The increased realm caps are fantastic. Loving it on Pagle. Can run a dungeon on an alt, or get a group for an elite quest any time of the day. No matter when you get off of work, there’s a thriving realm questing and raiding and whatnot.
Its fantastic.
If each layer is the size of a 2005 server, then collapsing those layers would essentially mean all those mini servers were dumped into one. So a server that started out with 5 layers would have 5X the population of a Vanilla server.
Blizzard said they would remove layering before phase 2 and warned people to consider transferring off overcrowded servers.
Belongs in retail.
It was going to be a catch 22 either way.
Bigger (and thus fewer) servers - exaggerated issues on PvP servers
Smaller (and thus more) servers - dead servers
Either way, people would have been complaining and demanding Blizzard fix something.
Mergers aren’t the terrible ordeal people make them out to be. I think everyone who yelled NO MERGERS should be compelled to play the underdog faction on a PvP server. F those guys.
While many realms are super busy, the expectation is that players will eventually drop off over time. So, it’s nice to think these realms will still have viable long-term populations.
I’m pretty sure this has been said through statistics somewhere. Probably one of WoW’s largest population explosions in a while. How many are on retail now anyway like a total of 100 people on the LFR queue?
There was a big population drop off though.
They are the same size now that layering is gone, and by same size I mean the max logged in capacity is roughly the same.
However in classic the majority of the servers are what would have been high/full pop servers in vanilla. In vanilla there were a lot more medium/low pop servers so many people likely never exeperienced a real high pop server until now.
Connected realms would be more desireable than an actual merge. But you know, thats a retail tech and the word retail triggers people.
Also, retail.
I don’t see anything wrong with having more people then before. Heck, in an MMO, the more is the better really. And since WoW is my Favorite MMO (regardless of what version), it does make me all the more happy to see that more people are enjoying it.
That was factoring in layers.
My eyes tell me that is not true. There were over 500 players in Orgrimmar on Mankrik the other night.
How do I know? I started counting the people just afk at the flight master and there over 40 just sitting there. That was nothing compared to all of the people milling around.
There’s no way a server with 3K players has 500 people in Org
They didnt want to open more servers at launch, so now almost all of the servers have massive pops that vanilla servers could not handle.
Blizz just mishandling classic in normal blizzlike fashion.
I’d say even putting aside all the pvp issues the raw resource gathering is a huge PITA right now with the increased population for endgame.
The game world mobs and resource spawns were not designed for this large of a player base.
I dare you to try and farm Felcloth for just personal use in a reasonable amount of time.
i read and im not sure if its true that each layer was the same size as a true vanilla server, around 3k players per layer.
thats is why it felt so vanilla like while we were all leveling beause we were only around 3-4k other players. now were competing in a world designed to hold 3-4k people that actually holds 25k people now. or whatever the capacity is.
That statement regardless of what else was talked about is about over-all server population. Yes there were layers… guess what happens when layers are gone…
Here we are.
A factor not many people are talking about.
But every server is massively populated across time. Not everyone is playing at the same exact time as one another, even at 4 AM, many servers still have what would be considered a medium/high population for an old classic server. There are constantly people playing on every server. There isn’t really a true dead time on most of them.
If that’s the case it still doesn’t really answer why they made such a massive change to the game while keeping so many other things #nochanges.
You act like players had much of a say in this, Blizzard let it be known very early on that they had their own plans for servers sizes. Whether it was sharding, layering, or whatever else their plan was always to have more players stuck on one server.
Blizzards goal was to create as many long term viable server populations as possible without needing to do merges, which is something they have never done. Connected realms come with their own issues and it was pretty clear they wanted to hedge their bets against needing to do either.
There are certain things players had a chance to change opinions on. It’s pretty clear that past just basic feedback servers weren’t one of them. They were never going to have 100’s of 3k servers, no matter what players did or didn’t state.
Thunderfury feels underpopulated. The most I see are the 20+ 60s dancing on the mailbox in Org. HB vs SS and STV have a healthy population pvping. Kargath seems to have 1 Ally raid worth vs 1 Horde raid at any given time.
Barrens has a lot of levelers, but way down from launch. I’m so far behind the original wave of players, who are mostly 60, that they’ve gotten to the point of logging to do a raid and then leave.
One of the smartest things I did, in hindsight, was to join this PST server when I’m EST. My bed time pops right as the 7 o’clock masses show up.
I play later than this too. It’s mildly more busy.