I enjoyed your post, but I do want to remind people that phase 2 is not representative of what vanilla was or should be. It was a short period of time which ended with the release of battlegrounds that were themselves created to resolve the problems introduced by the honor system.
There is a reason private servers released BG’s with the honor system. Phase 2 was always going to be awful.
If there were almost 30k in queue and 8k on each layer, then a low estimate would be 65k pop for a full server. That’s a full server with only 5 layers.
Blizzard hasn’t said. But they were more than 8k. I’ve played on private servers with 10k pop on launch day, and your math is really skewed. But let’s say there were only 8k. When they collapse 5 layers into 1, what does that give you?
That’s right.
You aren’t the only one who’s played on private servers. I have no idea about Northdale because I never played there. But I can tell you Elysium and Light’s Hope was nothing like this, and their servers began with over 10k.
Your scans showing 8k simultaneous players are as useless as the ones who say there are 70k.
Forget the anecdotal evidence and the screen shots and the vids which all show the population is insane. Just pay attention to what Blizzard said about how they’ve handled “modern” server population in Classic. Pay attention to what the login queues said before they increased the player cap. Pay attention to what happened when they removed layering.
Blizzard scuffed Classic with their mega servers. More specifically, they totally ruined PvP servers.
I don’t see how BG will fix anything though. The servers are still imbalanced and large numbers of Horde will still grief every choke point and farm spot possible. Sure, you’ll have another option to ‘fairly’ pvp in BG, but the world will still be inaccessible for the most part. You can’t undo this by just adding more band-aids.
You have already won and BGs will be released early to appease the whiners in just a couple weeks. Either don’t play or deal with it until then.
I personally hope this changes nothing and people keep fighting the good fight out in the world like it should be.
Don’t worry, you’ll get your wish. Players like you will still form 40 man raids to camp FP’s and kill solo alliance players as they land…then label them whiners if they dare mention the bs imbalance. Fun game, huh?
Hey Zend…good to see you are around and enjoying Classic.
BGs should alleviate some of the issues. I think the bigger issue is that just the general population of Classic realms far exceeds what an original realm housed. So, even if there was a faction imbalance back in the day, you still could find some quiet spots to farm.
If players quit…well, good. It is expected that the population would decrease and bring realm size back to what Classic should really house.
Also, not sure what to say about general faction imbalance on many PvP servers. PvP oriented players generally play Horde creating this issue in the first place. I would be fine with Blizzard trying to manage this in some manner (e.g., free Horde to Alliance account transfers).
Actually, you don’t know why they’re releasing WSG/AV in dec. Because your reasoning is completely wrong.
I have no idea where you keep pulling these numbers from. There has never been 40k players online on a server at a time, and there aren’t now. The layers were never 8k players or 15k players or whatever number you made up.
Layering is gone and the servers are still smaller than Northdale.
Trust me, the total server population of any server, including all layers, never exceeded 10k. And Blizzard reduced it recently with the introduction of phase 2. Based on my scans the server capacity seems to be about 8k. Which makes sense for anyone who played on Nost/Elysium/Lightbringer/Northdale.
Faerlina/Herod did have 20k queues, but those queues were something like 15 hours long. It was expected for everyone to want to play on the same server. And everyone knew that Faerlina and Herod would be the biggest Classic servers.
Self-fulfilling prophesy is right. Blizzard’s incompetence knows no bounds. It’s unfortunate that they’ve ruined PvP servers because, while I don’t want to play on them, there are players that do.
Meanwhile it seems Westfall is getting more players by the day. IF and Org are a sea of people and even Darnassus had players running around the last time I was there. A LOT of people are leveling and it’s still difficult to get some quest objectives because of the crowds. I’m leveling in STV now and it’s… not quiet.
Blizzard needs to open up some PvE servers and allow free transfers there off PvP servers for both alliance and horde. But saying what they need to do is pointless.
