Shared Topic: Single Realm for All?

This week’s Shared Topic by Frinka of Warcraft Street asks:

If it were possible, would you want Blizzard to put all characters in a single realm/game world by realm type — PvP vs PvE vs RP? Why or why not?

I thought long and hard about this one, and I think that I would actually love if this were the case.  Like I mentioned in my last post, my WoW experience is mostly a lonely one.  The friends I have who still play the game are spread out across servers, and all of the great bloggers I’d love to join up with are also spread out.  I imagine what life would be like if we were all on one server and it seems like a very lively WoW experience with tons of people to enjoy the game with.

However, there are some logistical problems that would prevent this from being able to happen, I think.

• How would server performance be handled for people in different locations in the world?
• How would one go about ‘hiding’ from other people if they need some alone time?  I suppose you wouldn’t have a need for RealID anymore, so you could just create an alt and spend your time there.
• Naming would be a fiasco — your name would almost certainly be taken long before you could reserve it.  Every good name would be taken and people would end up being named Jjklejgeiegjkj.  Yikes.
• Rare spawns would be a nightmare to farm.

I’m sure there is more technical nightmares behind the scenes that would prevent this from being a reality. I like the way The Secret World does things.  There are different servers (called dimensions) but you can chat cross-server, join guilds cross-server, and group up for quests & dungeons cross-server just as easily as being on one server.  This helps out all of those logistical issues that I mentioned above.