They are too busy rubbing their hands together over how much they can get away with charging for character clones to even think about this…maybe if enough people offer them $$$$ it will happen, but that’s literally the only way.
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They’ll be dungeon GDKP runs very quickly after TBC launches. First couple of weeks in “Retail TBC.”
The Hellfire dungeons are a lot of fun! I ran as a Prot Pally in TBC as a main. Before we got Ardent Defender, we got hit hard, but we could yank aggro in some of the hardest dungeons very easily between consecrate and AOE taunt. We could pull whole instances, even. The Shattered Halls got a lot of action from Paladins due to the gauntlet. I would run it over and over.
Netherstorm has the best dungeons, IMO, and because of the gold transfers incoming a lot of people will get there insanely fast. Some great blues in there, like in the Mechanar. I went after the epic Sun Eater as fast as I could via heroic.
Heroics will certainly be GDKP / RMT territory in “Retail TBC.” They were by no means easy when released. Cool that you are getting some experience and having fun. TBC was the best, but it has the unfortunate potential now to be the worst. I spent DAYS getting world buffs in Classic Vanilla. Then the phases came: One. Two. Etc. Done. KT down. Game essentially over. People are just capitalizing on large gold “bankrolls” in GDKP now. In Classic, I feel more time was wasted than used productively.
Simply will not be playing unless there are fresh servers created. The economies are already a mess in Classic Vanilla. I don’t see Classic Era being a popular option, so A LOT of players are bringing thousands and thousands of gold (10K+ will not be uncommon–I have seen the money spent). It ruins the competitive component of the game, amongst other things.
i remember healing it for some…i wanna say pally, who wanted the figurine of the colossus, i think it was called
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Man. Figurine of the Colossus. Memories. I ran a lot just to get that. Great trinket. Shield Block was everything to Pally tanks after 400 defense rating I believe it was? Can’t remember no crit, no crush defense ratings off the bat. Dodge didn’t hurt, either. I appreciated Moroes’ Lucky Pocket Watch. I remember that feeling of, “YES! Epic trinket!” In my late thirties now and I was a 20-somethings noob back then. No GDKPs back then that I knew of. A whole lot of discovery and theorycrafting.
I would see people with T4 Mag’s chest dancing on the mailbox. Not sure how ActiBi$$ion will handle difficulty. I will be going Priest as my main, Pally as an alt if they do, indeed. provide fresh servers.
I had some great memories, but so much would have sparsely happened or have been allowed back then as happens today. Economy was so important, and Blizzard made that very clear.
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We don’t need new realms and there’s no good reason to make more. You just further divide out the player base and make low pop realms even worse to play on. This lesson should have learned from private servers where the constant begging for “fresh” realms regularly ruined old ones. If we cranked out a new realm every time it was asked for; there would probably be more realms than players.
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Translation: “I don’t wanna start fresh, so no one should!!!” The same reasoning the Wall of No trolls gave for years about Vanilla servers.
Of course the reality is that there are tons of reasons why Blizzard should add fresh servers, but probably the most basic one: money. There is a huge demand. People will sub just to play a fresh option.
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Ironically that’s the logic the wall of nope people used, and it’s the selfish players asking for new realms with no regard to players on older ones. Fortunately, Blizzard knows better, and that’s why you’re not seeing unnecessary new realms. Fill all these up first; then we have an actual reason to create more.
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do the low pop realms have boosts, transfers, gdkp’s and ruined economies?
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Exactly, Lilock.
What they need to do should fresh happen is clear off the lowest population servers through free migration and dedicate what is empty to act as fresh servers. Fresh servers do not necessarily mean new hardware. There are plenty of low pop servers if we are talking a “New Server.” ActiBli$$ion servers are cheap but they shouldn’t need “New Servers.” Initially at least. Just rededicate servers emptied.
If there is such a large demand for fresh servers, then adding servers would be ideal then. TBC may or may not begin like Classic with 4 hour queues and hardcore choppiness and disconnects.
Either way, what we generally don’t want are boosts, transfers, GDKPs and ruined economies.
