Actually, those of us who understand that sharding or layering is required for the first few months have the Classic game far more in mind than people who are selfishly concerned about their own stubborn insistence, without actually thinking about how to handle the very real issues:
Shareholder perception
Long term stability of the playerbase
High populated servers after the tourists leave
Not turning those initial tourists who would convert to Classic, away with long queues.
Being able to play the game at launch, instead of waiting in 80,000 person queues.
At this point, I actually believe some people would prefer to destroy the game out of spite for it not being 2004, than accept the conflicting demands of the reality of 2019.
I don’t think that’s you, though. I just think you’re whining.
Queues, server transfers to new servers. Same old same old, as it was in Vanilla.
And before people mention it, “Server Merges” are not something that happened in Vanilla. I thought so too, until I did some digging, and discovered that there has never been a server merge in the way people think of it. Only Connected Realms then Cross Realm Zones.
So claiming that server merges are more Vanilla is ignorant of the actual environment.
Acutally, the game’s just fine without it.
I was around to see nost, elysium and both the servers on LH and I vividly remember the starter zone experience to be crowded but still playable. Yes things like nodes/NPCs were dynamic but there’s plenty of ways to get around relying on those methods it and it rarely lasts more than a week before players have spread out in the world from the starting zones.
That assumes that people will want to transfer away from the server they’ve been playing on since phase one, which is not a factor that can really be relied on. Instead of trying to solve major problems caused by a solution for a minor issue, perhaps it’s better to instead simply deal with the lesser issue.
Not in 2019, with millions of people trying to get in. This isn’t 350,000 across 89 servers in 2004.
Notice how in 2004 those numbers lined up nicely to make 3k servers with a bit of extra padding? We do not have that situation in 2019. We are getting a lean number of servers with a high number of players.
And those are not what Blizzard want. They want people to get a Vanilla experience, being 3k people in their available space. Not a Private Server experience, which you clearly prefer. Blizzard has said they don’t want dynamic spawns.
Anyone who honestly believes that the majority of the playerbase will remain to 60 and still be playing 3 months in, I’d love to see the premise you’re working off and the numbers you’re expecting.
If we’re getting the numbers everyone is expecting, and from sources like Retail, then I can all but guarantee that a large amount of those players will disappear. WoW may get back to a permanent 2 million players in time, but it will be from the natural growth, not a burst at the start, from players who really aren’t interested and are just “trying it out” before they go back to farming 8.2.
Blizzard is trying to ensure that those players don’t permanently damage the realm populations by taking up spots they know will be vacated. They’re only intending to have a few layers on any given server and will be using queues once the layer cap is hit. So you’re not talking 30,000 people, you’re talking maybe 6k or 9k. Since they’re not using dynamic respawns, they’re choosing to use 3 layers and only for the first few weeks. After that, they expect servers to be roughly 3k active peak players.
If you’re genuinely saying you want to have 15,000 people on one server at launch, and expect that to drop back to 3k, your estimates are the same as what everyone else is talking about.
Sharding starter areas was the pre-supposed solution after comments at Blizzcon by Ion that they were ‘investigating’ it.
Layering is a “Continental Layering” where each continent has a set of “shard-like” layers, that are contiguous across the whole continent. So instead of 3 Teldrassil shards, 3 Durotar shards and 2 Mulgore Shards, you have 3 layers, each of which has the population for Teldrassil, Durotar and Mulgore that would have been in a shard from each of those zones.
That may be so but Blizzard uses a cloud based solution for hosting, it would be relatively easy to spin up new servers and acquire the necessary power to run them should they need to.
There was a launch day for vanilla too, fewer servers then too.
I may not have been at launch but I’ll bet good money it was just as congested for the first short period of time.
Look at the total player count at the end of actual vanilla, then compare it to the launch of BC, the player count was an upward trend until wrath, couple this with the fact that there’s a lot of people that want to play to begin with it’s likely we may see some drop off but assuming all servers will turn into a ghost town nearly a 5th the size of their launch population is not something that should just be taken as pure fact as that assumes that 80% of people that play classic will give up within the first phase.
People are pretty bad at predicting such things, that and retail population trends now are not exactly the best metric as retail is mostly a quick experience comparatively with far less depth to it’s open world and RPG-centric elements which is what gives classic it’s staying power.
That’s not at all what I think could happen, due to the fact that classic incentivizes time investment through it’s mechanics it’s very much a possibility that we may not see that drop all the way to 3K and as players are able to play on a single server 30k at a time it can lead to people wanting to remain on those servers and end up either stuck with layering on or forced to wait in a long que. The issue is less that the players would be split at launch and more that they would crowd larger servers due to the increased caps, then removing layering would result in the equivalent of merging 5-10 large servers together at once and only lead to more problems with over population that are now even greater due to the fact that only 3k of the people usually playing at a given time (out of the original 15k that initially rolled on that server) would get a chance to play at peak hours without layering, thus necessitating the continued existence of the system or forcing players to deal with the issues it causes when removed. The unfortunate fact is that layering is a solution that was not fully thought out and will likely result in far more problems in the future should blizzard chose to continue using it into launch. It’s a good concept on paper but in practice will only lead to overcrowded servers should the future not exactly conform to the idea that player counts will fall to reasonable levels on all servers in a short period of time, all this risk taken to avoid a few slower servers and a few more wasted CPU cycles should it not pan out exactly as expected.
From a technical standpoint, you are totally correct. From a gaming and realm population standpoint, it would be an unmitigated disaster to do so. Because what you’re proposing would only work if they created a “megaserver” by using connected realms and cross realm technology. CRZ in particular was specifically crafted to make use of the floating work unit capabilities of Cloud Computing. However, for the same reason, it completely decimates the encapsulated community of the ‘golden age’ of WoW.
