RIP realm hopping

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sasrei7
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RIP realm hopping

Unread post by sasrei7 »

frig.. I loved realm hopping it made catching rares sooo much easier. Like seriously. Now i'm stuck on a server with literally a ton of players.. so many realms. I wish they would at leat fix respawn timers and up them if there are a certain number of players in the zone. It's going to be next to impossible to catch king krush, loque and skoll now :(
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Quiv
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Quiv »

what happened? I've been hopping realms just fine since patch.
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Valnaaros »

Realm Hopping now only works if you have someone in the group who is in the same zone as you are. If not, then it'll keep you on your original server.
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Quiv
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Quiv »

Oh god that does put a huge limitation on it. I thought it was working fine because I was hopping looking for that corwardly goron in Frostfire that drops a toy, and I was joining a bunch of garrison groups who were also in Frostfire.

I hope they post an explanation for this. I've checked some recent blue posts and didn't see anything. Makes me sad cuz this was sooooooooo handy.
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Valnaaros »

Yeah, they talked about it a bit ago, so it is intentional. They said something about trying to limit potential abuse through realm hopping. However, most people didn't know about the post and thus were surprised when they couldn't realm hop as easily as before.
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Lupen202 »

I've heard that more realms are connected as well in CRZs, so you have less realms to hop to, and it certainly feels that way.

I'm kind of conflicted. I hated realm hopping at times, especially when you're trying to get a group together and 50% of people signing up aren't interested... but at the same time I've done the same thing. It's super useful when I want to farm something or get away from a camper/gank.

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Valnaaros
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Valnaaros »

All realms except for RP realms have more CRZ's. They didn't mean to add CRZs to them in Legion, so they plan on slowly removing them from almost all areas.
sasrei7
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by sasrei7 »

Frig I hate crz :( I hope they get rid of quite a few realms that are linked to mine, Sholazar is crazy on mine :( you cant walk even a bit before hitting a hunter or a ton of questers lol.
They need to lower the amount of realms connected in CRZs cause the pre legion stuff is going to suck :(
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Iowawolf »

http://wow.curseforge.com/addons/server ... in-legion/

This is an article explaining more in detail what is now considered realm hopping which I think sucks because of some group leaders being too lazy to manual invite or players abusing the system ruined it for the rest of us.
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Xota
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Xota »

Even inviting manually didn't stop the hoppers. It's not like you could see where the prospective group members were located, and group leaders shouldn't have been expected to know all the common camp spots anyways. So please don't blame group leaders for being lazy, when people wrote and used hopping addons to exploit groups that were forming for a specific purpose.

But I think that's moot, because TBH, it was pretty obvious that realm hopping was not being used as intended. A lot of the reason for realm hopping was because other people would hop to your realm and snipe your rares. The game is designed for rares to be on a spawn timer, and camping was the intended way to improve your chances at finding a rare spawn. It got to a "if you can't beat them, join them" point with hopping. When I started hopping, I thought, "well, this isn't going to last". And I'm glad they came up with a new system that addresses the problems of the old, and found a way to keep its intended uses (for making groups for players to interact with each other).
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Wain
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Wain »

Completely agree with Xota. Sorry but realm hopping had become a pestilence. People would form a group in good faith and end up waiting on group members only to have them leave 5 mins later.
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Lisaara »

Wain wrote:Completely agree with Xota. Sorry but realm hopping had become a pestilence. People would form a group in good faith and end up waiting on group members only to have them leave 5 mins later.
I'm in agreement. Realm hopping was god awful and often times it hurt more than helped.

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Quiv
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Quiv »

It bugged me people would use non-hop groups to hop. I would often throw up an Oondasta group back when I was camping him. Sometimes I would get actual people, but most of them would be people jumping in and out. While this didn't bother me in this instance, it was people using my group for what it wasn't intended.

I did enjoy throwing up hop groups when I was dinking around on a toon for a while. Some people would stay and chat, most would drop in and out. I always wanted to give back to people who utilized hopping the way I did by offering a hop friendly group.

It seems to me we have two distinct issues that need to be separated. The first issue is the people listing a group for a specific purpose only to find it being hopped to death. This is a real issue and its frustrating to try and fill a group and only get a bunch of hoppers. I get the aggravation.

