Didn’t you have an idea prior to monday as to what was considered too many on a realm? That algorithm should not had a need for adjustment (twice?) after the pops were already out of control.
I’d love to trust that you folks have a plan, but moves like this do not exactly instill confidence.
might aswell ask for his credit card information
You realize there were low pvp servers even yesterday. Fairbanks was still low pop. It wasn’t until later it finally hit medium. Why would they add more servers when there are currently low pop servers for both pvp and pve?
How is it there fault that everyone acts like sheep and all pile into 1 or two servers?
Trust me, they understand, and have sophisticated forecasting to predict those numbers and accommodate them. At least better than your 10 * (2 or 3) = 90.
Here’s the thing: the pops did not suddenly jump, but rather the algorithm that the blue speaks of lowered the label/indicators across the board, so it appeared there were now more players on all of the realms.
It is their fault because upon 3PM monday, “low, medium, high and full” meant differently than they do now. They should have had a target maximum pop per server before monday 3PM, not adjust it after the fact multiple times as they have done (the “algorithm”)
Cool thanks blizzard. Looking forward to the launch day.
Have they said anything about paid character transfers on classic? I would be all for rolling on a low pop server until the queues die down then transferring back to the server my friends and I decided on.
It will be the 26th in the US and the 27th in Europe
Wasn’t layering supposed to fix this?
The argument he has makes no sense. On the one hand he argues people don’t want to play on lower pop servers. On the other he thinks more servers should be added.
More servers means more lower pop servers. A lot of players will still flock the the absolute most popular 1-2 servers as anything less seems like settling for something less than ideal.
BE REALISTIC – Even a medium pop server is going to have 5x the population maximum at one time of an original WoW server. That is over 15k-17.5k individuals Even if 80% of the players quit in the first year and NO ONE joins that is still ~3k-3500 players. Which was the absolute maximum an original wow server held at one time.
Anyone going for world firsts anything… it aint going to happen on the Full servers. Not with weeks of Que, and raid members missing trapped in que from DC or not logging in hours in advance. Raid times are pretty standard for most guilds. Which means que’s during raiding hours, and leading up to them. You can be the best guild in the world. It won’t matter if you can’t login to raid.
Did you play the stress test? It was packed, and there was TONS of layers. The servers where also medium pop 90% of the time. That should give you some idea of how crazy it is to bandwagon on the most popular servers.
Even if Blizzard had 4 more servers at reservation day everybody would have still flocked to the big 3 servers, It makes no difference.
There is nothing wrong with criticizing Blizzard’s actions. But what I find frustrating is when people seem to think that the right thing to do is obvious, clear, and easy. It’s not.
Blizzard is trying to accomplish the following things:
If people would think about this for just a minute, they’d realize that this is a hard problem to solve, and to do it perfectly requires being able to see the future. All solutions involved trade-offs.
So Blizzard invented a whole new technology, and is pairing that with their best efforts at predicting, to try to maximize their ability to accomplish the above bullet points as best they can.
They may not succeed. Heck, if Classic falloff rate is extremely high or low, compared to what they predict, then layering may fail badly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re stupid, incompetent, or greedy.
One thing I think they could have done is introduce user-selectable last names, which reduces (but not eliminate!) the pain of transferring or even server merges, and allows people to get the names they want.
I have 2 Horde accounts, both on Fairbanks. I’ll also be looking for a guild, but my goals are more casual leveling, PvP, and less hardcore raiding than they used to be.
Does your guild have similar goals?
Would be nice to jump in with like-minded people. I have been waiting for Classic for years. I had to jump ship with MoP, and haven’t come back until now.
Blizzard played it too safe on the number of realms. Imagine how many people haven’t subbed yet or declared their intentions at all. These servers are gonna get nuked.
You sir, have just won the internet!
You are missing the point. On monday, pops that said low now show medium, those that were medium are now showing as high, and those that were high are only NOW showing as full. I am saying they should have known prior to monday what numbers they considered to be “full”, rather than adjusting the algorithm over the course of a couple days after the damage was already done. They saw that 2 servers were getting pounded, they had to know that it would lead to the need of an additional realm, which they should have done on monday, not 2 days after the fact.
It was shoddy any way you look at it.
This is all not even considering that part of the problem was players attempting to distance themselves from a problem that blizzard courted: streamers.
Alright, time to delete my Whitemane toon then. Stalagg here we come (time zone doesn’t matter on my end). Also probs gonna wait on trying to join a guild until all servers are announced, probably actually wait 'til I play.
Hi, Bornakk, is there any way you can offer some statistics as to the amount of characters per realm?
This stuff is so funny. I’m so amped man.
I find it hilarious that people are actually managing to be upset. Like genuinely raging mad because the servers are going to be bustling with people.
I honestly couldn’t care less, at some point its time to enjoy the good fortune. Cant wait for launch.
I have never been for layering and have been very outspoken against it from the beginning pretty much. I was hopeful at first, until the more I experienced it in the stress tests.
You all misinterpreted less servers plus layers for population control incorrectly. I was pretty certain there would still be queues, which was obvious from the stress tests as well. Layering is what they are using so there aren’t tons of people in an area at launch making it hard to complete quests. They don’t want overpopulation to scare off the tourists. But hey, I suppose as the years has went on mmo’s just don’t have the same meaning. Got to make that easier! I mean, let’s not dare have to work together or see others in an mmo. Anyways, that’s one reason.
Their other reasoning for it is to avoid dead realms later on down the road, so they say.
So I just find in interesting that for all these months, many people have argued for layering because they didn’t want queues and thought layering would cause queues to be not be there. Nah, just not true.
See, I don’t mind queues. As I said in another post, back in Vanilla I would just attempt to log in 30 minutes to an hour before I could actually play. If I was just getting home, I would immediately log in and would be in the queue while I was getting a few things done after getting home. It sure wasn’t the end of the world and I played on Illidan for a time where I would be in a 45 minute to hour long queue most nights. Did it suck? A bit of course, but once I started logging in before I could actually even play, it just didn’t even matter.
But, here we are with layering, and queues, and people phasing in and out, exploits happening, layer hopping, people not being able to see people on their own realm unless they invite them to a party, people getting layered while in a party and almost dying because their party phases out and all that good stuff to come. I would much rather layering was nonexistent and I would happily play on my realm and log in early while it’s in queue. Isn’t layering awesome! But hey, let’s hope it actually gets removed in a few weeks like promised.
And hmm, I wonder what Blizzard will do later on years down the road when there are some inevitable dead realms? I mean, part of their reasoning for layering is for that to not happen. Let’s be real here, no matter how much of a success this game becomes, there will still be some dead realms in the end years from now.