You keep throwing out words whose meanings you don’t understand. Please stop embarrassing yourself.
The only embarrassing thing I see in this thread is BFA players like Enrik trying to make classic more like BFA.
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There will be a drop in time played for the average player even if no one quits. People just play the game more at launch, then drop to more normal time investment later. This will lead to a natural drop in concurrent player numbers.
Whether the player base as a whole will drop, remain stable or grow post launch is the big unknown.
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You dont seem to understand how numbers work…
If you have servers for 400k players and 2 million are trying to log on, thats not a couple hour queue thats a queue for like half a day+. I hedged my estimates in your favor btw, i doubt there will be 400k concurrent players within 6 months and there almost certainly will be well over 2 mil at launch.
also layering isnt that bad and is hardly noticeable in actual usage, all the “exploits” are massively overblown.
Are you on a quest to prove to everyone how smart you are or something?
What’s up, man? You cool? Wanna hug it out?
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What about the gameplay environment that’s going to be created in the first weeks or months into the game, where there won’t be any proper community on a server with multiple layers?
As in, a gameplay environment completely antithetical to the games original design?
What about the aftermath of the merge of that bunch of loosely collected players now in all sorts of level ranges, when there are still layers up at the merge of the server?
One one hand, with for example the alternatives i’ve (and plenty of other people) have suggested, you can actually play the game with a real community from the start (as the og game design intends you to do) and only in case of emergency you’ll be put together with another realm.
If it came down to it, you’d keep your names intact (as in, preserve your old community you bring with you), and since it’s still early on in the game the damage is as minimized as possible for everyone involved. You can even avoid calling it a “merge” PR wise cause the names were shared all along.
On the other hand, you have layering, with which there’s no community possible to be formed with multiple layers up for weeks or months.
Then at the layer collapse, again you’ll not have a community formed suddenly out of that big bunch you throw together.
But instead you’ll incentivice splitting it even further because people won’t be able to login and do higher level activities with their guilds, or they won’t be able to just plain continue their leveling journey, which before at least server access wise wasn’t held up by a sudden big queue and a fun surprise waiting for them upon entering the game and seeing a lot of new faces.
Layering does so much more harm to the game than the alternative, or even the original approach could hope to do. The only way it would damage control itself a bit more is if the realms all died down as they’d hope they do (a sad attitude to have considering the quality of their game at hand, but ok).
The proof is already there that the game is more than capable of not just surviving, but thriving without this.
I’d still argue that it’s necessary for it’s sucess that it doesn’t resort to a game breaking measure like that, to fix an issue that will return in time, requiring the same actions layering is trying to avoid in the shortterm.
Because this will end up generating more subs overall, than one or the other would.
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No. I’m not wasting an hour waiting to play a game. And Blizz, thankfully, knows this.
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I do understand that view and way of thinking.
But I also see and believe in the potential of classic.
You can’t look at beta servers as a clean comparison.
Progress there is finite. All of it will be wiped, and people still have put in multiple days of play time in mere weeks. Despite the fact.
In truth the reception was very good. Even from people that at least doubted the actual need for Classic WoW Servers. Considering the modern landscape of negative reception around many games, it adds credibility to the critics claim.
I’m saying that Classic is simply a very good game. It has been all those years ago, and it could today if executed correctly. If not hindered by graphics, and once people accept the game and its rule-set for what it is, they will see it for what it is:
A very good game.
A game that is so good, that it’s the reason World of Warcraft sits on the list of the best games of all time.
A game so good, that people even all those years later, want to play it. Again.
A game… that made people quit their jobs, lose everything in real life and in some sad cases… even died because of it.
The reason why some people are afraid of the possibility of phasing staying for longer than intended, is that there is a realistic possibility of Classic having a way better retention rate than expected.
Some people go so far as to think that it’s even more likely, given the arguments pointed out above, that Classic will either stagnate or even rise rather than losing players as expected by Blizzard.
And layering becomes an issue the second less people leave as expected.
By the amount of layers some expect them to use, this threshold is supposedly quite high. Especially if they want to have no log in ques.
Is it really that far fetched to see, acknowledge and point out the risk at hand?
