Enjoying the leveling, Enjoying the game as a whole. The community is helpful when asking for help and the quests can get difficult as there are players always trying to get them done. Getting into groups helps a lot.
Server 15
It was super crowded but I was able to get all of Northshire completed and level 6 within an hour or so, which is perfectly fine with me
I utilized groups to get tags on slay quests and went solo for drop quests.
Realm 15, was in Mulgore which is always less crowded but Durotar was very crowded.
I was at a Gnoll Camp, had just cleared it, we got Mass Disconnected and upon relogging the gnoll camp had a few shards worth of gnolls.
The camp normally has about 7-9 mobs, but in this case there was around 20-30 in one spot.
I was at the farm where you kill the mobs… ugh cant think of the names right now… but they have same character skin as Maggot Eye, in trisfal glades. Anyway it was around that field. There was a mob on the other side of two water towers. This mob got stuck inside one of the towers.
There was murlocs on the beach not far from there … where suddenly it started evading and went back to its spawn spot. Also one murloc decided to levitate about 75% up to the top of a tall rock on the beach.
I have various other bugs that were here and there.
Overall my impression is it works. Dont change it… layering is bad i know but a early neccessity… hated… hated… people complaining about spawn rates and how hard it was
This is from a gamer that use to play ff11 when it launched and sat with a group of friends for 16 hours to get 3 levels off of a sea turtle.
Off-peak-hours, like in the morning around 5am PST, the starting areas were manageable and felt more appropriate than 12 hours prior during the peak time bottleneck. Felt better when I saw populations of around 5-10 people around a spawn/quest area, rather than 50 or more. Enough people to group for harder content (like the Hogger/gnoll area), but not so much that no one can seem to get a tag on a mob.
I think the goal is to make the game feel alive, but not a huge crowd of players camping and contesting each other over a single spawn point during peak population hours, where no one can seem to get a tag on anything and a single quest can take upwards of 1-2 hours to complete.
At the time i logged in, around 3pm pst the server I wound up on was very crowded. I did the human starting area. There were so many people that even if grouped you could not complete quests. I wound up running thru Goldshire to Stormwind for kicks. Elwynn was similarly packed. Stormwind less so.
So for me it was more crowded than even a regular launch day. The second zone was slightly less crowded, but still a zoo.
Layer/Sharding whatever you want to call it goes against everything Classic is about. Stop trying to add controls. It does nothing but divide the community on the forums and in game. Ya bottlenecks are rough, but they are part of the experience and FAR better than the crap they turned out beloved world into!
BLIZZARD: Throw out a bunch of serves with no Sharding or layering and set pop limits and a login que. The players will divide themselves. Then after a weak or the initial pop drop but DEFINITELY before they develope a dynamic community, merge the low pop servers and then get the hell out of the way. From that point on, leave us alone and don’t touch anything! We want nothing more to do with your poisonous design philosophies!
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I’d argue that you should feel compelled to group up, even in very low level zones, even if it’s due to being too crowded.
I met a lot of people back in the vanilla days from adding good peeps to my friends list early on. Sure, a ton of people never logged on that toon again, but the ones that did were there around the same level and better when they seem to play at the same time. After that sort of filtering, around quest gaps having dungeon buddies was handy.
But, waiting 15 minutes for a hit on a mob is too much if that’s what’s really going on here.
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I was on Realm 5, Tauren starting zone first, and it felt find. It didn’t feel like a launch day event but I was seeing 3-4 people everywhere I went. When the Omar snap happened I went to Realm 15, still Tauren, and it was frustrating. Even in a full 5 man party we were taking 45 min+ just to get the quillboar quest done. I feel the balance is in the middle of my 2 experiences.
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Maybe people have just gotten too used to linear questing. You don’t have to complete the starter zone to move on (or at all really).
Westfall feels pretty dead in the opening areas right now. Like, most of the mobs are dead, but I’m not seeing many people around.
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In this gaming household, the experience is represented by two separate yet equally important players. The paladin who was home during the test window and the warrior who has a forum presence. These are their stories.
6/20/19 2:34 p.m. PST: Two realms available, both PvP. Other realms listed offline. Player 1 opts to wait.
