Play or don’t play. Idc. Layering is staying until P2. I’ll enjoy classic for what it is.
If it’s gonna end up in the game, i sure hope for everyone involved it’s gonna get out much sooner than P2!
Anyway, nice to hear you can enjoy Classic even with layering. I wish i could too, but i really can’t. Good luck & have fun ![:slightly_smiling_face:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slightly_smiling_face.png?v=6" ":slightly_smiling_face:")
It will be in the game. And the promised end date is P2. Whether it leaves before or not is remained to be seen.
I hope for your sake you let go of any preconceived notions you have about what classic NEEDS to be and enjoy it for what it is.
The only way to get vanilla back is to build a time machine to 04. Classic is a 2019 replica. It will have some changes. You gotta be able to understand why it’s like that and move on.
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The amount of people here who don’t understand how Layering works here makes me want to bash my head into my desk.
^ Me above at people wrongly explaining Layering as if it’s Sharding or CRZ.
It’s very much this. It’s less about launch stability, they could just server queue/control realm max population for stability. The main reason for layering is basically to have 2 or 3 realms worth of population on one realm, because they KNOW the tourists will leave quickly. They’d rather do this than server merges which would be even worse for classic culture. then you’ll have *-realmname user names and duplicate guilds/player name identities. no one wants to see that. that’s a lot worse than dealing with layering for this first month
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So then what’s your alternative to layering to deal with the increased number of players at launch, that would actually work?
Hmmpf… i got a feeling regardless of what i show you specifically, even if you ask, you’ve already made up your mind. 
I’ll show you anyway regardless, for the sake of the overall discussion on the layering topic.
Let me say this first though.
Let’s not pretend there’s a perfect solution that will magically secure server health longterm and make everybody happy, because as long as there’s ever a time where people get to decide how they populate any given server, imbalance is inevitable and dead realms can emerge given the nature of players. And those, if Blizzard doesn’t wanna see them, will need manual attention again.
The fact is, if layering goes through, it will manage server pops (at the cost of everything else) during the first inital period of the game exclusively, while the actual rest of the game is left to the Classic’s playerbase own devices and decisions. That time being a significantly much longer of a time than the inital period layering is active, aka years probably instead of weeks/months, opening up much more potential of server health issues down the road that will need to be dealt with, without layering, again.
That said, If you really wanna listen to what i suggested in terms of dealing with launch, read the post i made here, linked below.
Scroll a bit down, to the second last (and last) part where i go into an approach style they could use to help with the big initial wave and server health during the first time period of the game, and why i think it’s overall preferable to the current layering approach.
I’m certain Blizzard has additional ways to support this style technically, but this is the idea of the direction they could go in as an alternative, in line with the prio being the authenticity of the game. 
Offering free transfers? That won’t do it. It’s proven that won’t do it. That didn’t work in vanilla. That’s how they handled it then and guess what? It didn’t work.
Mainly cause they won’t force people to leave. So they offer them and then not enough people take them and they are left in the same situation.
So again any idea on what to do that will work?
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I see it exactly this way…however I don’t see it is as a bad thing. I understand that Blizzard is a business…and businesses have to cut costs where they can, especially when they had a disastrously bad Quarter this year. They were already developing classic with a skeleton crew of developers as it is. Why have to spend more money on more servers and more infrastructure that (in their opinion) may not be needed 2 months down the road when they can save money and still let the tourists play until they get tired/bored/frustrated and leave?
To be fair, I do think the OP referred to people who want the layering as being “like a bunch of sheep”, so for me an intelligent, respectful conversation kind of went out the window with that.
Well I didn’t even count you to begin with.
I never said it’s gonna work in a way that’s actually going to alleviate the whole situation. If you’re looking for a solution to the whole thing, you’re out of luck. Yes, the same goes for the “layering” solution. Got any ideas other than going with layering yourself, anyway?
My point all this time is that they can regardless choose to go with a normal launch as the “alternative”, and use their resources they have available nowadays to assist them in ways the didn’t have access to back then.
Their tech staff is clearly competent and has what it takes to handle the launch, even without layering.
It’s going to be more difficult in some ways, because there’s less automatic redistribution available to them from the layering tech, but either way you can’t avoid things to get ugly at some point if there’s a big dropoff (which i don’t think will be nearly as big as anticipated).