However is realm hopping in and of itself a negative thing? I loved realm hopping, and personally only tried to use it with groups that invited hoppers or who didn't care (such as garrison groups). Aside from the frustrating it caused players actually trying to form groups, I wonder if the impacts and implications were in line with what Blizzard wanted. Hoppers could essentially zone to a new realm and snipe a rare. I've used it a lot for this, hunting rare pets or vignettes or whatever. It was immensely convenient for those purposes, but I always wondered about it. I hate to see the convenience go, but I get it.

Maybe if they added a toggle on the Group Finder creation screen that allowed the user to specify if he wanted to flag his group to allow open hopping. This could be made visually apparent by some indicator on the group when searching for one. Ehh I'm not holding my breath. C'est la vie!
Last edited by Quiv on Fri Aug 05, 2016 10:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Xella
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Xella »

I'm not gonna lie—I made use of realm hopping to an extent. I tried to be courteous about it and only join hop-friendly groups or garrison groups who were obviously on auto-invite but not nearing capacity. I picked up whichever-Rotam and escaped from some cross-realm campers and turned in quests in Honor Hold/Thrallmar that way. I also utilized it a lot for the Tanaan rares and the (non-voidtalon) outdoor mounts (both joining and creating groups) and world bosses, but that didn't feel bad cos that was sort of the obvious, intended purpose of the whole thing.

I also had a hunter from Sargeras phase in next to me and kill Gondria mid-tame, sooooo... I dunno. Not that you don't get that from people in your usual CRZ (or your usual server for that matter, if you're on the kind of server that has those kinds of players in abundance during your play times), but it's extra frustrating when it's somebody you wouldn't normally be competing with AND you know they're using someone on your server to be petty because you were there first—someone who may have a hop-friendly group OR someone who doesn't want hoppers but is getting them anyway.

And yeah, it was super frustrating as a group leader, but if you're already in combat with one of the tanaan mount rares (on a pvp server, no less) you often don't have the attention to spare manually inviting people; usually about the best I could do was de-list the group when they hit 25% or so so people wouldn't keep joining with a dead boss. I never put on auto-invite for party-sized content but even that didn't always stop hoppers. Heck, it still doesn't, because people haven't caught on that realm hopping is dead yet.

The only real drawback to the new system from my point of view is that I feel sort of stationary if I'm trying to let people hop for a specific reason. For example, after camping Cravitz Lorent (the shady book dealer in the Dalaran sewers who sells the rogue detection book, the priest confession toy, the shaman cockroach hex, and an glyph recipe for... something for rogues) for something like five hours on Wednesday, I went and checked on a whim while I was in Dalaran on an alt for old raid running reasons yesterday and he was up; after getting on all the characters that needed stuff for him, I opened up a group in Group Finder. But then I had to sit there for like an hour to make sure that anybody who joined the group looking for him could actually get him (also to make sure I delisted when he despawned). I spent a lot of that time answering questions in the group and in trade chat, and idly making transmog sets and plans for what instances to run on which characters, but it was still super boring, haha.

(My guildmates also used it (well, cross-realm phasing, not group finder specifically) at the start of WoD to phase to a low pop PvE server and I'm not sure they'll be able to make use of me like that for Legion with the changes; hopefully if they want to do that again they'll ask to test it BEFORE launch so I don't lose too much of my own leveling time, lol :|)
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Quiv
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Quiv »

Xella wrote:...usually about the best I could do was de-list the group when they hit 25% or so so people wouldn't keep joining with a dead boss.
Tangent: Thank you for doing this. It is so irritating when those groups don't delist but stay up for like 10 minutes with people cycling in and out. I would try and do the same for those groups, Oondasta etc.