For those of you who say this is Vanilla you couldn’t be more wrong. For those of you who say this isn’t Blizzard’s fault you couldn’t be more wrong. If you say Blizzard can’t fix this, you’re wrong. But if you think they will, you’re very, very wrong.
Its hard to know the exact numbers…but the pop sites originally pegged Herod as 66:33 … which was challenging but ok. You could get outdoor content completed.
But then… because of the long queues Blizzard offered free transfers to both factions. Guess what faction took the transfers? Making the realm 70:30 (estimates… its hard to tell)
Then phase 2 released and the Alliance stopped logging in (we still have queues though… so yeah… the imbalance keeps getting worse with every decision Blizzard implements. Battlegrounds are not going to help this situation.
Faction specific queues would totally fix the issue. The horde could sit in queue all night until they take the free transfer. The Alliance would never have a queue to login.
Hardly any realms have queues so your solution won’t help most realms. Now, if you cap Horde numbers to the number of Alliance players in game, I think that will cause a holy storm on the forums!
Outside of having players faction transfer from Horde to Alliance, not really sure how to manage this issue properly. After all, it’s not like there are a lot of Alliance dominated PvP servers out there.
Lower the concurrent login caps per realm ON ALL SERVERS to reasonable vanilla numbers… that will create login queues for the Horde and force them to transfer. Also offer free faction changes (very few Horde would ever faction change to Alliance if there wasn’t an advantage in it for them tho)
Newman: Will there really be 2,000 people in the human starting area in Northshire Abbey?
Hazzikostas: There will be that many people and more in every Northshire Abbey and Valley of Trials on Monday.
h ttps://www.forbes.com/sites/hnewman/2019/08/26/warcraft-classic-layering-and-realm-queues-ion-hazzikostas-explains-why-youre-waiting-to-log-in/#eca2cf27e45d
So 2k players in every starting area on every layer. There are 6 starting areas. So that’s 12k people on each layer. That’s the people actually playing, not the people in the login queue. Since that time, they’ve increased the number of people who can play at the same time and removed layers.
Even a low pop server would have more than 8k, and there are NO low pop servers.
This isn’t true no matter how many times you repeat it. There were as many people on the whole of Northdale as there were on one layer on one server in Classic.
There’s the math. It’s out there for you. And you can argue your anecdotal scenarios all you like but you can’t argue with the math.
Phew, like I said, that would create a Holy Storm! Probably a lot of Horde players would quit too.
BTW, as you know, raw factional population numbers don’t equate to the number of WPvP killers. If Alliance are PvE oriented, your proposed system wouldn’t necessarily make things more balanced out there (but it would help).
Blizzard simply would not do anything that radical.
How do people do this? Stomp your foot on the ground and say you demand something?
stay out of Burning steppes, Searing Gorge, Western Plague, Eastern Plague, Tanaris, Un goror, Winterspring, Azshara etc etc.
I don’t think you are quite getting the scale of the issue here.
Give zero honor in wpvp for anyone 4 levels below you. Problem solved.
So faction queues?
A slightly more benign version of I saw would be to lease layering in place but make layering faction specific. So horde could still login they just wouldn’t have any alliance to gank, except on the theoretically balanced layer.
Form your own 40 man raid and fight back. The only thing stopping you is you.
We often have 40 man raids fighting back. Guess what happens? The Horde will brings in 120 to fight us. What don’t you get about 70:30 population ratio? What don’t you get about the Alliance are barely logging in anymore on my server but we still have queues during prime time? The Horde are logging and playing…and the Alliance are not logging in…making the problem much worse than 70:30.
The game is unplayable as it wasn’t designed for these crazy high populations. Nobody is going to pay a monthly sub for a game that is not reasonably fair and reasonably fun.
This is true and what we see now is the inevitable result of employing Layering to reduce the number of servers.
Remember, Blizzard’s justification was that layring could be removed once players had moved out of the start zones … which indeed happened … except now they’re all in the end-game zones which are far fewer in number so are even more heavily over populated with respect to vanilla realms than the start zones were.