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.
Don’t want things to get missed so I’m posting this here too, sorry for any confusion!
3 Likes
This has been a great night! At 31 years old, I felt 17 again. I love you all for putting this together for us!!! WoW is STILL the KING of MMORPGS!!!
3 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
Update concerning server 3.
Made it to L4, mainly from exploration XP going from gnome spawn to elf spawn.
- Starting areas were both low for a launch emulation.
- Did not see a soul outside of the starting zones.
- Tons of people griping on /1 about not enough mobs to tag, but few if any I saw taking the initiative to actually leave the spawn zones.
1 Like
I don’t think it’s a lack of initiative.
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.
Not a great first impression.
2 Likes
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”.
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The game wasn’t that crowded. There was a lot of people, but that is what makes the start of a game fun.
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In the second zone I would say it was more towards too crowded then towards too empty.
This was all between 7pm - 9pm server time on Classic realm 3 (PvP)
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 ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
1 Like
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
On server 15 in the Tauren area. Way too crowded and not enough to kill. But no technical problems, no lag or anything.
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.
Was on Realm 3, It was pretty dead. There was some competition, but not enough for us to warrant exploration leveling. It was actually a smooth leveling process and wasn’t difficult to get through. Not everyone was excelling, but if you knew what you were doing you could easily get ahead of the pack. Tbh after experiencing that, it was quite nice. I’d prefer the long ques and crashing server though.
1 Like
Unfortunately I only got home from work after the main stress test window was over, but I joined Realm 2 wich was low pop around 7PM. The starting zone was crowded and there were no mobs to kill.
But for a launch day experience it was not that bad, I would expect it to be very crowded at first.
Unfortunately I don’t have time to play further atm, but will tomorrow which will be in the middle of the night realm time with hopefully less crowds… ![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
Edit:
Undead start zone.
for a launch event it was disappointingly empty
5 Likes
Server 3 had severe lag problems. Undead starting zone: Far too many people standing around hoping for spawns. Key bindings and settings were not saved when server kicked people out for no reason. Grapchic settings went haywire randomly. Screen went really dark out of the blue, I exited client and opened launcher and it was still really dark? Like even without loading into the game. GTX 1080 16gb ram, i7 4700, This has been a hype deflator for sure.