3:00 p.m. PST: Still two PvP realms, Player 1 rolls on PvP 3 as a dwarf paladin. Play is laggy, and there are few mobs to be found among the corpses. Grouping necessary to make any progress at all. Player 1 describes this as acceptable for launch day. Plays about an hour.
5:56 p.m. PST: No trouble logging back in. Only the available servers show in the list. Player 1 Trams to Stormwind and attempts Goldshire quests. Kobolds and candles are scarce in Fargodeep, even for a group of 5. 1 hour, 2 candles, 1 dust. (ed: bonus points from P1 for in-game help markers about how to work the interface)
9:00 p.m. PST: Player 2 creates dwarf warrior on PvP 3. P1 returns to Anvilmar. Zone population seems moderate, quest mobs galore at this point. If you stop to look around the cave and get your bearings, a new mob might spawn and gnaw on your ankle. The way out fills in behind you.
Note: P1 and P2 zoned into different layers, making it necessary to know each other’s names and group up blind. New group member appeared smoothly.
6/20/19 10:36 a.m. PST: P1 and P2 log in about a minute apart, and we appear in different layers. Log out, log in as close to simultaneously as we could manage, different layers. Group again before logging out.
(ed: For launch, it might be worth it to add a sticky or even resource file based on the “not a bug” list and what to expect from experiences with layering, to cut down on player wear.)
The melee leeway mechanic is disgraceful and needs to be changed please, a Tauren shouldn’t be able to hit someone who is too far to be hit by their own Warstomp… (larger than 8 yards melee range)
After uninstalling Classic, deleting the folder it left behind and installing it again, I was able to launch and play the game. I started on realm 2, made a human warrior… uhhg /who even making a group to get mobs for quests was still way too many people and not enough mobs.
after about an hour, I made a Night Elf Druid, and again, same experience.
This reminded me that yup, what a gong show. It’s even worse now though as the majority of seasoned players are solo players that have no interest in community or grouping ![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
I chose Realm 15 (pvp) just before 4:00 (2:00 pm PST) and created my character, a NE druid, then waited until it was possible to log in. (I like that I could do the character creation even before the server was available.) Upon login a few minutes later, I started the leveling process and made it to about level 2, iirc, before the servers were imploded a couple of times. I would describe the NE starting area as busy at this point, with competition for mobs, but still doable, especially when grouping up.
After the servers were blown up, general talk on the forums and in game suggested that the original 15 servers had been condensed to just a few. This was when it got frustrating. Everything in the starting area was consistently dead. Tagging mobs became a game of who happened to be lucky enough to be close to the mob so they could tag it instantly. I kept myself from going crazy by killing critters to raise my Staves level, buffing everyone I could find with MotW, and helping others kill their mobs faster and healing them for fun. The spider quests were particularly painful. At level 5, maybe a couple hours into testing, I gave up on the starter-zone quests and moved out to Dolanaar and Teldrassil in general. At least there were mobs to kill out there, but competition was still pretty stiff.
I logged in this morning at about 8:00 PDT, and things were better. I could actually find mobs to kill without much difficulty. I even went back to the starter zone and finished my quests there. I saw several people running around, and there was a bit of competition for mobs, but nothing terrible.
Up until now, I have been skeptical about layering and dynamic respawns as options in Classic to avoid crowding problems. After this experience, I think they are going to be a necessity in the starter areas at launch. I would still prefer not to see that sort of thing implemented in open world beyond the first days/weeks, but I can see why it’s being utilized for that initial period.
Good luck, Blizzard. I hope this helps and that you find a good balance for launch day, at least as good as can be hoped for, because the sheer numbers of people logging in just might overwhelm any feasible solution for handling them!
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I disagree that the servers were way too crowded. Back in the day when when Blizzard was adding servers to accommodate the subscription growth we were on top of one another in the starting areas up until around the time we leveled enough to start questing in Stranglethorn Vale. I think it’s important to have a lot of players in the starting zones because it gives us the opportunity to start interacting right away. One of the single biggest differences between then and now was the sense of community. When we saw a lot of other players we felt like we were a part of something. We felt like instead of choosing Halo, which was the competitor at the time, we made the right decision because seeing all of the other players validated our need to know that it was a popular game.
