I would rather see it as 1,2, and 3 merge into just Darkspear, however if they see that all 3 are leaning to being Horde population favored they could grab Gilneas 2 which has higher alliance population. As for numbers cap I am not good with statistically producing a number of this cap. During early weeks of
release it won’t be too hard on the economies. The players names could just default to forced rename, like they did when Blizz originally did merging of server A and server B. Might make some people unhappy but once again this could be an idea to replace sharding. The benefit of this approach is minimal as of course the re-naming character would make some frowns and for the cap numbers I believe someone could produce a better idea of a numbers cap. The second approach being character creations waves in lets say 15 minute intervals, I dunno 300 people per 15 minutes? would prevent renaming (or starting with 1k then going to 2k). It would not have to be lets say for an hour but they could do it after 30 minutes. While there would be queue times for this yes, but as far as alternate ideas I am trying to thrown out a medium ground approach. Both parties probably won’t be happy, us as players having to wait, and blizz having to create more servers. Blizz has reached middle ground ideas with looting trading being a good example. I am just trying to throw out some thoughts that Blizz might be able to create another plan other than having sharding.
This to me seems like a bad approach that will only generate resentment among players. Server identity is a big selling point for Classic and merging servers like this is going to damage that perception.
How do you deal with character names? How does this prevent server communities from being completely upended when they get merged with a bunch of players they’ve never interacted with before? Sorry, but at least with the sharding option, it gets shut off after the beginning zones and you can start to form a cohesive community on your server. Your option seems more calamitous and (negatively) impactful than temporary sharding.
Edit: I guess with the names, you could opt to prevent people from having the same name if they are in a set of pre-determined servers that will merge. Still, I think doing a bunch of mergers is worse for communities than temp. sharding in the starter zones.
Don’t need sharding or dynamic.
If they do do merges I hope they will do them when the server is truly dead and not just a low population server.
If there are several servers with only 1 person playing per week then sure merge them baby.
I agree that it has the possibility of being actually worse than initial sharding.
My issue with initial sharding for population control is that it is a total gamble, it assumes that a lot of those people initially there will leave and while I agree that they probably will it doesn’t change the risk.
But if they get the numbers wrong and less people leave than they anticipate then there will be lots of overpopulated servers and that is way harder to fix than low pop realms through merges.
In any case it’s going to be a choice between several bad options.
Luckily Blizzard does have experience of high initial player counts that rapidly decline “WoD” so they might have learned a thing or two about that.
They haven’t done so in my experience. It’s why I generally avoid leveling till 24 hours hvae passed and most of the playerbase is ahead of me.
Dynamic respawns will give certain classes an early advantage gold wise with trash farming. Sharding is the better option.
“Connected realms” is Blizzard’s version of realm merges.
I’m vehemently against this idea; connected realms ruined the community of the realm I was on that got hit with this. I have no doubt straightforward merges would do the same.
I’d rather just shard the first 10-12 levels.
They havent so far
There should not be dynamic respawning in Classic. Zero exceptions.
I’m firmly against sharding, and hope they do some sort of stress test to gauge what the servers can actually handle. The first few zones are where you meet people on your realm right away and start the community. I don’t want to run around with people with an * over their name that I’ll never see again, can’t guild with, and won’t be able to head off to the next zone with to tackle group quests. I’d rather take a few disconnects and lag over being sharded away from people on my realm. I want to populate my friends list right away, not after level 20.
The servers are the same as the ones they’re using on live, so they already know what the servers can handle.
As long as hey don’t alter the realm sizes I don’t really care. It was an important core part of the design of the game.
That is Cross-realm zones (CRZ), not sharding. Sharding simply limits the number of people you can see (though you can still interact with them in chat, party with them, etc.) in a zone. So, your ability to make friends, guilds, etc is unaffected.
With Sharding the server as a whole is going to have more mobs to kill. If Dynamic Respawns are restricted to the 1-10 experience I don’t understand how that will majorly impact the economy. Players who are level 14+ are not going to go back to the dynamic respawn zones with a whole bunch of competition for items which are already going to be market saturated, like linen cloth.
Kind of hard to know if a player is there with you or if that player would help you when they’re sharded. I would assume the shards would be filled with enough players to feel lively. I just want to see everyone as it used to be without phasing in and out.
I’d take sharding over dynamic spawns no doubt.
People who want dynamic spawns are just mainly private server people who plan on going to a grind a spot for insta spawns at the start to get ahead. Look, I can do that too but it isn’t right.
I rather have no sharding and no dynamic spawns over dynamic spawns.
I played on new servers like Hakkar when they released after the first batch. No dynamic spawns but a flood of people. However, we are looking at servers with an ocean of new people. I rather have a flood like the old days and sharding can do that.
Based on all the discussion I’ve read, the experience I’ve had with the Blizzard implemented dynamic respawns in earlier expansions (before sharding) and all the other problems with it, my conclusion is:
Dynamic respawns would create a far more inauthentic experience than high capacity shards would.
If you’re truly after an authentic launch experience there should be scarcity and population, but not so many people that all you see are mobs and people on every square inch.