at 2:00 PST I created a Gnome character on server 13. It was low pop at first and easily killed the wolves and had only slight competition for the Trogs. had to AFK for a few minutes and when I resumed and started on the boars there were more people in the zone and competition for the boars was about right for fun but still felt like grouping would help. I expect launch day to be busier than this and actually several of us commented that it was nice but unlikely to be this way on launch day maybe on day 2-3 and beyond but not launch day. then the server got shutdown.
a bit later after checking to see if server 13 would come back it looked like just the 2 servers were going to be up so I made a new character on server 15. what a big difference dozens of people fighting over the wolves, I mean like 45 minutes for that quest overpopulated even grouping up (i.e. no shared loot ya know) unless you grouped with a hunter then it was easier as they had instant tags from range. An hour to get my imp (4 dropped items) due to competition from everyone in the troll cave and low number of novices to kill and everyone killing them along with the regular trolls.
Once out into Dun Morogh it was still bad. not a single live boar spotted on the way to Kahranos. dropped off the quests and picked up the next batch of quests. in town and steelgrill’s. headed down to do the ammo quest and Windegos. I would estimate 40-50 players trying to kill windegos, this was horrible even grouped up.
had to log shortly after eventually completing those 2 quests ~4:45 PST.
So from what I saw playing as a hunter you could have a smooth time insta-tagging and pretty much have a good run through the starter zone quests with only slight delays on respawns/the one guy at the back of the cave.
From the perspective of a non hunter it sucked if hunters were around and slow but doable if no hunter near by.
for launch day - this was about what I would expect, maybe a bit overpopulated I would like to see maybe 60-75% of the numbers in the starter area especially.
grouping up is normal especially for kill quests but even grouped up for every quest it took so long and was not FUN. When we had a hunter in the group then it was okay, still a bit slow with respawn times and lack of mobs but okay simply due to hunter tagging mobs that spawned. Any group with no hunter had a tough time.
Am I salty about hunters being the only ones in the starter area and into the second zone that could insta-tag at range? yeah I guess I am. Warrior charge is close but hunters have a HUGE advantage in the first 2 zones when it’s crowded.
On layering since it seems we are destined to have it at launch, is to make the starter areas smooth at launch. okay whatever settings the had on realm 13 from 2:00 to shutdown were fine, does that mean 50 or 100 or 500 layers on the server who cares. The idea of layering was to improve the game-play experience so tune it to a point where it’s fun but grouping up for some quests makes sense. don’t tune it to where it takes 45 minutes to do each quest even in a group.
I did log back in later in the evening around 8:00 pst and it was better, ice bears and snow leopards were the exception as usual but fine. still grouped up for discombobulation and frostmane hold but could solo some as well. there were plenty of folks doing quests and running around reminded me of vanilla (post launch problems)