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The servers will never fill up. That’s the nature of the playerbase. People go where there’s already people. Dead servers get even more dead. Overpopulated ones attract further players, which only adds to the problem.
A fresh option is the solution.
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I hope so. And something in me tells me that we still will… even if indirectly, at some point AFTER prepatch (gotta make that boost money amirite?) and at or around TBC launch (hopefully before and not after)
They did feel the community backlash on the price of character cloning, and lowered it from 35 dollars to 15 dollars… here’s hoping they hear our community as well.
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You mean when content was finished? Odd they want a fresh server when there was nothing left to do… 
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Very obviously an objective opinion from someone who has not taken the time to read the “good reasons” to make some… Not saying there is anything wrong with that, but just pointing out an observation…
I will include that they have already announced connected realms with classic era servers - how long do you think it will be before we get connected realms on tbc? At this point the assumed divide in the playerbase would hardly matter…
As a final point “You just further divide out the player base…” would be an equally good argument to get rid of classic servers entirely… Because they "further divide out the playerbase from retail… #Justsaying
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So you want these guys to go fill up a server that allows the features they are seeking to get away from. Then after that is deemed successful you might allow them to get a fresh server where they will have to start over again once more.
It’s like the pathfinder model on steroids!
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A well ariculated response.
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I’m not exactly sure how cloud tech works, but presumably they just add ram/power to a centralized server that contains individual folders. each folder is a “server” on the cloud. this is why they can layer, cross realm, phasing, share mail between servers, etc, because it just one gigantic website with lots of folders, interlinked
language warning 
hehe looks like lag is on the menu!
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Its hard to really use a stress test as an idea of reality as it relates to actual outcomes of how servers will go. At the same time, as a person who was there on the servers. It was typical Blizzard servers in high population situations.
That being said, i did think that the situation was a good indicator that high pop servers as people migrate to them much in the way they do in Retial (see Pagle Mankirk Ferilina) are going to have issues for sure. I wonder how long before Free Transfers are going to open up.
everybody did a fine job stressing the server. launch day will be better because they will turn on layering, presumably, but at what point…think i’ll stay in azeroth and level some more till the crazy is not so crazy
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I am pretty sure WoW uses its own internal servers, switching out blades when upgrades are needed. Clouds function kinda like email. Your emails are on some server out there. As ISP speeds have gone up, the ability to stream or pull down data have also increased. You are accessing an often large server’s storage with a Cloud. Borrowing some space that can be accessed. Like any PC, though, the more threads or cores and RAM you have on the server, the faster that server uploads data to you.
Just tried to sum that up.
ActiBli$$ion does not exactly prioritize speed, but they have a lot of space. As of 2019, they were using some pretty antiquated blades. Sold some retired ones off. I believe Activision was moving in the direction of AWS (Amazon’s cloud) but I also believe Blizzard is still using their own internal, physical servers here in CA and across several other states still. Pretty sure they do their own internal thing to some degree.
They use minimal hardware no doubt, and employ a whopping 70-ish people to maintain their servers. People speak about ActiBli$$ion sometimes as if they had hundreds or thousands of people maintaining the hardware. They have customer support employees to maintain things, but without active GMs ActiBli$$ion is keeping things pretty skeletal. They don’t require engineers for TBC at all, just for what they add to the game. Like mounts and toys. It isn’t like they are building a new graphics engine with TBC. Their engineers are at work on the next Shadowlands patch.
Yes, we are dealing with an entity other than the original Blizzard, but it would be great if–even if adamantly against it–we got any blue response. This is one of the largest threads I have seen in any game where there hasn’t been moderator response.
Maybe trying to set a record…
Generating a new realm that is set to level 1 would be a cinch. My father was a senior electrical engineer who handmade, soldered his own hardware FPGA boards in a week. I was a tech in the military, but worked on very old hardware. It isn’t what it would cost them, rather the money they know they can make taking advantage of this old expansion.
They have plenty, plenty of space to host a few fresh resets. Don’t even need beta action. The game is good to go, a few fresh “servers” being very low maintenance as well.