Good intentions do not mean good execution. The phasing of World of Warcraft ruins one of the biggest community events.
Most activities in World of Warcraft can be completed in groups of 5 to 40 players. The only exception is content created by players themselves: So, community events.
On the largest RP server in WoW, Moonguard, the Tournament of Ages was set to take place from August 6 to August 12 – a massive role-playing event where hundreds of players come together to participate in tournaments, balls, and all kinds of role-playing activities for a week. It was supposed to be the largest role-playing event ever.
But the phasing technology has disrupted the players’ plans. For the arena battles, players went to Northrend, to the Argent Tournament Arena. Unfortunately, the tournament fighters and the hundreds of spectators could not see each other.
The reason for this is phasing. For a while now, WoW has created multiple instances (“shards”) of many locations when the influx of players at a particular place is too great. This aims to reduce server load as well as the burden on individual players’ machines. While it is fundamentally a good thing, it causes problems at events like this, with individual spectators sitting on the stage wondering where the event with 300 players is supposed to be.
The only workaround is to form a raid group so that players can see each other. The limit is only 40 players, which is far too small for such projects.
Cortyn says: As a role-player, I can certainly understand the problem. The only exception to phasing seems to be a few major cities, such as Stormwind or Orgrimmar. Almost all other places, including Dalaran, tend to phase out and make it impossible to encounter friends if you’re not in a group. This is detrimental to the sense of “we” – and especially devastating for large community events. At its core, phasing is definitely a great thing – but for large events, it is the death knell. The sense of community suffers greatly from such “improvements”.
Especially absurd is the regression. Years ago, we were happy to finally move from text chat role-playing to graphics. Now we are back in group chats to circumvent the technical barriers of games. Long live progress.<
Update: Sometimes, miracles still happen:
Signs and Wonders – Blizzard fixes Phasing in WoW for Role-Players