Back to topic...
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Valnaaros »

I myself used realm hopping from time-to-time. I'm sure most people have. But in the end, I think it is best that it is done away with. It shouldn't be the group leader's responsibility to check where everyone is at. And I can't really think of a way that Blizz prevent realm hopping without just turning it off almost entirely. Besides that, realm hopping made it harder for realms - particularly smaller ones - to find rares like TLPD or Aeonaxx. Now they have a better chance.
sasrei7
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by sasrei7 »

Valnaaros wrote:I myself used realm hopping from time-to-time. I'm sure most people have. But in the end, I think it is best that it is done away with. It shouldn't be the group leader's responsibility to check where everyone is at. And I can't really think of a way that Blizz prevent realm hopping without just turning it off almost entirely. Besides that, realm hopping made it harder for realms - particularly smaller ones - to find rares like TLPD or Aeonaxx. Now they have a better chance.
Umm there is no such thing as small realms, not with CRZ. Like ever. I see around 20-30+ people always in sholazar questing and camping rares. And i'm on icecrown which is a low pop server. I got extremely lucky with Loque and King Krush. Loque was up for a bit and saw a hunter camping nearby, I poked him multiple times but he never came back and wasnt sure if he was camping King Krush only so I tamed him. King krush a lvl 74 warrior was killing ads near him. I got feared but luckily tamed him the next time. Rares in shola dont last longer then a minute with how many campers and questers there are.

Whether you don't like it or like, all your realm hopping problems would have been solved with a manual invite. Is it annoying? Yes, but at least it would stop most realm hoppers. I only ever joined ones that allowed realm hopping. You could also delist before you pull as well. So... yah. They should IMO lower respawn timers depending on how many people are in the zone. A 5-20+ hour respawn timer is insane when you have 30+ people in a zone.
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Xota »

sasrei7 wrote:Whether you don't like it or like, all your realm hopping problems would have been solved with a manual invite.
No, that's not true. I used manual invites sometimes, and there were still realm hopping problems. And I hopped a lot too (no addons), being courteous about which groups I queued up for, and there were still problems, from the manual inviting leader being momentarily afk and then possibly not seeing the request because of the 100 realm hopper requests. Whether you like it or not, the current implementation is better. It keeps the intended functionality of the group finder tool.
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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Rikaku »

sasrei7 wrote:Whether you don't like it or like, all your realm hopping problems would have been solved with a manual invite. Is it annoying? Yes, but at least it would stop most realm hoppers. I only ever joined ones that allowed realm hopping. You could also delist before you pull as well. So... yah. They should IMO lower respawn timers depending on how many people are in the zone. A 5-20+ hour respawn timer is insane when you have 30+ people in a zone.

I might be in the minority, but I don't see why spawn timers should be lowered just because there's 30+ people in a zone for one rare. That's how it was for a lot of people (especially Hunters) prior to CRZ even existing. When I camped Loque back during Wrath in its hayday, there were easy 30+ people there in that Basin from my realm alone (again no CRZ existed). Some rare spawns, especially ones like Loque or Krush started off in a populated zone with long hours long before CRZ became a thing. That's part of the challenge of those rares.

Personally, I'm with Wain, Fisk and Xota. For me, realm hopping was a pain in the butt. I know some people used it responsibly and stuck to groups that welcomed it, but it honestly was a pain in my personal LFG raid experience.

But admittedly, it might also be because I was never (and still am not) a fan of CRZ. If Blizzard ever offered servers that weren't RP and had no CRZ, I would realm transfer in a heartbeat. XD

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Re: RIP realm hopping

Unread post by Valnaaros »

sasrei7 wrote:
Valnaaros wrote:I myself used realm hopping from time-to-time. I'm sure most people have. But in the end, I think it is best that it is done away with. It shouldn't be the group leader's responsibility to check where everyone is at. And I can't really think of a way that Blizz prevent realm hopping without just turning it off almost entirely. Besides that, realm hopping made it harder for realms - particularly smaller ones - to find rares like TLPD or Aeonaxx. Now they have a better chance.
Umm there is no such thing as small realms, not with CRZ.
Actually, there are. PvP-RP realms like Ravenholdt are still small, even when CRZ'd. This is due to the fact that there is only one other PvP-RP realm, I believe.

Manuel invites wouldn't solve anything. Realm Hoppers still would queue up and wait to be invited, hop over, then leave. There really isn't any way Blizz can stop realm hoppers except removing it almost entirely. And decreasing respawn timers wouldn't help anything either. There is tech implemented that'll increase the spawn rate of quest mobs depending on how many people are in the area (this is very useful when an xpac launches). But decreasing the respawn time of rares like Loque, Krush, the two spirit cats in Hyjal, etc would just take away from them. As Rikaku said, a lot of the challenge would be removed if they could spawn faster.
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