I don’t think so.
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Where does it say 80% will quit?
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I believe in the potential of Classic to grow after everything settles down. But all those Retail players, even if they like it, are going to grow tired quickly, and then come back later and see how its going.
Actually, firstly many of the players included are paid to play. That’s their job and what they do. Secondly, the non-Classic streamers such as Evitel, have had far different reactions. “I got bored after about 2 hours and stopped after about 4” is what I expect from people who like the BfA model.
To be completely honest, yes. The Classic team, and even Ion overseeing them, are fixated on delivering an authentic experience. Time and time again, they’ve said they know it has to be removed, and basically scoffed any time someone brought up Kazzak. Not because it’ll only last Phase 1, but by the time it hits Phase 2, layering will be long gone.
Ion promised a few weeks, and I’m pretty sure they’re going to pull all the stops out to ensure that.
I actually think layering is really being built for Retail to solve some of the complaints of Sharding, and Classic is going to be the proof that it’ll work, while also solving that initial burst.
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I also use arbitrary percentages to bolster my arguments, and you clearly don’t understand what layering is for.
70% of players never made it to level 10 when WoW was brand new and a pop culture phenomenon. The only reason the player-base grew as it did is because of the sheer number of people trying it due to the pop culture phenomenon factor.
Now not only is WoW no longer new, nor a pop culture phenomenon, but the MMO genre as a whole is not doing well. The original WoW launch was lightning in a bottle - the right game (a casual MMO) at the right time (as the internet was exploding). Anticipating the same 70% drop out rate without the sheer volume of new players to make the population grow is the logical and reasonable expectation.
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Uh. . you mean crow.
He ate his words and concedes the point. Why kick a person when they agree?
Forcing people to change servers brings up problems with moving guilds, duplicate names, people don’t like being relocated.
It’s far better to start off with a 5 or 6 servers that need layering for a month or two, than to have 10-15 servers and half of them are ghost towns after the same time period.
Besides the whole system will be removed by phase 2.
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80% will quite , is this normally what happens 2 month after an exspantion, or just from BfA statistics?
The dichotomy and unironic posting from many people is mind boggling.
The gameplay from Classic WoW is very good, but dated to modern standards.
The single biggest “extra” for Classic WoW is the community aspect. Something that is not going to be able to assert itself during the 3+ million player bum rush.
THAT is a major contributor for why it’s going to open big due to hype/nostalgia, then promptly crash, because a lot of the hype/nostalgia revolved around something that won’t be present at launch for most players.
That’s going to be something which grows out of the core group of dedicated Classic players who are there to play Classic. The community that grows around those players is going to be the force that starts to pull everyone else back in and grows the community.
But that only comes after the player numbers initially crash after having hit some impressively large numbers.
Pre-launch hype is the enemy of Classic, and the sooner Classic’s fan base figures this out, the better. The hype we want should come from post-launch. Because those people who play and quit due to “lack of the community feeling I was told to expect” are going to be hard to bring back once they’ve left the game in their rear-view.
It’s also why I hold to the “It’ll spike, crash, and start to grow from there, quite possibly surpassing the initial spike” model. That initial spike is the 800 pound gorrila that can destroy it all if it isn’t handled well. And in all of this, we have people refusing to acknowledge it is a giant proverbial wild animal we’re contending with.
It’s not that at all. There are just lots of us who have been around long enough to see the pattern that happens every single expansion: Big numbers at launch, followed by a big drop off after ~30 days and then a slow trickle of attrition, with bumps back up when new content patches come along.
It’s gonna be the same with Classic, because it’s always the same. A big pile of people jumping in at first, followed by a big drop off and then slow attrition.
Phases will be sort of like content patches, they will probably drive a bump, but not that big of one, because if you haven’t been in playing, the new stuff will be out of reach anyway.
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I’m inclined to believe the same thing. A lot of the attention aimed at Layering is actually to address issues with the Live/Retail version of the game, probably slated for the 9.x Expansion pack, but as Classic also has an application for it, Classic is doing much of the preliminary work on testing it. (Classic is also probably better positioned to be able to actually test it in general)
its what happens to pretty much every hyped game in the last few years at least.