Honestly I think this is one of the smartest ways to solve the very likely problem of high numbers of temporary players. Retail players can essentially check the game out for free so we can consider it a F2P game for them. Most F2P games have a HUGE spike in player base on release as people check it out and only retain a small % of that number after the first few weeks.
Yes a lot of players will come back to play and will likely stay. But a far larger number are going to come from retail and the majority of them won’t stay. If the pop stays crazy high, they can always open new servers later. But given the likelyhood of a huge temporary spike, I think this was a good way of handling it.
Personally I’d prefer this over 5 hour que times or future server merges. So long as they do in fact stick to phasing it out as planned.
But 50k-100k people all spawning across just the starting areas fight over a very limited number of mobs that have a 5 min respawn timer? I don’t think that’d be reasonable even if they made servers that could handle up to 10k people in one small area without crashing. It would be completely unplayable and could take you days just to finish a quest in the starting area. Even grouped up you’d be lucky to kill 1 mob per hour competing against 2,000 other groups.
What’s wrong with that? If I didn’t know the solution I was going to use I would be vague, too.
“We don’t know” exactly, but that’s not stopping people from calling the hypothetical launch day a crap show and complaining about how much they hate it.
Based on what objective evidence? Because someone doesn’t agree with you they must have been paid? I’m the type of person who collects objective evidence before getting upset about something or calling a system “bad”.
THe only thing I am worried about with the layering is. THEY HAVE TO MAKE end game farming not separate layers imo. THat would be a good way to ruin the economy if a guild can basically claim farming spots in multiple layers of a server… Aka devilsaurs and such. Will they really be able to work around this effectively?
Based on what? What’s wrong with players who play retail? Why wouldn’t they enjoy Classic as much as anyone else? The games are so different they might as well be two different games with NPCs who share some similarities.
That’s not what I meant. Is there any evidence Blizzard will allow this exploit at launch? I don’t think they will. I’m certain Blizzard never wants players to see any evidence of layering.
The largest player source is going to be non-current subscribers , and your example supports that, and there is no more guarantee a former subscriber will play more than a ‘tourist’ and also not leave.
I have no way of knowing and no one else does. The only thing we know is a lot of people in these forums can’t wait to play and are very excited about it. And that is literally it. My examples are just guesses based on the pull of the original game and how addicting it can be.
I don’t think anything is wrong with players who play retail. My mom plays retail. But since it comes free with the monthly fee they pay to play retail we can look at statistics for free to play games. They have a HUGE influx of people who check it out (because why not, it’s free) and within a month only a fraction of that initial spike remain and becomes the steady population. They usually have small bumps up and down after that but mostly remains steady past the first month. That’s likely what we’ll see from those on retail checking it out.
That’s simply how things play out when people can try something out for free. It’s not any kind of insult to people who play retail.
Because until they announce saying “Hey we fixed resources to not be literally 20 servers worth of resources available on each server.” I have to assume they haven’t done anything about it. Which is why I am mentioning it just in case this is something that has been overlooked. I understand layering is needed. I would love to have a smooth launch but not at the expense of a large part of the experience ruined because they couldn’t come up with a good solution to a rather large problem.
Edit: Not only that having 1 servers worth of resources split b/w god knows how many layers isn’t a fix either. So what we are just going to have stuff magically vanish in front of us because someone on another layer grabbed it before us? That is dumb too if that ends up being the solution. PVE servers sure that is fine but in pvp servers that won’t work as part of world pvp is fighting over resources.
There’s a couple reasons why this launch will be different. There won’t be as many servers as retail launches. Wow has been in a sub decline since cata, meaning it’s far easier for people to leave the game if they can’t play. We are also dealing with players having shorter patience. Back during WotLK expansion I was fine waiting in a queue cause the game and experience was worth it when I was like 14 and I had a lot more free time. That was back in 08. I’m not gonna wait in a queue in 2019. Since legion they have done sharding which made their launches go completely smooth.
Players won’t stand for queue times. They just won’t play. That’s completely untenable. Layering provides a means for no queue times and requires less servers at launch. None of your purposed solutions answers that. Either you are fine with queue times or you want blizzard to have more servers at launch and are fine with them merging later(also untenable).
Until I hear a good solution that doesn’t require queue times or mergers down the road I’ll be happy with layering.
Ion did an interview explaining it (I haven’t watched it yet). All I know is each layer covers the whole world rather than a zone or two. They have definitely been ironing out bugs on it too. At least from the stress tests it appears they have.
Blizzard has stats that show that’s how their releases work anyways, regardless of if it’s free or not.
Just cause the population rose from vanilla -> wotlk doesn’t mean that nobody ever unsubbed or quit playing. It only means they gained more than they lost.