Server 3 PvP for the horde!!!
For a launch day(logged in right as the servers went up) it didn’t feel that bad. As someone who’s been around for launch day events I knew the first quest would be next to impossible to complete so I just moved to the next area, found a group and just smashed out the first couple levels. It was great!
After that it got a little frustrating, we tried to world PvP late yesterday (20th) and due to a lack of alliance in goldshire (who were PvP flagged) it eventually faded. Was fun though! I have a picture of my troll in the goldshire inn!
The Human starting areas seems to be the worst. It could be more popular the zone might not support as many players or both.
Server 3 - Horde - 7:14 server time
Brill feels empty. /who says only 11 players in Trisfal Glades. /who says 30 players in Undercity.
I think everybody has rushed to 15…
Oh, i’ve started playing yesterday and Deathknelll was very crowded… like 30m to kill all reattlecage skeleton… but was fine!
Realm 2
Played later on, Wednesday(9:30PM~1AM EST/EDT)
Choose rogue, partner choose hunter, both Night elves
Area was populated, not over populated, but there was a wait on spawns. I felt it wasn’t that bad in all honesty. Waiting for mobs was normal in Vanilla so I feel it’s right.
Regarding the layering, if it was there, I didn’t notice. Both times we partied up, the surrounding players didn’t “phase” out like I’ve seen in beta videos.
I felt a little overpowered as I was able to solo mobs without much issue. With partner we were able to get through the starting area with a death to our name(minus a fall from the top of that tree for the 1 quest).
All in all it felt very much like vanilla, and even my partner who was hesitant is definitely more open to Classic now that they’ve played.
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Realm 15 was very crowded in Durotar.
As a veteran of many launches I knew how to handle it and had no trouble progressing though.
Skipped some of the big bottleneck quests and got to the second zones a little early. So they weren’t too crowded initially. They did eventually become crowded but only in specific locations like the Troll islands or the Kul Tiran area. Everywhere else was busy but not really an issue.
I found it was pretty easy to find grinding spots or quests that didn’t bottleneck quite as hard so as to bypass the masses.
Even though it was crowded, “too crowded” isn’t the description I’d use though. Sure some quests became troublesome but there was no lag on my end and everything was smooth. I had no problem leveling either, it just took some extra time.
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Chose to test on Realm 12 starting a little after 5 PM EDT, Human Start (Warlock).
Was it too crowded, even for a launch day experience?
Felt like it was approaching too crowded, in my opinion, especially as a casting class. I ended up finding a spot where I mob I needed would respawn with regularity and then waiting until that specific one did so that I could tag it with a quick melee strike, then actually using my spells to take care of it. Otherwise, I feel like someone would have tagged it just ahead of me with a different approach. This took about 20 minutes to complete.
For the Kobold Workers quest (second in the chain, I was able to find a group of 5 willing to share kills, which noticeably reduced the time for that set of 10.
The next set of Kobolds in the cave I ended up using a similar technique as I did for the first group, and it took a similar amount of time.
For the Wolves quests, it depended on if I was on the North or South side of the Abbey - most players were where the Kobolds were, less around the other side, and I was able to find more open spawns there more frequently.
Taking on the Defias in the area was similar to the Wolves, and didn’t feel overly crowded…
The second area felt noticeably less crowded, except where the Kobolds were at Fargodeep mine, where it ended up being much like the first couple Kobold areas - mostly players and quickly tagged Kobold spawns.
It definitely did not feel too empty at any point.
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I played today, early in the morning on Classic Realm 3 (PVP) in the Barrens at last. I had played the day prior but hadn’t done the first of many giant loops through the zone. So starting at approximately 0630 Mountain Daylight Time up until 0815 or so, I began the usual bout of quests on my druid, killing some raptors and zhevra down to finding Mankrik’s wife yet again, looping back up to Ratchet, then on north for the quillboar, Chen’s keg, and eventually on to Dreadmist Peak for my druid quest, before dropping back down to the Crossroads.
During this time, mob spawns were very good, required the usual pulling and some finesse, and the typical mixture of shifting and healing expected of a druid. So no complaints there at all, plenty of targets for quests and high density as expected. The sole issue noted, both being early morning and on a work day, was that I saw a total of five players the entire time, almost all of them in the Crossroads except for one just running that way. Again, while I understand this to be just a stress test, not actual launch day, a work day, and in the morning, this felt fairly low. I imagine whatever layering was going on wasn’t really needed at this point but that’s hard to gauge I imagine.
Either way, the world felt a bit empty as consequence, but I would say that if layers were merged based on this type of outcome some time outside the starting zones, this probably would stop being an issue.
After the first hard reset where you brought done all realms except 15 and 3, the r15 orc staring zone was a OK. Maybe a little laggy but decent. The mob density and respawn timers were f?!#ing horrendous. I logged over to r3 dwarf starting zone, which had much better mob mechanics and no lag.
The starting areas absolutely suck. I dont remember old Vanilla that bad. I figure “hey get a group” but there are 10 groups running around trying to do the same damn quest.
