Except in Vanilla, it wasn’t possible to phase into a different reality by accepting a group invite. The auction house and trade system wasn’t a mash up 20k contributors, either.
Do you have a better solution? We could cap realms at 3k for a Vanilla like experience, but what happens when more than half of those people leave?
Do you really want a vanilla like first few weeks so badly you’d spite the server pops long term?
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Cool.
Also, its not 2004, and WoW isn’t an unknown game that hasn’t yet grown into a behemoth…
That’s a completely irrelevant point and has no bearing on this discussion in any way
Beyond that, if someone thinks the layer caps in the Stress Test were 3k, they’re out of their minds. It was a couple hundred players…if that. It didn’t simulate Vanilla’s launch; it simulated BfA’s launch with those cap levels. Blizzard can say it has a cap of ‘server population’ but clearly they’re referencing what will be the case down the line, when the playerbase has spread over the world. But when everyone is in the starting areas on launch day? They won’t have 3k layer caps. And the stress test proved that. Hence Ion’s quote of not wanting a ‘miserable experience’ questing with too many players. Again, layer caps are dictated by convenience, not server stability or authenticity.
Look, I was mostly ambivalent to layering. I didn’t like it, but I saw some reason for it. I knew from the start it would be exploited and abused by layer hopping, and the Beta proved it was even worse than I anticipated. But they can…kind of create restrictions to cope with that. To some degree.
Two things really soured me on. First was my experiences in the second stress test, where Blizz I assume responded to the whining in the feedback thread by players who want to quest solo and lowered the layer caps to pathetic levels. I got to level 10 in 2 hours and 53 minutes. I believe I grouped twice, for two Scarlet kill quests that totaled maybe 5 minutes of that time. Otherwise I was completely solo. And I wasn’t even rushing. I think in that same 3 hours in the first stress test I was still in Deathknell. But it was infinitely more fun and more memorable. I grouped up, made some friends, joked around. Time flew by. The second stress test was just another testament to convenience being to the detriment of fun.
And the other reason was Ion’s quote that questing with 1000 other players is a miserable experience. I just want to put my first through a wall hearing that. This is the Game Director of the most successful mmo in history. And he doesn’t understand why people play mmos. The most important feature of the game: the community. That’s what sets an mmo apart from any other genre. That’s where it will shine. That’s where it has success.
It’s no coincidence when game features were implemented that put convenience above social interaction and player responsibility that the game’s popularity began to plummet. It’s almost like players gasp want that social experience. That’s why they’re playing an mmorpg. There’s a million games out there that offer solo player experience. And far better than an mmo ever could. So instead of concentrating and promoting what sets mmos apart…they tried to appeal to a broader audience and wound up taking away the game’s prominent feature.
And layering seeks to do the same. At least to some degree. It’s nice that Ion says it’ll only exist a few weeks, but I think by then the damage is already done. I’ve gone over this before, about establishing expectations of player behavior by game design. You can’t suddenly pull the plug on a system and expect players to suddenly change how they view the experience. The patterns will already have been established. And also, even when Ion does talk about how layering is antithetical to the mmo experience, it’s made in reference of a contiguous world. Never about the social and community ramifications. It’s almost like he doesn’t think players want or should want to interact with one another. It’s mind-boggling to me an mmorpg game director can think that way.
Does he really not see the value in a truly massive amount of players? Or, like so many entitled players, just see the ‘negatives’. Instead, the devs have just approached it from a convenience mindset. Let’s overcome those ‘negatives’. It’s such flawed design in an mmo. It kills the community. Why shouldn’t players feel compelled to group up? Create those social bonds from the outset. “But even grouped we have to wait for respawns!!” So? That’s when social interaction happens. That downtime has value. Talk with people, make friends, have a good time. THAT is the experience Classic needs to offer. Not promoting the mindset about single player viability and time questing efficiency. BfA has those features in spades, and look how it’s doing. Why? Because those features don’t make an mmo fun or engaging. The community does that.
But in any event, layering obviously is going to be implemented. I just hope they put SEVERE restrictions on layer hopping. And keep the caps at a level not dictated by the Current WoW mindset of, ‘There’s too many players. I don’t want to have to group. I’m leveling too slowly!!’ If they do that and get rid of layering promptly (ideally I would say within a few days), at least the damage will be minimized.
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That is the whole damn point.
We need layering to get through the launch period, precisely because it is not 2004, it is 2019, and WoW is far more popular and has far more people who will be coming around for a look than ever before. And because in 15 years the average player’s experience has changed dramatically, most of them will not be interested in the more challenging gameplay, and will quit.
