Layering wasn’t needed. Blizzard made it needed by their own failure to act.
They left themselves with no way to judge how many servers they’ll need.
Between having no means of measuring interest and giving the ~2 million retail players free access they’ve created a perfect storm.
Any attempt to determine how many servers they need would be a blind guess, and a correct guess is impossible since there will be a flood of retail tourists. Guessing “right” for the number of people who will stay means massive queues. Guessing “right” for the number of servers needed to accommodate tourists would mean server mergers.
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dont worry i agree OP. what people forget is vanilla was successful because it made the community matter.
A key issue for me in retail is player retention feels very low at the moment because it plays like a single player RPG. Each patch people achieve minimum goals then move on because there is little human interaction to keep them playing.
sadly any system (sharding/layering…etc) that reduces player interaction can have devastating effects on building a community which really ruins one of the founding pillars that made vanilla a good game.
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While I too think they are underestimating population retention. What if they aren’t?
Say they overestimate and population drops sharper than anticipated. What then?
Having been involved in one of the first realm transfers opened in vanilla. I would really rather not deal with that again. Which is why I for the most part am ok with layering.
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Layering is supposed to be out by phase 2. Hard stop. So multiple world bosses won’t be an issue as they are being added with phase 2.
Some don’t believe it, some do. I’d like to think they’ll stick to it, but only time will tell.
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It really is. Stress test 1 and stress test 2 were vastly different with layering from my perspective.
Tells me it improved, but I couldn’t say by how much or if it really did either. Just that I noticed it a lot on stress test 1 and only once on stress test 2.
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Curious as what you think would have been the perfect solution, taking into account all player sources and not just people from Current WoW.
Server mergers is what they could do.
If the tourists all leave in 1-2 weeks as so many here say then server mergers have zero impact because the community is not formed yet, not at 2 weeks.
The other thing to think about is that not all tourist will really leave either, and I’m assuming we are calling anyone who does not make a permanent home on Classic is a tourist.
pre-purchase has become a bad move anywhere.
They already have your money and can deliver crap.
This is not limited to video games either.
Wrong. You cannot access Classic without an active sub.
Server mergers are cancer.
I’d rather take the common cold (layering) over cancer.
But if layering is only for “a couple of weeks” then server mergers would happen in that same timeframe. Communities aren’t fully formed yet.
Yes. They are.
You need a community in Classic right from the outset.
Besides, what happens if that steep drop-off doesn’t happen in the first few weeks? What if it DOES take a month? Or two months?
Layering is the only solution Blizzard has that makes sense. Server merges will never make sense.
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If layering is needed up to phase 2 then I agree.
Guilds have already formed…MC cleared, etc.
So this debate really should center around “when does the tourist drop-off occur ?”
If it’s a few weeks…there are plenty of options
If it’s a few months…too far into the game. Players/guilds too invested.
The answer is… we don’t know when the drop off will occur, or even if it will occur.
Hence the need for layering. It’s something they can easily turn off when Phase 2 launches if it somehow makes it that far. And they’ve gone so far as to promise that if it comes to that, they will do it.
I don’t think Blizzard has ever actually merged servers? Correct me if I am wrong.
Connected is what they did.
Connected realms is basically Blizzard’s way of merging servers in a way that doesn’t require name changes. So, yeah. They’re realm merges.
It may not have ruined communities, but it didn’t save them either.