Just saying ![:smiley:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
sorry Thurs at 6 CST, 9 CST. Server 15 and then normal 2
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My husband and I played at 5:30PM right after the servers went live, on server #3.
We started in the Dwarf/Gnome starting area. We found that it wasn’t too crowded (we still had a chance to tag a mob every now and again), and it was what we expected going in. We did sit and wait on specific spawns for the very first wolf quest, but again we expected that. After the wolf meat quest, we had very little issue getting our own mobs as the other players seem to have fanned out.
When we moved out of the start area, we did notice the severe drop in players around us. We figured it was simply the other players taking longer to get out of the start area.
We got to the inn of Kharanos and, sadly, logged out there. My husband was starting to get attached to his character so he had to stop playing. He said he didn’t want to actually get attached to a character that was going to be deleted, and we’d played enough of the stress test time that we felt we contributed enough.
I played on Realm 3 and I thought it was good(Teldrassil->Westfall). It wasn’t as hectic as the first stress test, and I was able to get quests done decently, and still find groups for certain quests. It was a good balance of players. However, when I went to Darkshore it did seem a bit empty, but I wasn’t planning on leveling there anyway during this test, but when I went to Westfall, there was a passable amount of people(enough for grouping, but not too many to make quest spawns difficult). In other words, the main zones had a good level of players and I was generally able to have a good experience, but the side zones did feel slightly lacking of people(which may or may not be necessarily a bad thing at launch).
My spouse and I created characters on realms 3 and 12. We both would say the biggest issue on both the last two days has been way too many players in the same area. For example it is not fun at all, quite boring actually to take 60-90 minutes to collect 8/8 of an item or 12/12 of an item. Everyone standing around, even in groups trying to get lucky to tag something and hope it drops the item needed. It greatly slowed down character leveling.
Yes the servers will be busy on launch day. However, the game is supposed to be fun and enjoyable. Standing around waiting hours to complete one quest defeats any attempt for the game to be either. We went to other areas to try different quests and it was the same pretty much everywhere. The number of players versus the time investment on quests need to be a lot more balanced. We did not find this to be as much an issue in the previous stress tests. Repeat of this congestion will seriously hamper the fun and enjoyment on launch day.
The other issue that is still persistent in every stress test so far is interface options and keybindings randomly reset when character state changes such as when using the hearthstone to change location, changing level, or dying. Keybindings will be randomly undone and options under the interface options will become unchecked.
We still look forward to the official release in August. We love the feel of Classic WoW over what it has become. We plan to stay subbed and start our favorite characters again. Just not looking forward to the bottle neck congestion that we saw in this stress test. Thanks for bringing this game back and letting us replay one of our most favorite games of all time.
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I was playing on Classic Realm 3 in the NE Start area.
Overall, I loved the feel of classic again, but it did feel a bit too empty for me. I was playing typically at night time, anywhere from 9pm CST until 1:30am CST. I know those are typical lower pop times, so maybe it was different during “peak” hours.
However, for my own personal experience it was a bit too empty, both in the starter zone as well as the level 6 and onward.
Too Crowded?:
- (I did, purposely, choose the most densely populated pvp server) It was as expected with the massive mass, and as it should be (imho) … and yes it was annoying in the first sets of quests, as expected.
Too Crowded Zone 2?:
- the second zone, was less crowded, but still the mobs were still hard to find at times (most of Teldrassil was this way, and some of Darkshore)
In my opinion this should be the case on the first day of a release. Maybe in a newer game you can give the player the option to play the start in an instance, but (personally) I don’t see why to play an MMO, with out the m’s.
Thanks! (edit* server 15)
Issues experienced Thursday evening, July 20, 2019 - Realm 15:
- Too congested! Too many people in starter zones (night elf zone specifically) to do quests in a timely basis. Something that would normally take me 30-60 minutes too THREE HOURS because you had to fight for mobs. Phasing didn’t work at all. I would recommend more phases with fewer maximum number in each phase. Fighting over quest mobs is not fun.
- Disconnects in certain areas. I was fighting in one of the areas and everyone in my party (and others in that area) lost connection and then there was an instant respawn of all cleared mobs which killed us all repeatedly trying to get our corpses. We were no in the same place in real life, just the same place in the game.
- Many, many quest kills offered nothing in the corpse. Many, many regular kills just to get experience offered nothing on the corpse.
Thank you!
3 Likes
Starting zone (Deathknell) was extremely crowded and very difficult to accomplish quests. The rest of Tirisfal and Undercity were virtually empty.
I played on 3, as a R Tauren druid. For me it was great, i could complete quests with ease, kill rares and find chests. Although i came across other players on rare occasions. It felt to lonesome. I prefer a more crowded layer. Mulgore should be the easiest zone but it shouldnt be a deadzone.
Heres my feedback. Do NOT implement sharding at release. I would rather a queue. I repeat again… piss off with sharding all it will do is empower the top guilds through known exploits. Only blizzard cares that streamer realms will crash at release, the players that will be playing long term wont care one bit.
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Sharding is required. Dont be so silly to accept queues. Easy fix for exploits is ‘blizzard come out and say if you exploit you will be banned’