I mean honestly that is what it is plain and simple.
We have 11 classic servers w/ Layering… Mean you know there could literally be 12 versions of Herod up and 8 versions of Fairbanks
I honestly feel like even on retail 11 servers is believable with all the sharding and such going on… All the NA RP servers cross over to each other… and so on.
So why do we still have 100+ servers on live instead of 11? Well one obvious reason is that merging servers would just anger people because " I had so and so name for x amount of years and you merged our servers and want me to change my name"
You don’t know that, and Blizzard doesn’t know that.
The truth is, and I’ve been saying this since Layering was announced, is that it isn’t a solution. And if Blizzard’s assertion that there will be a mass exodus doesn’t come true…they’ve now just dug an even deeper grave.
Just curious, but where is this assumption coming from? I keep seeing people say classic will have a huge drop and just be a tourist phase. Are you referencing retail players coming for a look and moving back?
The bigger group I’ve heard are people returning from not playing WoW, that are here for classic and not intending to tour, we are looking to settle in.
While layering isn’t nearly as bad as people make it out to be, considering the changes they made in beta, there is still some server damaging things it will cause. If left in for awhile it will cause economy and community impact. It is a good solution to handle initial volume, but if populations do not drop or servers aren’t added to compensate and layering remains, there will be backlash from the playerbase.
it will hardly cause economy issues, the black log from swapping has already addressed that and the fact their may be multiple lets so rare mats acquired if anything will help the economy… instead of needing to use your life savings to get the item cause the sheer volume of people, it will be modernized.
I guess we will have to see. Honestly it is all hypothetical currently, so it is hard to know. I’d say worst situation would be a very high population server that remains high beyond phase 1. This would make it unable to remove layering, and that many people with a single auction house would foster an odd economy compared to vanilla. I also worry about the community, since that will be a long period where we have many players split across layers and not communicating as a core server.
No one really knows for sure how many people are going to play Classic, but Bliz probably has a preliminary “guesstimate” in the form of a high-low range. They could be wrong, but the number of servers we’re seeing now represents Blizzard’s low range. They feel confident there will be at least enough players to support this many realms. If the actual number starts going higher, they open new realms…during name reservation or even after launch if necessary.
I don’t see the issue. If they need more servers they will add more later. 1-3 months after release if numbers are still insane they will open new servers… and guess what, a LOT of people who had poor starts on the initial servers will be more than willing to re-roll.
Original WoW they just kept adding servers…the first year there was new servers every couple weeks. It slowed down but until TBC there was new servers pretty regularly.
All that being said… I think Blizzard has it right. A lot of people will give it a few months and move on.
Agreed. Even looking at how the stress test went recently shows some concern. Out of the 4 servers available 3 where high pop with 1k+ queues at one point and the 4th was medium pop. Not sure if they had lower caps compared to what they intend to roll when launching, but it made me wonder about total server counts considering launch will have more ppl.
There is a reason why Ion said that he can be quoted promising layering will be gone by the end of ph1. Maybe they don’t see layering being as innocent as you do and instead consider it double-edged sword.
My guess - and that’s all it is - is that Blizzard will allow 3 layers per server, maybe 10,000 accounts. Worldwide, they will be able to handle 250 to 300k accounts right at the start. If they fill, they will spin up new servers within minutes.
The assumption is that maybe 60 percent will basically drop out by Phase 1 and of the rest, people will be playing less hours overall.
If Blizz is wrong about the drop off, they will have to offer free transfers to those who want to bail to another server.
