I love the idea of tiny WoW (well, new-WoW) realms, and I think it’s interesting that the idea and its opposite can both work. Either you work with established communities (as do Facebook, XBL, etc.), or you establish a new community.

One’s more casual, and one’s more hard core– I simply don’t play WoW enough to build up a social reputation. If I did, though, I’d love to try out the mini-realm idea, perhaps with realms tailored to play styles and times.

You certainly see the “more exclusive” behavior on XBox Live, where folks often enable voice only among their friends list. Then again, that’s basically the worst implementation of permanent handles possible– there are no tools whatsoever. The only effect is that you know you’re grouping with the same asshole who teamkilled you repeatedly last time, and can’t do a damned thing about it.

I think the impact on player behavior might be greater than you expect. Even at the large server populations sizes currently, the effects of the semi-closed reputation system are keeping certain ‘defect’ behaviors in check. Fully open reputation systems (ones where you can enter and re-enter under a new name at any time) always become a race to the bottom. If we then add in the proclivity WoW players have towards being young, male and slightly socially maladjusted, I can only imagine that the trend would be accelerated. I suspect you would find guilds stepping up to cover the difference, becoming more exclusive and more skeptical of “outsiders.”

I do think the whole “playing with your friends” problem does need to be solved, and, as you pointed out, it is more than just being on the same server. I would actually love to see what would happen if WoW servers were even smaller, say, 200 people. Impossible to do with the large land mass that WoW has, and of course things like finding a group would be hell, but it would be interesting to build a game which really creates a “where-everyone-knows-your-name” feel. It would be something less like a world and more like a Village of Warcraft.

Oh my, you just hurt and excited that part of my brain that likes to corner the market on virtual goods. Its a good thing I stopped WoW awhile ago, or I’d be in big trouble if this ever came along.

I’ve never played WoW. I have many friends that do, and I’ve considered it a couple times, but of course, they’re all on different servers and so to play with any of them would mean multiple characters that I’d have to grind in a semi-parallel way. Forget that.

It’s just poor software architecture meeting (becoming formulaic) game design. We’ll design this game to have a certain level of scarcity, and we’ll add in extra checks to keep people from power-leveling, and we’ll add in extra checks to avoid gold farmers, and we’ll add in extra checks to make sure people didn’t just put something heavy on the spacebar, and we’ll put in extra this and that and these and those and holy crap, we need to nerf that class!

Remember IRC? EFnet and DALnet and all sorts of others proved that you could transfer data readily through a distributed network of servers….some time before large multi-user environments like this were considered desirable.

I think you’re basically right that there’s some game mechanics that are pretty artificial ruling things (like the factions), but I think the problem of multiple servers is a technical one; I think this idea of multiple instances can be broken. It’s not an easy problem…but a potentially solvable one.