the amount of people who want classic
2 (most importantly). that these people want to play together.
blizzard, people keep going to full realms because they WANT PEOPLE to play with.
they dont understand if server XYZ is going to have a good enough pop because you love to be extremely vague.
so they feel the safest bet is to just join a full server.
this is undoubtedly going to lead to people who just quit the game all together because of long ques, or their groups being split up among servers because of the ques.
you should have just locked servers at a certain point, and opened up more servers.
if a server was locked and an entire guild didnt manage to reserve on 1 server, oh well then they can try another server. or at least you can unlock it the day of launch, so this way people reserving names before launch are more likely to spread out.
They’re being especially cautious about opening up new servers for the sake of long-term population stability. There’s really no way of knowing how many people are going to play for a month and then either quit or return to BfA. If they open 5-10 more servers and lock the “cool servers” like Herod, then a lot of people are going to end up on lower-pop servers that might be empty in six months while Herod settles down to a sustainable level over the same time period.
did you see the bit about blizzard saying some servers will have a que so high that you wont actually see the real number… like… if the que cap is 25,000… you have no idea how many more are actually trying to log on…
Thing is, it’s not just Herod that’s full. They all are, they’re all cool servers. They could have made more servers, this is obvious they missed the boat on that one.
It stands to reason that people who reserved a name is possibly more invested in Classic and may stick around longer. I was surprised by how few servers were around for the name savers. Optimally, you would want this strong base spread across all your servers. But it is still an impossible feat to “guess” at what they will need hardware wise.
I thought some of my die hard WoW lore friends would play classic. Was pretty surprised to find out they are taking a hard pass. Some other friends I have that I thought “maybe” would play are extremely geeked about classic.
That brings even worse problems IMO. Take for example a guild still had a few members or friends of members that for whatever reason decided to join last minute or otherwise forgot to reserve a name.
Let’s assume all guilds have at least some people in this category. Well, by locking the servers the way you suggest, every single guild is going to have members who are dealing with the disappointment of being separated from some of their friends.
And that would create an epidemic of players who are faced with the dilemma of choosing between their friends and the guild, both of which are hard to replace if you’re already happy with them.
I think Blizzard is doing the right thing with servers. They really want to avoid server merges, so they’re doing whatever they can to reduce that likelihood. They know full well that extreme falloff is likely and they don’t want dead servers to exist. Its why layering may be the saving grace of classic.
Retail WoW has 241 NA servers alone. Classic has what, 10?
There’s no easy solution to all of this, and no matter what you do, there will be some pain. Just have to deal with it.
lots of people who played Vanilla know full well what its about and I agree with them wanting to pass. The ones who seem geeked out about it. give it time until the reality of time investment sinks in. From my standpoint playing Vanilla it really boils down these days to how much time I want to play, and how long having to pay for a subscription drives me batty. yeah the gong show free games have there moments but at least I don’t have to sink real $$ if I don’t want too.
Not only are they being especially cautious as you say, they’re trying way too hard to populate these servers. Here’s my take on it (yeah, I know, same post I linked above, but you should read it)
I would rather have a dead server than to have layering and queue’s. A dead server is only going to punish those on it, even though its no fault of their own. The other option punishes everyone, and double so for those who would prefer a small server and have no option to get one.
You say retail wow has 241 servers alone. They have said that what is medium on classic servers is way more than what a full server on vanilla held as far as players. Meanwhile they are saying massive queue’s of 10k plus on full servers in classic…sounds like if this was vanilla, we’d have upwards of 100 or more servers by now, but we have a mess of way overfull servers with no new ones being listed.
That predicted fallout will be of their own doing. No one wants to sit in a queue when they are there to play a game. As much as I’ve been looking forward to this, sitting in queue is not what i’ve been looking for. While Im stuck there, I’ll be sidetracking to my crafting while I wait, and when I start that, I don’t stop. The game will lose.
As someone who ended up on a dead realm in live wow, I don’t want that to happen to me in classic.
I think it’s important they don’t just open a ton of realms or people will end up on dead realms.
Also servers aren’t cheap, they’re trying to make a good profit like any business. Firing up a bunch of new servers that may be unnecessary later is understandably a cost they want to avoid.