Overall i think that server merges are actually one of the better methods to make communities more viable overall. That being said though, i do remember some of the free transfers that happened early on for the over crowded servers where a large group of players basically came in and just took over that server. While its more authentic to have single layer, the problem then shifts to the number of servers and how much are you going to merge.
Server merges in Just about every case are a swan song for a game. The last thing you want to see from your game is “World of Warcraft goes with Server Merges” as the head line on your gaming website as it shows weakness. Why do you think in the 15 years of wow there has NEVER been a merge. There are some dead servers and yet they still have not been merged. Now in the mega shard era its less needed, however, its still a thing.
I would like to see layering have a timer so that players cant log out and back in and be on a different layer in order to just solo farm materials. Beyond that im going to just suck it up and play the game. There is much more to the game than one month of play and to get caught up over that month when there are going to be alteast 22-23 other months of content seems like a waste of energy. I would think the amount of energy spent on the player base to solve this limited time problem is good dicussion but its clear there are things that could be done to improve the system we have as opposed to trying to figure out a whole sale new system in 2 months.
I’m just going to respond to this bit cause I believe it’s more than just odd to think that this is a smart idea to do.
The gameplay experience for people on modern WoW has suffered so much under the sharding system I would go ahead and say that they lost more players to not having any community, open world battles and having insane anonymity than they would’ve possibly lost by admitting a decline in players and merging servers.
I would actually bet on that.
Their fear of bad press made the game worse than it was and spiraled into even more people quitting.
How often have you had seen good feedback for sharding or layering tech? Almost no one likes it, most people try to live with it and some others don’t play at all because of it / or will leave the game once they experience its destructive behavior.
On top of that, modern WoW is designed around sharding, no immersion, interface clicking mini-game anonymity gameplay.
Classic WoW was designed around things that represent design pillars of quite the opposite polarity.
If you want the vanilla experience, you are asking for several-hour queues, server downtime, and immense lag. You don’t want the authentic Vanilla experience.
If you want to experience less layering, out-level the competition and get out of locations of high population or … wait a week for the population to spread out - your choice.
Because you’re asking for something that caters to the few and creates separate rulesets. All that does is leads to complicating a system that need not be complicated.
If in retrospect, it doesn’t work out, you can come back and have proof that Blizzard did it wrong or not come back, proving that they did it well
Well, first, double that, because servers are about 6000, 3000 per layer per continent.
That’s 48,000 which is still crazy low, but not unthinkable, especially if we end up with a perfect storm where the lack of modern convenience turns off the retail crowd while simultaneously the changes being forced on the game turn off the vanilla and pserver crowds.
However, 8 servers is a pretty reasonable estimate for a minimum number of servers for the following reasons.
It allows for 1 pvp/pve/rp-pve realm for both NA and EU regions with pve/pvp realms for Oceania
Blizzard has stated they wanted to be conservative on the number of initial servers.
Since layering won’t make a 6000 pop server look any different than a 600,000 pop server, they get all the good press that will come from opening new servers with none of the bad press that comes from overcrowding.
Classic would have to be an absolute failure for them to require server mergers, at which point the bad press from server mergers would be the least of their problems.
PvE and PvP are minor systems that have had 15 years to be ironed out. Layering is an infrastructure system and the more complicated it is, the more risk of having difficult to produce bugs that could affect even the non-layered servers.
Software and server infrastructures are not as simple as a switch and the more “layers” (hah, get it?) you add, the more complications you will likely miss.
We’ll probably never know since Blizzard won’t share numbers anymore, but I have a hard time believing it will ever be that low. I can see retail players leaving in droves, but the chance that less than 50k people will be playing this game in phase 2? I would be willing to bet every cent I own that this will not be the case.
Edit to change to phase 2, not year 2. Although I would doubt the numbers going that low after 5 years.
You’re missing the point, WoW Classic didn’t even have to happen and they’ve already defined the scope of the WoW: Classic project. One of the goals was to: use modern technologies to solve old problems, meaning find a solution that will be used across all realms, all server rulesets that will solve the initial-launch problems.
They do not want:
Server Downtime
Server Queues
Overpopulation
Character lag
Dead servers
Your solution of non-layering will include one (or more) of the above 5 things, meaning it is not a viable solution for the scope of the project.
Who knows though? I mean, those returning players all left once already. Retail didn’t become the current wasteland because of one big change, it was a thousand tiny changes that a majority put up with, but for a minority were the last straw.
Besides, the point is really that: By starting with the minimum number of servers possible, they have no where to go but up. They can spin needing more servers in the press. “Blizzard races to get more servers online to handle unexpectedly high demand for Classic WoW”. Even if they themselves artificially created the need for more servers, it still looks good, it gives the impression of growth. Server mergers give the impression of a dying game. So they get to hide the mergers behind collapsing layers, and then, when Phase 2 is about to hit, they get to open up new servers for transfers, and reap the glorious adulation of the gaming press.
It’s manipulative and shady, but it’s incredibly good business sense.
If you want to experience what it’s like to play on a server with no sharding at launch, do the following:
Take a screenshot of the loading screen from the beta.
Make that your desktop background.
Log out of WoW and stare at your desktop background for the next 3 hours.
Sharding is there for a reason. It’s to prevent the game from crashing and freezing up. If you really hate sharding, just follow the above instructions to experience unsharded gameplay.