Should Blizzard merge some of the realms??

[Fearlessone]

In classic we already have split realms with ladder and non-ladder. And, of course, we ARE classic - a small world already. After LoD came out probably close to 90% of D2 was xpac. Certainly the vast majority of players of both classic and LoD are gone. If there seems to still be alot of games, many are not public, and a big % of the private ones use bots. Bot games have spread in popularity in the past several years and skew the numbers of people really playing.

As most of u know, the answer is NOT to convert to LoD. That is a last resort for us. We sometimes play classic with only a few games showing on the list.

Blizzard has split the realms with ladder/non-ladder. Will there be a time, perhaps with Diablo3, when we will need to merge???

[Great_Evils]

It might be cool to have east/west classic merged, but the hardcore/softcore ladder/non ladder should remain. Any merge would have big effects of trade value and such, which people might not enjoy.

[mhl12]

i'm sure that will take a lot of effort that blizz does not want to give so I doubt that they will merge the realms.

[Great_Evils]

Yea now that I think about it, it would be pretty muich impossible. merging even part of two realms would require that servers from one realm be allocated to the other in order to support the players. Losing servers from a realm would make a lot of x-pac ladder players mad, because having less servers in a realm would mean Diablo Clone would spawn in a smaller number of servers, eventually messing up trade values with the anni charm.

[SwampBox]

im not trying to sound like an idiot but... I didnt think people used bots on classical ladder...

If there was wouldn't there be 99's already? USEAST'S high is 95...

[Fearlessone]

No, I havent seen them either. But if they merge like USWest with Asia and Europe with USEast, then its not only classic that has to be considered, lol. The point is when you sign onto a realm and see how many ppl are playing games at that moment, quite a few of those ppl are really sleeping or at work.

Alot of classic players have 2 (or more) computers going and are helping in the same game with bo and tele'ing about. When u get 2 ppl in a game the mf goes from sucko to decent. There actually are some programs in use, that can be best described as 'tag-along' progs. I used to see these in use in very high lvl cs runs years ago. The main char would walk forward, and the bo barb would do the same a few seconds later, and stay back about one screen, like a frady-cat. It actually looked pretty funny. But this might be risky to ur acct if bliz is or ever does monitor this type of activity, and besides, its unneccessary.

If u have 2 computers ( or can this be done with one computer and 2 cd keys?), u can leave another char in town and bring him down at the moment the boss needs to be killed, or when u need tele or bo. It's risky around monster types that flee and then come back a minute or so later, especailly storm casters, pee-shooters in act3, u have to turn up the volume on the other computer to hear if u are being attacked. I've done this, and have been killed perhaps 4-5x this way, its very irritating to lose many hours of play when this happens. I've talked to a few of the very highest ladder chars this year, and they say that having 2-3 computers is essential for them to get anywhere here in classic. This was not the case 2 years ago, so things are changing slowly but SURELY.

[Great_Evils]

Fearlessone, I don't see the correlation you make between bots and merging the realms. If all bots were removed then yes, less "players" would be on the servers. However, the same amount of legit players would be playing, so I don't see how a merge would benefit the legit players.

[Locke07]

I would love to see non-hardcored, non-ladder realms be merged. There arn't that many on the realms to begin with and if you could seperate classic to just two servers ,one for ladder one for non-ladder, I don't think it would be that bad. The only problem I would see is that ping for some people that live in Europe or Asia.

[Great_Evils]

The thing is...characters are stored by account, not by what type of character they are. Many people have a variety of characters (hc, sc, sc-nl) and it would be a huge undertaking to make a system that would control which character went where depending on the type.

[Locke07]

The thing is...characters are stored by account, not by what type of character they are. Many people have a variety of characters (hc, sc, sc-nl) and it would be a huge undertaking to make a system that would control which character went where depending on the type.

Im not saying doing it to all realms just the classic ones. There are aproxipatley 3 games on the hell list in USEast non-ladder at this moment. Just route the classic characters to one server instead of a USEast/West/ect.