You’re assuming:
You’re making a lot of assumptions there. It’s entirely possible (and probable) that the only resources you “spin up” are the ones in that zone.
Take a careful look at the zone borders. They are designed to never have a mob pat from one to the next. Even if someone drags a mob across a zone edge the game just needs code to allow the mob to change over in the manner players do.
Zones are about message passing, for the most part. If you can limit the amount of messages passed you can cut down on lag. From there it’s a small hop over to taking that smaller area and making it a bundle of data that can be handled with a virtualization setup and load balanced. Just like you can take a bunch of small processes and schedule them efficiently on a bunch of computing cores.
You just need a mechanism to pass data from one virtual instance to another and keep them in sync when necessary. Then you can balance them decently. Layers, shards, zones, instances, all are logical virtualized bundles of data and computation. There are trade-offs and advantages to each type of subdivision of a server but I’m willing to bet they all work similarly.
Then why layers to begin with?
Just have the normal retail shards without the cross realm which I think is what you’re describing here.
They changed the terminology and how it presents itself because all of the “no changes” people who were going wild about shards in Retail. It was one of the rallying cries that people had while demanding Classic, that there be no shards.
The thing is that the technology makes so much sense from a load-balancing perspective. And Blizzard needed to use it or else they might face a glut of people during launch, jumping from Retail to see what Classic is about and then leaving when their curiosity was satisfied. It was very difficult to predict how many servers were necessary for launch but which would later become empty wastelands.
So they re-branded zone sharding by making it full-server layering. There are also a few other differences like how they made it so people tended to stick to a layer rather than get a dynamic one. However, it’s very much the same tech with a coat of paint and a new name.
Honestly, I think they should drop the pretense and just go with dynamic shards but I suspect there are people who would start bringing out the pitchforks and Blizzard is too afraid of the backlash to bother. It’s a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t so they are simply doing as little as possible.
The shop has more than compensated for the fact that the sub is getting cheaper every year from inflation.
No, It is not
Effectively: adverb
adverb: effectively
Zilch: pronoun
informal adverb: Zilch
Comparative to a typical AAA game development process, Classic WoW cost effectively NOTHING.
Absolutely not true
Most games went F2P with a cash shop. Path of Exile is a strong example, and I would argue that there’s a realistic buy-in for things like stash tabs for serious players on that. (And PoE’s cash shop is VERY expensive. like, damn)
Let’s say it cost Blizzard 10 million bucks to do classic.
And it’s probably more like. 5 million tops.
The development cost for Vanilla was something in the neighborhood of 150million, and it may actually have been more.
If you had any concept of the costs of these kinds of games you would realize just how much a slam dunk insane profit margin this game actually is.