After trying a couple toons I decided to make a human female priest just like me in retail.
the start zones are crowded on high pop but seem to not have any lag.
Things play slower, much slower, but once I have shadow word pain instant cast I can tag things better.
Coming to the conclusion that waiting a couple weeks for the initial rush to get ahead of me may be a good plan, but I know I"ll just deal with it because it’s fun as is.
One thing is everyone will let a priest into a group, and since I can mix and match abilities from my spell book at low levels I just adapt what I have to work with small groups
Main thing I"m thankful for is I can set groups to to use raid frames and that once I set it up makes healing pretty easy
PW fortitude is welcome to all I cast it on and I get TYVM a lot
Over all I’m thinking that investing in some wine and accepting a much slower pace and just doing what I can as I can is the way to do it while enjoying the folk I’m meeting.
Was it too crowded, even for a launch day experience?
It is crowded, but I believe it should be this way for a launch day experience. Easily 10 people fighting per mob in Coldridge Valley.
Did it feel too empty or too crowded after you moved to the second zone?
Launch day should feel crowded because I believe it is an endurance test. The strongest willed and most patient move ahead. I loved it!!
Everything seemed pretty well except people disappearing right before my eyes over and over again. That is sharding, not layering. I started on realm 15 and it was horrible and overpopulated, as I expected it to be because of streamers. I managed to get the first 2 quests done in one hour… Yes. Two quests, one hour. I switched to realm 3 after it was impossible to play on 15 and had a much better experience. Did 1-6 in about 45 minutes… wasn’t nearly as bad.
Another thing that seemed off was looting. Some mobs I was able to loot lightning fast speed and other mobs it felt delayed. I’m assuming that’s batching. I’m not sure why it’s applied to looting, but it was pretty annoying. Will give more feedback later.
Overcrowded , not able to complete almost any quests even in a group. Mobs have slow respawn rate for the amount of people present. During character creation, the server will not recognize my second character.
I’m still a firm believer dynamic spawns should be enabled in the first two zones of every race. Less layering would be required. I’d VERY much have dynamic respawns than layering. Layering/sharding is so so bad for vanilla. It doesn’t belong in the game.
Down to two servers when playing around peak hours ~7pm-9pm EST. Population too high for enjoyment in starting areas creating a very large bottleneck. In human starting area, kobold and wolf quests took upwards of 30 minutes, and then the Defias Thug quests took over an hour due to the drop rates.
It is a drastically different experience when the populations thin out over time, but for launch, it needs to provide a relatively enjoyable experience for the time we contribute to the game. I felt I’ve read in the past that developers sought to achieve an experience that was ~12 minutes per quest? Reduce the populations to achieve that target.
Suggestions include: Further reduce player populations (shard the starting areas), or dynamically increase starting area spawns in response to the amount of players nearby. Populations will balance once the initial surge has passed, but you owe a quality “Blizzard” experience by matching day 1 with what players will experience day 90 when creating a new character.
Didn’t log in until 2:30, on test realm 3. Both character creation and log-in were smooth. Undead start zone was crowded for the first quest (kill 16 zombies), but not bad after that part.
I didn’t complete quests, but just killed stuff. Outside the start area wasn’t crowded. Only played for an hour and a half
Almost forgot: after about half an hour I started getting severe loot lag and lag while trying to sell stuff.
I made a test Gnome, everything was dead and there were like 150 people there. I left and went to Kharanos, everything was dead, all of the bears, wolves, snow leopards. The only things I could find to kill were the wendigos in the cave, and they resisted my spells 9/10 so I died… a lot because they were level 7 and there were no level 1-5 mobs alive, anywhere and thus was unable to complete quests and even level. There were just too many people compared with mobs. Literally the entire of Dun Morogh was empty of mobs…and critters.
The undead zone was the worst. 16 zombies, 150ish people. There seemed to be a problem with Rattlecage Skeleton spawns as someone else mentioned, there just were so few of them to begin with and the quest needed a fair amount.
Server 3, tried all zones from 2pm PDT to 5pm PDT, first 20-30 mins on the RP server, which was great. The PVP servers were an awful experience. No gameplay whatsoever, just a walking simulator.
Stack Right Bars Vertically - I do not recall that being an option.
Nameplate Motion Type: Spreading Nameplates - I do not see that option.
I can’t take this stress test seriously, when all we do is run around like idiots waiting for respawns. Just left a stack of 25 players all waiting for a scorpion to respawn.
Not able to give much feed back, we seem to be able to jump up and down and run around all over the place, but the game won’t provide the mobs we need to do anything to test thing like VENDORS and LAG issues etc.
Nice to see it appear to be working, a real shame there is nothing to do.
I spent an HOUR doing my fair share of jumping up and down and jumping off things and basically acting silly, waiting on the game to give us something to do, beside watch everyone else exactly the same thing. No mobs to be found anywhere, but lots of dead carcasses …
I did not have time to log on until 9Pm Eastern time, so my feedback is late but I hope it is still useful. I started a gnome rogue on realm 15.
What worked:
Picking up quests
Loading in
Talking to and selling/buying from vendors
Eating and drinking
What did not work:
Killing things. In 15 minutes I killed 1 wolf and otherwise every single spawn was camped.
The game was not smooth. It was laggy the whole time. I am not sure if that is on my machine or in the game. I am on a Mac, but turning everything down did nothing to help the lag.
I hope this test and our feedback is helpful. I hope launch day is better than this. Thanks for the chance to play.
9:15 pm us cst realm 15
Far, far too crowded. Not a single mob alive on the entire map. Couldn’t complete quests, couldn’t level up, couldn’t escape the zone
Did it feel too empty or too crowded after you moved to the second zone?
I guess I will let you know at launch if I can ever make it there.
Just left the starting Gnome/Dwarf zone. Didn’t run into any bugs and I believe the three disconnects were all done on purpose. I did pick PVP 15 server which seemed to be the most highly loaded to actually stress it and other then the first quest it wasn’t too bad. But I could see people getting discouraged just trying to complete the first quest by spending 30 minutes trying to get enough wolves killed (also I thought the quest item was a 100% drop but it seemed to change for the later kills). Did have to ignore one player who was complaining rudely about that the wolfs spawning in one area were “his”.
Just wanted to add that overall tonight felt better and smoother than the previous 2 stress tests. I was able to log in, access realm list, and create a 2 characters on 2 different realms with no problem right at the start. I had 5-6 dcs over the roughly 4 1/2 hours I played but was able to get right back in all but two of the times - was on within 5 minutes for one and the other time I decided to get something to eat and it was fine when I returned. I’ll do more leveling tomorrow
Started on server 3 and man was it crowded. Spawns took forever, severe lag, got booted from server while playing, came back and none of the settings or keybinds had saved so had to redo them. Went to graphics settings didnt click anything then my screen went dark. I exited the program and booted the launcher, and even before loading into the game the launcher was all dark. Something weird happened in the graphics settings. Very poor experience so far
Realm 15 - it took me 4 hours to get through the starting zone. I was playing between 6-10 pm EDT. It was crowded and laggy, with people popping in and out at times. (and a couple dc’s) So far it seems better now that I have moved on to the next area.
![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")