[Overpopulation] Winterspring - Winterfall Village and Timbermaw Post

[Ashstache]

Overpopulation is inarguably a problem right now; everyone who plays here recognizes that. While changes can be made to address that, those changes also shouldn't be something that has to be walked back later necessarily; overpopulation likely won't last forever.

The primary issue caused by overpop is players standing around, waiting for mobs to spawn, sniping them from each other, and generally being rude or outright hostile. This is a failure in game design on Blizzard's part, obviously, but they didn't design vanilla to be played by 8k people on one server. I'm retreading ground familiar to most of you at this point.

Dynamic respawns are generally the proper response, with few to no drawbacks. If the furbolg in Winterspring aren't already set to dynamically respawn, implementing that would be a staggeringly huge quality-of-life change to the dozens of players I see farming these areas at a time (me included, obviously).

More than that, these areas deserve a thoughtful redesign. Winterspring is one of the famously underdeveloped zones, and while some new custom quests have been added here, large parts of the zone could be redone to some degree or another.

Turtle staff has repeatedly communicated - through both forums/discord and the actual implemented design - that they want players to group up more. I agree! The game is generally much more fun when played with other people! However, much of Blizzard's game design not only doesn't support that but outright actively disincentivizes players from working together. Quest items in Winterspring are solo loot - the meats dropped for the initial Wintersaber quest, and the Winterfall Spirit Beads as well. This means that while you're on some of the least fun, least engaging, and most mind-numbing grinds in the game, you are encouraged to do them alone!

The simple solution is to make these party loot - everyone in the party gets to loot one when they drop. People will actively play together and actually engage with this existing content!

Besides group loot, the areas where these mobs congregate could be spruced up, particularly Winterfall Village. It could be larger, with more spawns, packs, rares, quests, interactive objects, everything. Silithus is often maligned for being dreary and unfinished, but some of the best open-world group content in the game exists around the Field Duty activities, as well as the elemental lord summoning sites. These are big, lively zones, giving players a really adventurous feeling while still being challenging yet also productive. More of the game could stand to use the design philosophies of Silithus.

Beyond a a design team taking a full-on redesign of the zone into consideration, at least apply dynamic spawns to these areas, or turn up the rate if that's already active. It's truly, truly miserable to experience the sheer depth of antisocial behavior that these areas currently bring out of people. That's not unique to Winterspring or Timbermaw/Wintersaber grinds, but it's been particularly egregious there, and as Turtle has consistently shown us over the years, things can, in fact, be better.

[Swagadin]

I agree. It's getting tiresome. Too many players in zones making it hard to farm consumes. Ah prices are high, farming methods taken out of the game and or nerfed. What's the point? I mean at one point I had farmed over 700 furblogs for a 16 slot bag full of fire water, so much in fact that I had enough juju to supply my guild all the way through aq40 progression and half way through revered with timbermaw. And barely now did we get increased drop rates? When there is 3x the amount of people on at any given time?

Yeah it's just boring. Some love to the farming zones would be a huge plus, allowing players to spread out would be amazing and adding some more mobs to grind. If this is out of the question maybe look into dynamic reaspawns on mobs. Because anyone who has been in those zones can attest that its full.

[Ugoboom]

I agree that taking the dev time to add dynamic respawns that decreases the spawntimer dynamically per characters on the realm, or a hyperspawn system like classic had that simply sets a minimum number of mobs that must exist at any given time, is philosohpically an easy add.

However, there lies a main problem in where the only way to acquire bis consumes like green juju and firewater is through those nonelite mobs that 3 players can solo tear through. I would also suggest adding consumes gathered through elite mobs that have a slightly greater of an effect. Firewater vs black juju is blizzard's prescedence for this, as while black juju offers better stats, its such a minor minmax that both firewater and black juju keep their relevance in pricing. There are plenty of unfarmed elite subzones in the world of azeroth that would benefit from there being a reason to kill them. And as elites, they can be tuned to dissuade soloing and reward group play.

THAT is how you want to reward groups, not by worsening the nonelite problem by encouraging more people to group together and overfarm it (and also establishing duoboxing effectively as a GPH doubler), but by providing new alternatives in the world that offer higher GPH that require 2+ people versus mobs are designed to make duoboxing a healer to do them hard if not impossible.

[Ashstache]

This has not gotten any better if anyone is wondering. There are consistently 12-20 people at a time farming Winterfall Village alone, so most stand at a spawn waiting.

[Xudo]

From my observations, devs intentionally made those farm zones to be crowded.
So, making those farm zones to be less crowded does not fit devs philosophy.
Making those zones to produce more consumables (by dynamic spawn) does not fit it either.
Jamey stated that group play should be encouraged while solo play - pessimized.

So if you want situation to be improved somehow, you need to ask something which fit current devs philosophy.

I think that those subzones could feature some summonable bosses like in Silithus. Those summonable bosses should drop consumables or materials for them.
Bosses in Silithus are also runecloth sink. So I think new bosses can be sink for other simple material: meat, useless fish, leather, thorium.

BTW, join PvP realm. There you need to fight for those resources. At least with other faction.

[Pyrahead]

I feel you and it's the only gripe I have with this server. This would all have been fixed if they had kept their promise about transfers and given the non-English community the option to transfer to another server (before allowing new characters on that server). But now you have to be careful what you say on discord or in the forum because the defence force will come in and tell you that you have a wrong opinion or that you are racist and the server is so healthy, just look at the population numbers!

Classic and not this Classic+ version was made for so many people being online and also the multiboxing annoys the hell out of me. There is no zone without a lvl 1-50 character followed by a lvl 60 character killing all the mobs. There is no immersion anymore.

[Harkus]

But the PvP server was going to fix everything!!11!1!

[Jc473]

I feel you and it's the only gripe I have with this server. This would all have been fixed if they had kept their promise about transfers and given the non-English community the option to transfer to another server (before allowing new characters on that server). But now you have to be careful what you say on discord or in the forum because the defence force will come in and tell you that you have a wrong opinion or that you are racist and the server is so healthy, just look at the population numbers!

Classic and not this Classic+ version was made for so many people being online and also the multiboxing annoys the hell out of me. There is no zone without a lvl 1-50 character followed by a lvl 60 character killing all the mobs. There is no immersion anymore.

Yeah, it would be nice if they gave an update on the EU-->SEA transfer option plan. I hope that the significant drop in population (due to the PvP server) hasn't made them drop these plans!

Re multiboxing - I agree. Never been a fan of multiboxing in anyway shape or form but I highly doubt they will change it. It is an intended server feature and people have gotten so used to it that it would cause a riot if it was taken away....

[Jc473]

But the PvP server was going to fix everything!!11!1!

Well, it's certainly helped with the overload in lower level areas so I'm sure a lot of folks are thankful for that.

Outside of game changes, I think the EU-->SEA transfer plan is something that will probably have an impact on this issue. I'm assuming that there are still a fair few Chinese plays who are raiding and therefore 'need' this sort of consumable.