With layering you’ll only avoid it temporarily if it even happens at all (or have big consequences explode in your face if there’s way more people staying than expected), and then you’ll deal with it for the rest of the game as people switch around again anyways.
If there’s issues arising during the first weeks or months, without layering, server merges won’t be as bad because the realm communities haven’t existed that long yet. And that’s the absolute worst case.
However they at least had the chance to go level up together and play the fully intact game during that time, unlike with layering, where you’re not even gonna have a proper community during the first weeks/months cause people get interchanged so much with so many people initially you can’t properly bond with anybody in that time. It’s too fleeting still.
To assist the launch, they could also give people a way to see what servers might be very populated on the first day by using name reservation estimations. It could be a guide to get at least an idea of which server you might wanna end up on at launch, so you can suit yourself accordingly and prepare for the big day.
This is short sighted at best and totally naive at worst.
This will do nothing to prevent dead realms.
Dead realm won’t happen in phase 1…that’s still the honeymoon phase.
Dead realms will happen in phase 5 and phase 6.
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Based on what evidence? There is no telling the kind of players who will try out Classic, not like it, and leave. I liked the game back in 2005 and I’m willing to bet a lot of players who have never played Vanilla with like it, too. I don’t think there is any way of knowing what the population of servers will be like in the days, weeks and months after launch. The numbers could climb for a while then level off or they could climb and then fall or they could just continue to climb for a very long time. There is no way to know for certain.
We’ve had big launches before in WoW, and the game’s massive success was not hindered by them at all regardless of how badly they were able to deal with them back then.
For example, here’s an article about the launch from TBC:
https://www.engadget.com/2008/01/25/back-in-the-day-the-week-after-the-tbc-launch/
There were a ton of players at launch as well, yet somehow, they made it out just fine and the game went on doing it’s thing.
Just as we’ll have a ton of players at launch this time, except Blizzards is able to manage it much better than back then thanks to their tech advancements and planning.
Back then they even told people they weren’t gonna change the game by putting in faster respawns just because it’s uncomfortable during launch. Instead, they told people that things will move on, aka get over it. Good.
Also, It’s not naive at all to assume we’re going to be completely fine, if launches of the WoW way back then managed to make the game into the best MMORPG out there with way less powerful tools at their disposal.
If anything, assuming everything’s going to go down the bin with Classic just because there’s gonna be a lot of “tourists” as there always are with each expansion to one degree or another, is straight up pessimistic.
This time around it’s going to be especially many, sure, and there will be some turbulance probably, but it’s not a good enough reason to change the game up this drastically just to adapt with half measures like layering to that tourist inflation, when there are methods that have worked before just fine, and let the game succeed bigly altogether.
The best chances Blizzard has to make those tourists into long term players (which also helps the long term server health) is to give them the actual game at release, not a much worse version of it during the time it matters the most that the game they show can present itself in it’s full quality to new and old players.
The servers can handle a lot more players now than they could back in 2004, the issue is the zones aren’t designed for more players than servers could handle back in 2004.
First off stop using “tourists” as an insult. Whether you mean it or not you sound like a person who is looking down on anyone who’s enjoying the current game. Many people will enjoy Classic from those who love the current game to those who’ve never played an MMO at all.
Secondly there is no way to determine how many people will play classic. A survey e-mailed out to past players would only get responses from people who respond to unsolicited e-mails. If they did a pre-order only the types of people who pre-order would get counted. There are people who will be playing classic who’ve never heard of the game today. In the future people will be hooked on classic who have never played a video game as much as someone who’s played since 2004. I’m certainly there will be people who said they would never play wow who will be playing Classic. You can’t do a survey to determine if a person will be playing because of peer pressure, social media hype, curiosity, on media coverage, or word of mouth.
What is the latest news on how layering is going to work? I’ve heard nothing about it in a while. I imagine Blizzard would make changes on how layering works given the massive amounts of criticism about it. I suspect they are aiming to make it transparent to players.
Okay bye!!!
There is a possibility that every former and present player will play classic that’s a lot more people than all the current players who joined in on the first day in TBC. The starting area in TBC was much larger than the starting areas in Vanilla.
The actual game released didn’t have hundreds of players flood every starting zone. Those zones were never designed to host that number of players. Having a reasonable number of people in the starting zones is more like it was back in Vanilla.
Regardless of whatever Ion or the other devs say, Layering is here to stay and it will never be fully removed from Classic, unfortunately.
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