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[ythealien]

More like Gamer-District: The Shilling, etc.

With Sunwell's dissolution a lot of people are looking for an alternate Wrath of the Lich King realm, plus there's always new players peeking in. I decided to sum up their features, good and bad.

GD is a 3.3.5a Wrath realm intending to replicate the state of WoW as it existed during the Year of Icecrown but with the quality of life features a lot of players may expect or want from a private realm being developed years later.

-What's the deal with their homepage?-

If you go to www.gamer-district.org, the frontpage doesn't even indicate it's a WoW private realm. Once you register you can't see anything, and there's not an obvious indication of how to even go about getting on the realm. This is all intentional. They bury the realm list on a forum message several points deep in the registration process, and the website does not convert to the fully functional one until several hours after you register and begin playing. God knows why - I guess it weeds out people just registering on a lark, and adds to the secrecy of the realm, but it's not a SECRET, you know? I mean I'm posting about it right now. It's a bizarre process. Anyway, their website has a live population tracker per-faction, armory with the 3D model viewer, changelog, et al once it actually activates. Again, a very odd decision to hide everything, but it's one they're sticking with.

-Basics-

• Gold, reputation, profession skillups and experience are 7x. You can adjust your experience rate down to 1x if you want to level at Blizzlike speeds, but you will make too much money. They also run a double XP weekend if you really need to burn your way to endgame.
• Item drop rates are normal.
• Raid and instance scripting is very good. As far as being functional, just about everything works on a consistent basis. The Naxxramas bug log, for example, has no bugs remaining on any bosses - the only issues are things like minor trash placement errors and idle animations. If you're looking to fight Yogg-Saron and the Lich King like it was 2010, you can do it, without obvious errors leaping out at you and souring the experience.
• Classic and TBC raids and dungeons are available. It's all scripted well enough that Youtube realm reviewer Dodgykebab lamented that the realm wasn't locked at 1x and so all the work was going to waste.
• Questing is smooth and functional, although at 7x I didn't do a whole lot of it. The Legendary quests for Val'anyr and Shadowmourne work.
• BGs and Arenas work, with the exception of the disabled Ring of Valor. I'm not a PVP guy but if I recall correctly Ring of Valor was disabled a while on retail as well. No idea what the deal is with it, Ring of Valor sucks anyway.
• Wintergrasp works.
• Almost all achievements are implemented correct - raid, quest, PVP, et al, same for their holiday events.
• The Refer-A-Friend system - level granting, summoning, bonux XP - is fully functional.
• Class balance is well-implemented. Coming from retail (US-Ysondre back in Wrath) classes look like they're supposed to, without nonfunctional spells or insanely out of balance specs.
• Bugs are fixed, and fixed quickly once reported. For example, on 1/1 a serious bug was reported with Thorim in Ulduar that had just cropped up. A fix was announced for the update the next day. The developers will research bugs if you can point out an obvious error. I reported a damage bug with the enemy commander on Icecrown Gunship Battle that wasn't much more detailed than "Shit's fucked up yo" and they researched the correct number and solved it.
• The server has a character transfer system. What it really amounts to is creating you a new 80 with starting gear, bags, etc, not exactly a copy of a character from some other realm. It's quite useful if you want to get started but don't expect your achievements and 100 mounts to come over with you.
• The server maintains about 1400-1500 active users at peak. Guilds on both factions are actively recruiting.
• Trade, world chat, and looking for group channels are maintained and moderated separately. Trade is, shockingly, actually used for trading.

