Can Australians please get a beta test for Classic WoW?
Everyone knows once you ship servers down here, you must flip them upside down and glue them to an earth-attached object so it doesn’t fall into space.
This could greatly affect the performance of these servers.
I, a humble gamer, would gladly take the burden of testing these servers, alone.
Initial burst was very crowded, mob tagging was difficult. Wasn’t over the top for launch day experience though. 3 hours in it was much better and while still crowded, wasn’t too bad. 10 hours in, still plenty of people around but not crowded and plenty of mobs to go around.
This was on server 15.
Realm #12, 0200-0300
Numbers were moderate. Not at all crowded.
Second zone was considerably emptier.
I didn’t feel the issue, when I was doing the first night elf quest with friends, was overcrowding, it was horribly slow spawning of quest targets. It really shouldn’t take 15 minutes to tag 1 nightsaber. We spent over an hour just on the first quest. The boredom was worsened by the fact hunters could shoot mobs before my druid spell could cast, so I could only tag things that spawned at my feet.
You’ve lost 2 potential players already, as one of my friends and myself have better things to do than stand around forever hoping for a spawn to happen at our feet.
Other friend is determined to continue.
Wayyy too crowded. It was so crowded that it took me almost 2 hours to complete the very first quest. I just went around killing other things to level up. I was on Server 3 I believe.
Haven’t made it to the second zone just yet.
To preface we were on Realm 3.
Too crowded at first. There were no mobs for us to tag and we had to essentially camp mob spawn points in order to complete quests. It’s fun to see people around in the zone but extreme competition isn’t fun either. Even for a launch day, it would be nice to see layering technology used so that everyone has a smooth leveling experience. I think we were layered later on which helped us a lot, but we still found the mob respawn rate very slow.
We moved into Tirisfal glades after being layered. There were still many people around quest objectives which made it difficult to tag and kill mobs because of the competition. There were definitely people around which was nice to see, but it made progression difficult.
All of that being said, this is a launch day experience; I’d count us lucky if the servers are running smoothly on August 27th. Very excited to see how it’s all going to run down!
My 1st experience:
Rolled on server 15 PVP from the start of the test (before Omar showed up lol). Since I got on a lucky realm, was able to level to almost level 7 on a Dwarf Priest in 2 hours 10 minutes. So, 6/19/2019 3:00 PM MST to about 5:20 PM MST. Had to log off after that.
Dwarf/Gnome starting zone was crowded, but number of players visually appeared not as bad as I thought it would be. Completing most quests was almost impossible however. In the 1st 10-15 minutes zone went totally dead. No mobs whatsoever. It got a bit better around the time I left the starting zone, but completing quests was still hard according to the chat. Caves with mobs such as the one in the starting zone and the one by the Karanos had decent respawn rate, but still unable to keep up with demand (+25% increase in respawn rate would made it perfect for the caves). Mobs in the open world however had much slower respawn rates, so even grinding was hard and mobs were very scarce to find. In all 7 levels I prob finished only 4-6 quests requiring killing a specific mob. I also had a weird bug so that any boar killed around Karanos showed that it dropped loot, but upon looting of corpse, the window was empty for about 7-13 kills. Appear to self fixed after relog/moving to killing boar of lvl 8 closer to the frozen lake.
Once out of the start zone @ level 4 (since leveling up in the starting zone was nearly impossible), it was a bit better, but again, only through grinding and mostly in the cave by Karanos. Area around Karanos did not look overpopulated, but mobs were scarce. Those who progressed level faster had the advantage to kill mobs. By the time I logged out someone was level 11 or so.
There was a horrible interface stall around 1 hr into the test. Seemed that everyone on the server felt that. Only chat was responding. I was selling trash items to a vendor at that time and the process froze up. Server choked, but did not crashed, which was nice. Still, not sure if that sort of thing can be avoided on a launch date. That was probably the most annoying thing of all experience by the way.
Graphics wise I did see a layering/sliding effect crawling ahead of me, especially noticeable along the mountain edges. Mobs were appearing out of the blue on 1 or 2 occasions in the area to the left as you leave the Dwarf strating zone (snow leopard and boar) without the respawn animation @40-55 min into the stress test. Scarred the living spirit out of me since I was out of mana when that happened and the mob was 2 levels higher than me. Ugh, that was so frustrating not to be able to see that coming.
My 2nd experience:
Leveling as Druid in the Night Elf starting zone on Server 15 PVP from ~00:50 6/20/2019 till ~02:00 6/20/2019 MST
Got to level 5 and 3/4 into level 6 in 1 hr 6 minutes. Totally unfamiliar with the zone and most of the quests. No overpopulated, just right. Very nice experience. Was able to group up 1-2 times, mobs respawning nicely to keep up with the demand. Was able to complete quests which seemed interesting, skipped only 1-2 of them. Planning to resume my journey in Teldrassil sometime later before the stress test is over.