Saying “they can just spin up more servers” is tantamount to “CRZ is ok”, because when the population drops they won’t be populated servers.
I was there. And we had more queues in March than November. November had database issues, but at least you were in the game. Long queues weren’t a thing until they started pumping out far more copies of the game and it became far more pouplar than they expected.
And Wrath ended in 2010. Since then for 9 years, the playerbase has been shedding players left and right. Coupled with natural cycles, most of the current retail population are Wrath+ players, and have never experienced the Vanilla lack of ‘convenience’. For this reason they’re not going to be as interested, at least not in the first few weeks.
Vanilla started small, with 350,000 US accounts, and grew from there. It did not explode instantly, but ramped up giving them time to open new servers that the knew would be filled. 15 years later, while there is a sizeable group ready and willing to play again (myself included), that playerbase is not going to be more than about 500,000 people to start with. People who played back then aren’t all coming back. They’ve changed in 15 years. And yes, I think we’ll grow, but those people aren’t going to be there at launch either.
There’s going to be a glut of Retail players criticizing everything and telling us how much better Retail is for the first week or two, and then they’ll go back there and leave the core players alone. After we spread the word on how much fun we’re having, old players will come back, retail people may give it another try without the bias, and so on.
But there will definitely be a rise and then crash in the first few weeks. Layering only needs to be there till the crash. Then they can turn it off forever and only use it in Retail.
This will not be a thing. They are intending to have a few layers, at most, and if that doesn’t work, they’ve said they’ll add more servers. So caps may be 9k, and if that’s constantly overflowing, they’ll add more servers maybe with lower layer caps. The 30k or even 15k servers will not happen.
Using the more realms model will only result in a need for Connected Realms in Vanilla. Something that none of us want. As much as people want it to be, this isn’t 2004. We aren’t going to see 12 million players in WoW again. There’s not only too much of an MMO market, but there’s also far more accessibility to other game formats and an industry willing to pump them out. And the target market is 15 years younger than the Vanilla crowd, in a world that is far more demanding of instant gratification and stream-ready games.
Even if there is a renaissance coming in MMO gaming, that won’t happen in the month of September. It’ll happen over the months and years that come after that. Don’t encourage Blizzard to damage Classic and that possible future, for short sighted stubborn-ness.
Even with the “small” (cause it was huge by the days standard) start there were ghost town servers by ~1.5. Server transfers/migrations were first opened before BWL launched.
And they were to move off high poulation servers to less populated servers. I checked, and there was never a server merge. Connected realms were the point where the community was destroyed by ‘merging’ multiple realms.
If they end up using it, the immersion of the world is already cut to the point where showing which layer of Azeroth you’re currently in would actually be appropriate, and appreciated, cause it clears up some of the confusion at least of where the hell you are.
I remember in Aion, another MMORPG from a long time ago, they also had these types of “channels” which basically are layers.
There was channel 1, channel 2, etc and you could see which one you’re in, and were able to switch them if you wanted (altho without grp inv).
This kinda stuff personally put me off these MMORPGs who used instance systems like these so hard though.
WoW was the saving grace with it’s open and shared world. If it didn’t have it, i would have quit very quickly when i started playing cause i personally really dislike instanced worlds.
Also, I like your idea, and i really appreciate it that you mentioned it
I could just join in whenever there’s only 1 layer active so i get to play the actual Classic game before they take it out as you said! It does align with my preferences in terms of play style.
Yet at this point it’s more about principle for me, and i know i’ll have a grudge when i play knowing that i can only play the game at certain times (really late, basically) and it’s not the real deal. I can’t support Blizzard for that Really sucks but that’s what it comes down to.
Regardless, best of luck to you too! If this thing makes it in, i hope you’ll still be able to enjoy the game a lot anyway!
You make a good point, but I don’t think it will stop me or most other people. I have to have faith that it will be adjusted or made so you cannot just skip around to different layers willy-nilly.
So yeah, Blizzard dev team has a lot of work to do here to make sure layering isn’t a problem.
People still seem to be ignorant to the fact that the ‘exploits’ found on beta are a good thing because it means Blizzard can fix them before launch.
Stop B**tching about them unless they show up in launch, otherwise just report the exploits and move on.
Layering is also not just gonna go away within a month or two, it’s gonna take the first content patch before it’s yeeted from being a thing if you have such a major issue with it I suggest literally not playing because the other options are
CRZ (LOL NO)
Sharding (Layering but even worse, especially in the case of RP servers)
Server Transfers (Which won’t work why would anyone actually leave their high pop realm for a ghost town, this has been proven time and time again.)
Server Merging (A horrid idea that will ruin plenty of communities more so then Layering ever would.)
If you guys haven’t realized it this is a situation where Blizzard just can’t win no matter what they do plenty of people will be mad, you either suck it up and live with layering until it’s no longer needed or you can continue being entitled and wait until it’s not in the game anymore.
Where have you been for WoD / Legion / BFA beta’s, exploits get reported, they get ignored especially the closer to launch that they get ( and maybe get addressed 6 months after launch, sometimes never ), merely look at the trend. If you’re annoyed now of all the layering talks here you may want to avoid the forums outright when this goes live and they predictably do nothing about the game breaking exploits.
![:heart:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/heart.png?v=6" ":heart:")
![:slightly_smiling_face:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slightly_smiling_face.png?v=6" ":slightly_smiling_face:")
![:worried:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/worried.png?v=6" ":worried:")
Really sucks but that’s what it comes down to.![:+1:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/+1.png?v=6" ":+1:")