The difference, and why I think it seemed too crowded is because the spawn rate needs to be tuned. It took some of us 4 to 5 hours just to complete one quest. Many people were leveling by going outside of the intended quest areas and killing mobs.
One thing I noticed about Goldshire is that the class trainers behind the blacksmith hut are missing. I don’t know if it was intended or not but there were other things that I can’t put my finger on… it wasn’t classic. The characters seemed over tuned and the npc’s seemed under tuned, not so much the starting areas but in Elwin Forest and Westfall
edit: I didn’t start playing Vanilla on this patch. I started a little later, maybe a month or two before BC dropped so maybe the NPC’s behind the blacksmith hut in Goldshire were added later?
Also, coming out of the Elf area there’s a small bridge that is about 2/3’s of the way to Darnassus. I don’t remember the colors being so vibrant. I noticed vibrant colors in quite a few areas but I also saw a video on Youtube where the Dev was explaining why there may be different colors and shades so I get it.
The lamps in Stormwind seemed different as well. There’s a little trick spot to the right of the walkway leading out to the mage area that we used to jump through. I don’t remember there being the black (I can’t remember the term for elaborate decoration) on the lanterns and sconces but again, I did not start playing on this specific patch so maybe there were changes made at a later date.
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Biggest issue was severe lag at quest turn in/pick up, severe lag during looting of corpses, and severe lag when selling to vendors. By severe lag I mean I would interact, nothing would happen for several minutes in some cases. I could be several yards away from the last corpse whose looting was still pending and have it finally transfer loot while in combat. Same with vending and quest turn in. Other than that, spawn rates seemed very much as I remember them and found myself grouping with anyone working the same spawn nodes.
Realm 15 seemed pretty crowded in the gnome/ dwarf starting areas. There was a lot of competition for the kill quests. I would often see 6+ mage fireballs casted on a wolf that just spawned a few seconds ago. The starting zone took a lot longer to finish due to the overcrowding.
There was also server instability. I experienced multiple random crashes/disconnects and had to re-enter macros, keybindings and interface settings before I finally ended up saving them by logging out after the third crash.
Copying the keybind and macro folders from live to classic doesn’t work which needs to be looked at.
Went back to server 12 this morning - played for about 3 hours 2 am pdt to about 5 am pdt.
I also played for a few hours after that. Both times I encounterd weird all of a sudden lots of people and all of a sudden no people/no mobs issues.
The human area is still bad to level up in but not impossible. Couldn’t finish the kobald gold dust/candles quest even after going back to the area 6 times - constantly about 10 plus people trying to do that quest and grouping up doesn’t really help because it is a collection quest.
The night elf area after the starting area didn’t have many people there.
Another thing I noticed. The second stress test you were actually able to sell stuff on the AH, not really sure why but this time there is very little on the AH and nothing is selling. Is the server population that much lower on server 12 than it was on the second stress test ?
Realm 12
10:30 to Noon PST
Starting zone at 10:30 was perfect as far as spawn rates go. It was unusual in that Mobs seemed to spawn in waves, and people often appeared in waves. Not sure if that was natural or layer-shifting.
Once out of the Startiong zone the same looting bug happened over and over on the boars as I made my way to Kharanos.
On mobs and layers: Ice claw bears are non-existant, and the one I did see was trying to climb a tree. No doubt it knew it was an endangered species cue to it’s abnormally long respawn timer. Snow Leopard behind karanos was again running from Narnia to who-knows-where. Top Speed. Zooming in and out of my layer with its ninja snow-cat Fu.
The complete lack of bag drops in the Dwarven/Gnomish zones was still happening. Just like the last two stress tests. Switching to play in the human zone nabbed me enough bags to make the run worthwhile. Possible connection to the loot-table error I keep getting with all the boars.
Was pretty smooth to level 7 when I logged at noon PST, other than the usual vanilla-authentic bugs.
Only thing interface-wise that was off was even if you purposefully tracked quests, they’d untrack if you didn’t achieve an objective in a set amount of time.
I was getting that too but I didn’t think it was related to time, I thought it was more related to opening maps or bags,etc.