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.