The fact that you think this is irrelevant, is the reason why your point of view was discarded by Blizzard. It’s not money or perverse desire to annoy you that’s driving Layering. Its a realistic assessment of the re-launch of a game in 2019.
Please tell me when you ever experienced this in Vanilla. It didn’t happen at launch, it didn’t happen at any patch, and it didn’t happen at the end. Hell, the TBC launch was the only time I saw long queues, which meant it still didn’t happen.
Your demand is an unrealistic and inauthentic demand. Ion said he didn’t want 1000 people in Elwynn Forest at once because it never happened in Vanilla. Arbitrarily increasing populations to inauthentic levels just because you think being crammed in is more fun, means you’re no better than those Private Server players who claim “monsters hit harder”, or “Hit is all wrong”.
You’re misinterpreting Ion’s statements for the purpose of making an argument that doesn’t exist.
Putting aside opening day inflation, if there’s a drop, a more realistic expectation would be 20-30% from Day 2 to Day 14 - which mean transitioning from 1 hour queues to no queue with healthy servers
Why do you feel a 20-30% drop is realistic? Please link your data.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read in my entire life. BfA is so dead that it probably has less subscribers than WoW did after 2 weeks of sales in 2004. At the very least, it’s current count is surely comparable to that, because it has less than FF14, which isn’t that popular.
If this whole ordeal is to smooth out “launch day” then it’s a flawed idea because consumers expect and accept messy launch days time and time again.
But it’s not about smoothing launch day, it’s supposedly to handle the rapid deflation which will supposedly and assuredly occur after launch day. That’s ridiculous, frankly. Most people that are still playing after a day or two is almost surely in it for a long enough haul to justify that the game won’t bleed off millions the way WoD/BfA did
Wow, do you only read philosophy texts from the Greeks and have never read anything else in your life? Or are you using overweening hyperbole… just a little bit.
Uh… we haven’t “expected” that for years, and only got used to it because WoW had two messy launches.
Cool. Layering will be gone within 2-3 days, Xjum has #Promised.
I’m just going to quote this again because it encapsulates your obliviousness perfectly
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So you’re saying Retail has less than 350,000 subscribers? Cool. Layering will auto-disable within the first day or two and we won’t have to worry about it at all.
#ProblelmSolvered.
There’s something like 30% fewer guilds clearing Heroic after 5 months into a raid tier than there was in WoD when the subscriber count was announced to be 5.6 million. There’s also far more ways to gear up now than there was in WoD, with Mythic+ replacing raids for many players. I doubt more people are clearing Heroic raids now than they were during WoD.
People just can’t stand to hear that BfA still has millions of subs. They want Modern WoW to die so badly that they lose all common sense and seek whatever they can to confirm their delusion.
I guess you just plugged your ears and went “I CAN’T HEAR YOU, LALALALALA” and linked me something worthless?
Sorry no, it doesn’t
Goes to show two things, though. The only people defending layering are people who play BfA, and people who BfA are blind
You know how armory parsing using the API works, right? Okay so you use the API to check the achievement data of active accounts, right? When a new raid releases, you use wowprogress to see how many guilds are clearing Heroic, next week we can do this.
Now, we cross reference the data from wowprogress with the armory data (just use worldofwargraphs) and we can see a pretty good estimate of the current subscriber numbers. Every time I’ve done this, the numbers come out to about 2.2-2.3 million, excluding China as wowprogress doesn’t track their guilds and progression.
There’s also the data on wowprogress that you can use to see the number of guilds clearing raids in WoD during the time Blizzard announced they were at 5.6 million subs. The numbers aren’t all that different from BfA, despite there being far more ways to progress your character in BfA than there was in WoD (less people are raiding now)
You’re in severe denial if you believe BfA has less than millions of subs.
Here: https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17624462586
Remarks like these aren’t true, sorry
it is 2019, and WoW is far more popular
BfA still has millions of subs.
Pathological denial is serious folks. Confirmation bias as well. Those numbers were debunked, Ythisens even said on his stream that they weren’t even close and that’s he’s seen the real numbers.
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Not really. BfA is a pretty dead game. There’s only a handful of active realms in each region. It use to have hundreds of active realms per region. You can match the downward trend pretty closely with search engine trends and put it at about 1.5m or so subs. I don’t particularly understand the logic behind armory data because alts are incredibly abundant and the armory doesn’t display accounts