Do you have numbers to support your argument?
4 Likes
If you don’t think there’s drop off, than you aren’t paying much attention.
It doesn’t matter if it is beating Retail or not. It costs them virtually nothing to spin up new “Realms” in either Classic or Retail. The most taxing thing would be giving them a name and adding a record to a database. They probably have a script for this anyway - ./createRealm Chimichunga 1.
All the realms are virtual these days as it is. Each realm isn’t on a physical machine but exists on multiple virtual machines in a data center. Classic and Retail run on the same back-end.
The problem comes down to Blizzard not having an actual plan to manage populations on individual servers. Instead of merging small servers and dividing large servers to maintain population balance and health, they just let server populations languish until customers get frustrated and either pay to transfer or leave. No one even needs to lose their character names either if they handle it correctly. Surnames and Battlenet identifiers can alleviate this issue.
Just watch in a year, some Classic servers will most likely be in the same place as you are right now. People will leave and others will change servers. Even free transfers don’t resolve population issues because people are reluctant to use them and leave their friends and guilds behind. Plus you don’t know what the new server is really like.
1 Like
Classic has more NA players than retail, I think overall retail has more players across all regions (china) that is where their main market is
Classic was created to keep NA/EU subs
1 Like
Where is the dropoff? Even after Blizzard raised server caps nearly every server is high-full in primetime.
1 Like
Classic is more popular than Retail because it’s a better designed game and a true MMORPG. I’m excited for the people who have never played an MMORPG and are finally trying one playing Classic. Everquest was my first MMORPG and I still remember how exciting it was. The world was open and dangerous and you needed to be careful and an easy way to do that was to work together with others.
4 Likes
We need more realm mergers, but I think they want to see if classic players convert to retail after dead end grind.
Even if they do, they aren’t going to be dumb enough to join the servers that are practically dead.
1 Like
For sure, that’s because there are no dead ones.
You are wrong Vox. If you need proof on that, just look up the recent blue posts in the Classic forums.
The blue posts explain why they are offering free transfers and it’s the exact opposite of there being a huge drop off as you keep trying to say. They are doing it so people can transfer off realms that are overly populated. They are even about to open even more realms.
Also, if your queue has lessened, that is due to them “substantially “ increasing the server cap and amount of players that can be on the realm at a time. There is another blue post about that as well. They did this before the holiday weekend. They didn’t just increase it by a small amount, but the word Blizzard used was that they had increased the cap on every realm “substantially.”
3 Likes
Exactly.
I’m on Pagle, which is pretty populated but near as much as a few others like Herod. During peak hours the queue is around one hour on average. I don’t know what it was before that because I only had the opportunity to play earlier during the day before.
1 Like
Your server died because of the free server transfers Blizz gave players in retail years ago .
Guess what it will probably have the same affect on classic.
How WoW players can hand wave away a sad fact is depressing. Absolutely players on dead realms should be given free transfers. Instead, Blizzard’s offering Classic WoW that opportunity.
I’m at a loss.
Please, explain to me how offering retail players transfers would cause harm (especially when they’re being offered to their new game’s players)? I am more than willing to change my thinking.
1 Like
Transfers have never been from dying realms . They have always been from over populated ones and the reason realms are dead or dying is because they created too many realms and with the over all decrease in players over the last few years , there are not enough to keep a lot of the smaller ones populated.
They have only 3 options. 1: free transfer from a high capacity server 2: ANother round of server mergers or # 3 which they probably won’t do is shut the server down.
Because of #3 they will not give free transfers from dying servers . They will only give transfers to them.
I know they changed the way the displayed “server pop” was shown, but that seems kind of fishy. If they could just increase server cap, why wouldn’t they have done that when they saw the amount of names reserved? As far as declining population, we’ll see.
To whom and why free realm transfers were offered to players in the past is not relevant to the discussion (or at least what I am asking).
I am asking, what harm in theory would offering retail players who by little fault of their own naively chose either dead or dying realms free realm transfers to more populated ones? To me it seems like the right thing for Blizzard to do.
I know the blue post you are referring to, but you seem to have missed the other blue post where they talked about increasing the server cap substantially at the end of last week.
They didn’t do this before because they were starting out with a slim amount of servers and having new realms ready to go when needed. They ended up opening new realms a number of times and were encouraging people to move to those new realms. The new realms kept filling up and they would open more. This happened at least three times. Finally last week they increased the server cap by a great deal to lessen the queues because they were outrageous and they have tried to avoid opening too many realms. It’s in the blue post.
And also as I said, they are about to open even more so people can transfer there when they open the free transfers off select realms.
1 Like
That’s nice it’s in a blue post, but once again, if they had the capacity why wouldn’t they use it? It seems pretty stupid to let people sit in que when they had the capacity to let more in.
/sigh, did you not read my whole post? I explained this already.
But if you are really looking for more logic, jut look to layering. As it is they are already running multiple layers on each realm. It’s like a lot of realms rolled into one at this point. They have promised to remove layering and collapse all the layers by phase two. If they keep adding new layers and increasing the server population, the realms will be an absolute mess when they remove layering if the population stays as high as it has since launch.
They are trying to accomplish a few things here. They are trying to make sure they have the right amount of realms. Releasing too many would be a mistake. They are trying to reduce queues but also trying to have a healthy population, but it can’t be way overly populated because that then causes more issues when layering is removed soon.
Westfall on my realm is ridiculously packed as an example. I can’t even imaging what it would look like if they collapsed all the layers on Pagle at this point.
You just seem to have your mind set on something and no amount of explanation from me, or even Blizzard, is going to change it. All these questions you keep asking have been answered by Blizzard in numerous blue posts.
2 Likes
Only if most of the servers are still leveling in 6 months, which i doubt. Leveling content is the only reason for layers since multi tagging quest mobs isn’t a thing.
Which is another reason why it is pretty strange they would cap the population on servers with ques, only to uncap it after releasing more realms.