A full Classic server has a third as few Black Lotus relative to players

Only on the full realms though. Medium didn’t have a queue and if medium is 4x Vanilla full realms then medium would have queues if the cap was at Vanilla levels.
Queues came back because the country is in lock down. the full realms have had queues for a long time now.

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But that’s not the case, originally they were using retail metrics to calculate low/medium/high/full etc… which do have higher concurrent login caps, caps which were only being reached because of layering.

That was fixed.

I like the premise of your joke, but your punchline was built on an overly simplistic parody of the situation, so it falls somewhat flat.

They were originally using Vanilla metrics and changed it because caps were increased and layering you mean?

Precisely.

No they were using the same kind of calculations they use for retail which weren’t accurate for classic.

Basically your “medium” realms still had queues and massive populations.

byt NOT changing a single thing

You obviously fail to understand the difference here between population cap and layers, they are not one and the same.

They are when there’s only 1 layer per server.

If anything I’d argue that all resources should probably have been upped to compensate, not just black lotus. Either that or just don’t allow triple the population on the server.

Then again in a lot of ways I don’t really think the server population would impact the availability as much as people would like to believe it would. With enough people being informed on how good that stuff is you don’t need that many people targeting them to make an impact.

If you think about it tripling the server population was changing something.

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I’d prefer they fix the servers so we could have proper massive battles in BRD instead of a lag fest.

All layering does is manage population density. I’ve done this run around maybe hundreds of times now with other misguided people. There is literally 0 literature out there to support your presumption that layers have anything to do with the servers’ maximum population.

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Layering was introduced solely to manage leveling zones, so you didn’t have an entire faction’s worth of a server all in Elwynn Forest all doing the same quests at the same time. The point was to divide the player-base up so people could actually do quests without competing against the entirety of the server at the same time.

It makes zero sense to me that another “layer” would be a doubling of the server size capacity with each zone being a full server’s worth…then layering would have done literally nothing to lower player density in any given zone.

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Layers literally allow more people to be logged in at the same time.

That’s why we suddenly got queues when layering was removed.

Queues were still there when we had layering so your anecdote means very little.

Again, show me the literature. There is none.

Most people at this point tend to link the Ion interview where he almost directly supports my point, and the other person proves they lack reading comprehension and believe that because he said that a layer is the size of a server, that means that 1 server supports 2 servers worth of people.

No. It just means that a layer is an effective population distribution tool because you can split 1 servers worth of people in to two “instances”, and when 1 server worth of people is several times the amount of original vanilla servers, that’s a significant relief to populated realms.

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Layering

players on overcrowded realms were grouped into different "layers". Each layer is a copy of the outdoor world

Layering is only about managing player density once inside the world. It is the exact same tech as Sharding, and no one thinks Sharding has anything to do with server capacity. All it does is copy a zone and split up the people ALL READY on the server so that any individual zone isn’t over crowded.

If adding another layer doubles the amount of total people on the server, then the goal of layering is completely defeated.

Layers were targetted to have around the same number of players as a healthy vanilla server.

Hence multiple layers means we have more players on the server than what normally would be on a single server. This allowed blizzard to not have to release too many servers at launch.

And while yes there were still queues with layering they were not nearly as bad as they would have been without layering. And servers that hadn’t had queues for weeks suddenly got queues when they turned layers down to 1 layer per server. Why? Because less people were now able to log in concurrently.

Yes it manages population density when there would normally be far more people than what a vanilla server would have. Hence you might have a server with 10000 people logged on but each layer would be the same as a vanilla server.

Do you understand how density works? If you double the size and then double the palyers…density stays exactly the same.

I’ve done this song and dance so many times on Reddit, here, and other places.

It’s mind-blowing how many people cannot comprehend how they’ve misinterpreted how layering works, and refuse to change their beliefs despite no evidence supporting their particular interpretation.

This is honestly on the fault of Blizzard though, as they’ve yet to ever come out and speak plainly about which interpretation is objectively correct, leaving only that original Ion interview which is inherently poorly worded.