I don’t think Blizzard should increase the population cap like the shady private servers have. Whats the fun in running around with a million people stealing your tags and griefing you in the world. Private servers ONLY care about one thing, Money. The more players, the more money through gold sellers.
Firstly as it pertains to PvP, I cannot imagine questing in Stranglethorn Vale or the Shimmering Flats. Especially as Alliance. When server population is large, the majority of the time horde griefers will just end up killing you because of the population imbalance that comes with horde.
Secondly, I don’t think its fun at all to sit and fight with 20 people over mob tags. People nowadays have jobs and sitting in durotar/barrens getting nothing done is not what the vanilla WoW is about. Especially if you are a priest or warlock, you cannot tag things immediately and would have to join one of the 4+ groups camping the same quest mob, i.e. Kreenig Snarltooth, the quillboar for the Northern Barrens quest.
Lastly, on gigantic mega servers, you are like a small fish lost in an ocean. You don’t have the feeling of a closely knit community that came with the old population sizes. Nowadays, my 10 man guild raiding group have something special. But on Mega Servers, other players are just like machines, using them for tagging mobs and other random tasks that are shallow. Seeing new people everyday doesn’t become a breath of fresh air, its feeling lost, never recognizing the same faces in a busy city.
I started playing World of Warcraft 10-11 years ago in Wrath of the Lich King. So I’ve been here long enough to see the beneficial changes that have occurred in our game. Hopefully blizzard does not detract from the community with mega server populations, and fake vanilla.
The first few days can be brutal, but the pack spreads out and soon it’s not an issue. I’m split on what should be done. Having 3000 cap means only 3000 players can be online at once… if there are 10,000 people wanting to play… then 7000 must wait in queue.
Raising the cap does make it different than Vanilla for sure. But I have to admit, it was exciting to play with that many people online at once.
Maybe sharding IS the way to go for the first couple weeks, and for the first couple zones. Allowing the population to spread out and be less competitive for mobs. But that too will affect the overall game… perhaps the handful of people you would have really clicked with and become game long friends will be phased to another shard an you will never meet them. The videos I saw of how people would just phase away was very disconcerting… especially if YOU were the one who phased when you had a field full of mobs alive ahead of you… and suddenly they are all dead.
I will say again that having 12,000 people online was an experience I will never forget… Azeroth never felt so alive.
In vanilla faction imbalance skewed heavily towards alliance not horde.
Loot trading and right click report/squelch are in place to minimize the need for human moderators. Personal loot and retail’s version of mob tagging do the same things and eliminate most of the problems you describe. Once activision realizes they can save on payroll, such features will be implemented in classic, just be patient a little while.
Pretty sure 5K+ is very stable with newer server tech. Also, bigger population per server means greater community and less risk of dead servers over time.
I would rather see server communities alive at all times of the day with a larger overall population than a smaller population and times of the day when the server is dead.
I’m hoping for blizzlike server cap. I can’t remember which one it was, but I played a pserver launch that was ~3k. Once I got out of the starting zone and moved on to goldshire everyone was already starting to spread out enough that question g wasn’t a huge issue.
The 12k server on the other hand…it was cancerous nearly the entire way to 60. Then again that might be the trick to dealing with retail tourists. Maybe we start at 12k and get down to 3k after they all quit on day one when they can’t finish their first quest.
Because the population discussion is about recreating the Vanilla experience, not recreating the exact population caps - there’s 10X the likelihood for dead servers with the same caps as Vanilla for Classic as there was back in the day.
Then why don’t we talk about re-tuning dungeons and raids to account for 1.12 class balance in order to recreate the Vanilla experience that we had in 1.1? Why are people opposed to reverting threat changes so we can get the original Vanilla experience?
A lot of people here like shouting “No changes!” at every tiny little thing right up until it starts being inconvenient to them.
Then suddenly there is an excuse for why we should change it .
Server population is one of the most important unaddressed issues left. The game world was not built to handle more than 3k people without some ugly things starting to happen. It doesn’t matter how many people the servers can handle. Servers with any more than 5k concurrent don’t feel anything like Vanilla.
I’ve already said in just about every other thread we’ve had on this that the private servers are nowhere remotely close to a Vanilla experience at lower levels because of the population caps.
Dynamic respawns to address the respawn rate only accounting for 2-3k players are a joke and create things like 15 herbalism nodes in an area where it’s only me or mobs that respawn 2 seconds after dying.
Camping of low levels is rampant everywhere because of the increased population caps. Most zones were as bad as STV was on my high population PvP realm back in the day.
and it doesn’t get rid of sharding, which is Blizzard’s solution to the dropoff of players not long after launch as the tourists leave on top of their solution to dealing with server stability(which this will only exacerbate).
I don’t know what you’re trying to say here? I’m aware of everything you’ve said.
The question remains - do you implement sharding, have higher pop caps, or just pray the you don’t have dead servers everywhere that put an end to Classic about 6 months in? (You can also merge - but there’s not been much said oaths yet)
Continue to be snarky all you want - I’m being 100% serious, this is the single MOST important and complex topic we have right now (aside from which version of AV we get which is far more important)
I’m not saying it’s not important, I’m saying that people are rushing to ask for a private server rather than a proper Vanilla experience.
Which is not what the goal of Classic is.
Like I said: Even with higher population caps, Blizzard still thinks they need sharding. Sharding isn’t going to be there just for population, it’s also about stability at launch.
So why would we make 2 changes(1 of which is permanent and damages the Vanilla experience) when we can make 1 temporary change?
That is, unless somebody has a solution that removes the need for sharding entirely.
I haven’t specifically called for it as much as tried to highlight the issue.
I don’t know what the right answer is - if I had my call I would commit (as Blizzard) to looking at merging servers after 30 days, then reviewing every 30 days for the first few months and going from there.
The issue of the starting zones being too crowded goes away after the first week anyway. It takes the average player 2-3 months to hit level 60. A crowded starting zone is really a minor issue in the grand scheme of things except for the 1% that are trying to be server first 60.
To me it doesn’t seem like something that is worth arguing about…