up is because I’ve recently started playing on another new server in WoW so I can play with friends (ie: in their guild). I don’t want to have to pay to move my 0lder characters so the only option I really have is to start fresh. I’m currently playing on three servers and I REALLY want to just be playing on one.
It’s not completely unheard of, I mean EVE Online does well with their shard universe and there are a handful of other games out there that will let you transfer (for no cost) between servers at your discretion but older games (EQ, EQ2, I’m looking at you two) require you to stay put unless there are server merges or free transfers.
Of course this is all easy for me to say. I know if it were as simple as developing a new idea to keep people happy then it would probably already be implemented. Plus there’s revenue generated when someone pays to transfer. Still, I can’t help but wish things were a little different, and that when my friends gathered in their respective games I could play with them too without having to start all over once again.
All I’ve ever seen servers and the inability to freely move between them as is developer incomprehension of player needs and lazy feature coding. I’ve never seen any good part with it, not can I think of one. Games using such technology deserve to lose customers, imo.
Yeah this is such a pain in games, it’s the reason why I never got to play much LOTRO with my nephew – we’d both invested too much time and effort in characters on different servers! It’s emphasized the more when my group plays a game like Neverwinter and you just group up and right click a group-member to “move to their instance”. Servers by another name but without any of the barriers…
You stole one of my Blaugust topics. :)
Needless to say, I completely agree. MMOs are the only genre where two people playing the same game might not be able to play together. If I find out a friend plays League of Legends or Call of Duty or whatever, it’s easy for us to hop in and play together. But if I find a friend who is also playing World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy and we’re not on the same server, it’s like we’re not even playing the same game. Personally I would like to see more MMOs just use channels.