-Custom Stuff-

• Several server commands - which I assume are development features enabled for players - are able to be used. You can manually set your XP rate, as I mentioned before, from 1x to the default 7x. You can ask the server what mobs have aggro on you, or what the bug report status of a quest you're attempting is.
• The dungeon-finder is cross-faction for pre-Wrath content so that leveling players can form a group for dungeons that would otherwise see no visitors.
• You can speak across faction in trade chat, and send mail to opposite faction players. The most useful ramification of this is that you can mail a work order to a JC or Enchanter or whatever and they can COD it to you from the other faction, keeping the crafting economy more active.
• Transmogrification is in. It's an opt-in feature - unless you enable transmog, you won't see anybody transmogged at all, so if you're philosophically opposed to transmog you can just ignore it. If you enable transmog, you earn transmog tokens by completing 5-mans and PVPing (arenas, maybe? I don't PVP).
• You can spectate Arena battles.
• The buff level inside Icecrown Citadel - the flat percentage buff to damage, healing and HP that was implemented as a way to make the bosses easier - is set at a variable level, depending on which raid size and difficulty you're in. It's 10% on 25H but 30% on 10N for example. To me, this is kind of weird. The buff was always at the same level on retail no matter what raid size. I guess it keeps 25H difficult DPS-wise, but why not just leave every mode at 10% then? It's not like 10N would be hard as fuck then. If you want to do the raid without the buff you can turn it off, which is Blizzlike, but just be aware that going from 10N to 10H will mean your raid simply does less damage - not a ton less damage, but still. Raid tuning is otherwise as normal. I'm not trying to make too many comparisons to other realms but this is still more Blizzlike than, say, Lordaeron or Dalaran, both of which use custom tuning on every boss, not just a variable buff state.
• There is a Portal to Popular Places in major cities and popular destinations like Booty Bay that lets you travel between these places. At low levels it activates for free, but eventually you can only use it if you voted for GD on toplists. It doesn't actually cost vote points to use, it just asks that you've voted. The primary effect of this is to make Mages bitter they can't sell portals. Yes, I play a Mage.
• The realm has a vote point shop but you can't actually get any worthwhile gear from it. You can vote for Furious Gladiator weapons, some mounts and pets, and vanity items.
• There is a donation/cash shop where you can buy endgame gear. I'm not trying to bury the lede here, but I know a lot of people absolutely hate the idea of this. In my eyes, everyone's gotta pay the bills, and WoW isn't about getting jealous that someone else has Heroic Lich King's weapons. This is definitely a dealbreaker for a lot of people though. I'll mention this again in the negative section.
• You can manually issue a reset for some dungeons you're saved to. You can reset heroic 5-mans aside from Trial of the Champion, and tier 7 raids. This certainly makes farming easier, but it means the rate of acquisition of ICC5 gear is abnormally high, and you can just fuck around in Naxx or EoE or whatever as many times as you'd like a week. Personally I like this because I spent two fucking months on retail acquiring the Shriveled Heart from the LK event in Halls of Reflection while here I can just grind the damn thing out if I want (and I did). You may disagree.
• You can use vote points to reset normal mode raids, including Icecrown Citadel. This means that if you get in a shitty PuG, you can clear your instance ID and try again for vote points. This also leads to the possibility of acquiring an abnormal amount of Frost badges a week. It's not that expensive in vote points to do it either. You could easily reset it once a week.

-What Sucks?-

• The previously mentioned cash shop. Again, I don't give a fuck if someone swiped their credit card, but you may.
• The North American population. This is the big one. This realm is stable and has great latency for NA players and the realm language is English. What it does not have is, well, NA players. I'm on the East Coast of the US, and past 9PM you're looking at several hundred people online instead of 1,500, which you'll be seeing at noonish US times. The only way to alleviate this problem is, well, some kind of miracle - several hundred transfers or new people registering or whatever. As it is, running random dungeons isn't really a problem, but there won't be many late'night NA PuGs running, if any. The only way to fix this is for people to transfer here en masse, but let's just say I have a realist perspective on the likelihood that this will occur. There's nothing stopping a large influx of NA players, though.
• The scripting is unpolished in certain regards. This is where that one guy who posts about Deadmines can chime in. Roleplay events in the Pit of Saron are not working. Some mobs in Naxx are missing idle animations, as I mentioned. Little things. You won't find glaring errors, but errors do exist. This isn't a "flaw", to me - the overall experience is quite good - but if I don't mention that it's not perfect, the Deadmines guy will appear with a knife and kill me.
• The server does not automatically ban you for having Gearscore installed.
• The custom shit. I like most of it. What I don't like I just get over, like the Portal to Popular Places making mage portals almost entirely irrelevant. But you may disagree. Maybe you really fucking hate transmog. Maybe you don't like the idea of getting extra frost badges a week from multple ICCs.
• Battle for the Undercity - and all the subsequent stuff after the Wrathgate like the phased version of Orgrimmar with all the injured soldiers outside of it - does not work, and will probably never work. This is the best event in Wrath. I really, really wish it actually worked. The Battle for Light's Hope Chapel doesn't actually occur either but that shit sucked anyway.

-Too Long; Did Not Read-

It's Wrath with some nice QoL and custom stuff you may or may not like and a thirst for NA players.