I played on realm 15 pvp server. For the most part it felt like a smooth launch only minor issues with mobs “resetting” during combat and another mob fading in and out right next to me. At the end of the day just before i logged off I was in RFC and fell into a lava pit. It did not kill me I was not taking damage. I believe this to be a bug.
In starting zones I had a lot of competition at certain points to tag quest mobs & 2nd zones were a bit crowded. However, I prefer it this way. I grouped with people and chatted for a while with complete strangers - even though I was already grouped with long-time friends. Amazing job Blizzard. (Realm 2)
I had about 5 different bugs to report and couldnt report them 3 evade bugs… 2 visual glitches.
Got home from work late so I chose 15, one of two available options. Undead starting zone was completely packed with people. Like many have said, getting tags on mobs was difficult so people grouped up. I focused on getting tags on things and essentially grinded for xp. I did complete most of the quests but it took a long time.
A few observations:
Latency was very good (~60ms) despite being on a PDT realm. I am in CDT.
I did get a few disconnects, however. Upon reconnecting the client did not remember any settings changes (no sticky targeting, instant quest text)
I thought it was fantastic. Logging in was smooth, game was smooth and looked great.
I didn’t have much time, but got to level 4 by exploring and doing FedEx quests . Cannot wait till August!
You missed the entire point of the stress test completely. There were only a couple servers up for a reason and it wasn’t for you to get a hands on demo…
i’m guessing you chose a low pop server. on the high pop server it as almost impossible to tag one mob
Was on realm server 12 it seemed pretty spot on the only thing I found missing from the whole vanilla feel was lack of que to login to the server
First 20min:
I was in realm 5 and there weren’t many people. Since I logged in right at 2pm, I could get ahead of the pack and was able to do everything according my plan. The server shutdown around 20 min mark. I think I’m ok to have a little bit more people for this server.
After the first 20min:
I joined realm 15 and it was very very crowded. I didn’t think I could even get up to level 2. So decided to grind in spider cave as level 1 without a quest. Once I managed to get up to level 2, I went out of starting zone and started to kill level 5 mobs. This was very tough and painful and I died a lot. However, as I level up to 5, I could clearly feel that I am getting stronger and that felt good. Around level 6, I grouped up with other level 2 and level 3 players who also evacuated from the starting zone. And, we started to grind high level mobs to get her. We had some nice chat and I enjoyed that.
All in all, although I wasn’t happy that I had to give up many quests, I think the experience was within the range of something that I can accept assuming that this is one time experiencing at the opening only.
I started just before 8:00pm EST on realm 15.
Deathknell seemed over-saturated, but after escaping it, I did not have too much issue finding mobs and nodes for questing and leveling herbalism.
After Tirisfal I went to the Barrens, which was also fine.
The fact that they opened so many servers at the start and then cut them down to just a few is a bit concerning; if there are so many people wanting to play Classic, then you would think there would be plenty to go around all servers, enough to give an honest stress test. The fact that there apparently werent, and they had to shut down a bunch and confine everyone to a couple…that is vaguely concerning.
Ive been playing for about 8 hours and had no trouble at all levelling. Plenty of mobs, no real difficulty achieving them.
Server 15- Started play at ~9 PM EST. Coldridge Valley was quite crowded, spawn rates seemed very low for the density of players there. The majority of people were fighting for boar/trogg spawns. I found it better to just roam around the zone, and kill whatever mobs were available. Population stayed high into the night, with certain quests that were difficult to complete in Dun Morogh because of the high competition for certain mob types (ice claw bears & snow leopards). Was able to complete them with a friend after a good period of roaming around the zone. Made it to Loch Modan ~2 AM EST, and encountered basically no one. Zone was pretty empty and spawn rates were fine there.
As a side note: encountered a weird issue with (I’m assuming) layering. Going from the first guard tower in Loch Modan to the trogg section directly south of Thelsamar, there’s supposed to be a bunch of hovels with Troggs and Scouts. At first glance, the area was completely empty, devoid of corpses and no enemies in sight. I spied an ore node on my minimap, further south, closer to the caves where the Seers are located. After getting the node and coming back, the entire first area with Troggs and Scouts were alive and there. I didn’t join or leave any groups, and didn’t log out of the game. But perhaps I swapped Layers?
Overall everything felt pretty smooth, and this is what I’d expect from a launch day in the starter zones.
Was able to get into game long enough to create character. Had to restart but have not been able to get back in yet. Its 425 am PST so i imagine it should be a slower time, however i keep getting login server full messages. I get to position 1 in queue then get disconnected. I keep trying, but the wait time is getting longer and longer, and I always wind up getting dc’d before getting in.
#edit Server 12