Its not even normal MMO’s.
New servers during Vanilla failed. All of the new servers attracted re-roller after re-roller and left the server a barren place once more servers were made. Server populations would go from high to low within a month.
Blizzard is likely expecting a large majority of people that join will not be willing to drop their BFA main, and a bunch of the people will be going to the servers because they are new.
Layers are a good solution for the overall health of the server.
The only other option is to create multiple new servers which will die off and need to be connected.
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Except this is so unlikely as to be near impossible. Unless they plan to go with an insane number of layers, there is no way we have that many at phase 2. While unconfirmed (to my knowledge), most people seem to be expecting closer to 5 layers per server at launch. A large chunk of retail tourists are expected to quit within days/weeks. I would be surprised if many servers have more than 2 layers after the first month.
I think the reason behind the layering is to save on hardware expenses reducing the number of physical servers. I believe that is the idea anyhow.
Plus the long log in queues was an issue back in Vanilla. I remember waiting with over 300 people waiting in queue before me on raid night.
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What if they don’t quit tho?
No one seems to consider that eventuality…
Back when WoW was in its prime, you couldn’t sneeze without hitting an MMO that another studio had created to try and cash in on its popularity. Now everyone is making battle royale games.
So the current devs, presumably, aren’t under the illusion that releasing a legacy version of a 15 year old game is going to magically revive a genre that’s been declining in popularity for the better part of a decade.
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They have, server transfers will be opened up. It is possible that some realms will end up with higher pops while others end up lower.
However, to think that every retail tourists will quit to play classic, and every nostalgic player who hasn’t played in over a decade will stay, isn’t a possibility worth taking seriously.
All MMOs have turnover, and they have the benefit of not being free trials to players of another game like classic is.
Because it’s a fantasy not worth considering.
Personally I just think they’re shortsighted and selfish, not that they want Classic to fail ![:wink:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
I’m trying to make them understand, not just tell them they’re wrong ![:rofl:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/rofl.png?v=6" ":rofl:")
There was certainly a lot of whining there. Quite a few tourists are already being turned off by Classic. I think Blizz should open beta just before release, for a couple of weeks, to let all the tourists get their taste. That would reduce the need for a few layers on launch day, at the very least.
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People angry louder than people who are happy. 95% of the Feedback for the Stress Test was people talking about how crowded and congested the main PVP Server was, a minority of them were complaining, the majority states the congestion, and how much they still loved it and enjoyed having to grind or group to finish a quest.
Indeed, I loved every moment of it. Mind you… I rush as fast as possible, skipping the quests that were too congested, just to stay ahead of the zerg.
You say that, but look at Vanilla originally; it grew like mad.
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The estimates really do crack me up. They have no idea what they’re about to unleash.
It’s absurd, really. They ought to. They’ve seen it before. Pride… It’s blinding.
EQ2’s solution was after 100 people were in a zone, they opened a new copy of the zone. It wasnt unusual to try to zone in and see three copies of Enchanted Lands.
That’s essentially what layering is. Load balancing of a sort.
I’d say a little bit of both. The fact that people prefer a 15-year old version of the game to modern WoW has to be a huge blow to the designers’ egos which were already bruised by stuff like D3’s failure, Heroes of the Storm dying, and crowd’s reaction to the infamous “Do you not have phones?”
Better question is why create the issue in the first place by bundling the subs. Not a ton of foresight with the company these days. It’s all about maximizing perceived short term “success”, without thinking beyond the initial windfall.
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It had the advantage brand recognition and coming out at the begining of the golden age of MMOs.
Classic is a 15 year old game coming out during a time when MMOs are in free fall and being replaced by battle royale as the most popular genre. Even among MMOs, games like classic are not popular. BFA, ESO, FF14 and the like are still Kings of the genre, and all have massive amounts of qol features.
I think an example that sums up modern gamers can be best explained by the first weeks of BFA. People took to the forums and cried on mass at how they hadn’t up ugraded their weapon in over a week after starting endgame content…that is something that can takes months in Classic. It’s all well and good that some retailers liked the first 15 levels,but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the game.
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They are like overprotective parents who end up making their children fail instead of letting them solve problems themselves for a successful outcome.
Literally all they had to do was leave it exactly how it was and let it run its course. They are trying to do their modern Blizzard overprotective changes and the game will be worse for it. Imagine if in Vanilla, TBC, and WOTLK they assumed players would drop the game a few weeks after trying it and designed it around expecting this failure. Right when they started to do this in cata with cross-realms subs plummeted. Don’t aim for failure.
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Hey if one company knows or has insight on 80% of it’s player base quitting it’s Blizzard.
Also, if Classic fails it’ll be entirely because Blizzard can’t deliver a solid recreation of it. Which again they can only blame themselves but will realistically blame the playerbase if they do a terrible job on fixing the problems shown in the beta from strafing, to layering, and more.
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80% will quit BECAUSE of “layering” “phasing” “sharding”, so I guess they are going to be right after all.