Server 3, Thursday and Friday
After the initial launch rush, things died off heavily. There were plenty of people to play with but it seemed most people congregated in Westfall. Zones like Darkshore were basically completely dead. Dun Morough was likely less dead but not nearly as lively as Westfall. This isnt inherently a bad thing but it was fairly evident that either a LOT of people quit before hitting level 10 or that there were too many layers.
Realm 15. Played the first 3 hours, no lag… later I played a total of 15h. 10/10 experience!
The experience was never crowded enough to cause instability, however, with the number of people able to participate in the stress test versus the number of people that will participate in launch, is seems inevitable that there will be instability in zones like Northshire.
The second zone felt slightly emptier than usual with the layering once the first four hours of the stress test concluded.
Layering will be necessary for launch, but it is imperative that the layering be removed after a couple of weeks or a month at most with it only being used for extreme circumstances after that point.
It was an amazing experience on realm 15! It was definitely crowded at launch making it pretty painful for the first few hours. Took me 2-3 hours to kill wolves for the first quest in the dwarf starting area. But, that was pretty expected for right at launch. By 10 hours later, population was reasonable, and the starting zones had cleared out by the next morning. I’m excited for release! It feels so true to my first experiences with this game. The only thing that would be nice would be the ability to choose the layer you spawn into.
When servers first came online I found it was pretty crowded but I was still able to get mobs and level to 5. After the merge where it was dropped to two realms and I was forced to create a new char it was impossible to even tag mobs in a 5 man group. I logged and did other stuff for the day. Later that night (about 8-10 hours later) I leveled from 1-15. I saw only a handful of people in the starting zones and no-one in Silverpine. Orgrimmar was DEAD it was like being on a layer by myself. I only saw people there when the server was going down despite there being 50 people when using /who.
Lag-wise it felt alright other than the 200 ping. Please give us an answer when it comes to OCE servers soon!
After the 2 days of tourist time, an addition to the previous report (server 15).
I did eventually get out of Shadowglen. Getting water from the moonwell isn’t respawn dependent, so that worked out much more quickly. I had developed a “mobs are a super precious recourse and shouldn’t be killed unless you are on a quest and preferably grouped to share kill counts” attitude. Because I was doing things in groups (thus getting less drops and coin), I couldn’t afford all spells (saving time on visiting the trainer, I guess).
After getting out of Shadowglen into Tendrasil proper (so Wed. 7:00 pacific), things were mostly less busy. A couple of quests were real bottle necks in terms of respawn timers with groups of 5 competing for tags. Picking stuff up off the ground (dream catcher, relics of awakening) wasn’t a problem, the respawn is instant (just can’t pick up at the same time). The follow up dream catcher to go kill mystics and a named guy (for his necklace) was an issue. The named guy spawned at least 4 times before we got the mystics needed for the quest (killed him for exp - this was on Thursday - around 8-9am pacific). And I picked up a lot of peacebloom and silverleaf (they were respawning). The elementals at the lake were nearly always dead (but their drop rate of the quest item sucks and the respawn is long… I knew that would be a problem and did it at 4am pacific - Thursday - and still competed for spawns).
Darnasus wasn’t terribly populated when I went through, but I was able to find an aspiring tailor who would make my cloth into bags (my intended purpose). First cloth wear I whispered was a tailor.
Darkshore was pretty empty Thursday ~noon pacific, Friday ~noon had more people but still sparse. However, Westfall was rather crowded ~7-9am Pacific- (I ran through Wetlands at level 12 using 2 health potions of the one step up variety that I crafted via alchemy but without dieing). That likely reflects the different racial popularity. I went back to Darkshore and pursued the druid quests (cure poison) there after seeing people in chat there wanting “level 15 BiS” for Deadmines. I counted my time in the Barrows for relics of awakening as a dungeon experience (I was with two hunters - it took so long for the shaman to drop the item that they were all out of ammo - however, again, that drop rate always sucked).
I enjoyed playing (especially after the population dropped off a bit) and look forward to the game launching (again).
Edit for adding approximate times from my memory
Server 15 played on horde in the barrens and silverpine forest during mid day 06/21. I was level 10 at this point and found the game to feel completely EMPTY. and at the end of the streaming day on the 21st it was almost impossible to get into the “good” layers and resulted in lots of “inv me to the good layer” spam. I really think you need to get rid of the Layering. Listen to the community please. Don’t ruin our game and our fun. I shouldn’t have to go in to a capital city and see almost NO ONE THERE. THIS IS NOT BFA. STOP. THE. LAYERING. IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY PLEASE STOP THE FREAKING LAYERING! IT CAN BE ABUSED AND IT RUINS THE IMMERSION AND COMMUNITY OF THIS GAME.
Intentional caps. I was yelling. I hope you do your fans right and if you do you’ll rake in the dough not just on launch but in the long term.
So my favorite part was when me, Asmongold and about 200 other people took a dragon into stormwind and killed a dev npc
Realm 12 a friend and I teamed up at the last moment. We tried 3 zones, tauren, undead, and orc. Orc was very smooth, not a whole lot of competition. Undead was worse; running around in circles till the rambling skeletons or whatever spawned. Tauren was the best of all; nice, spread out, …no lag or connection issues in any zone.
Some people want no layers or very limited layers. Some want tons of layers so they are not slowed down. Put the choice in the users hands so they can be in the experience they are looking for…
This stress test felt like an exact copy of day one classic, it was perfect. It even surprised me some times with the little things that made classic so great.
I cannot wait for retail D:
Was it too crowded, even for a launch day experience?
Did it feel too empty or too crowded after you moved to the second zone?
Wasn’t crowded but felt full and enjoyable. Never had a moment of seeing no one which added to the world experience. All the zones I encountered felt new and fresh again. Hard to explain the experience unless you go through it yourself. May have had to wait to find something to kill for a quest, but was worth some of the fun and hilarious encounters with other players. If only more had the actual beta.
This was my experience as well, leveling after the valley of trial was really easily as I barely saw anyone. Upon seeing the hundreds a the event it was clear we had pretty heavy layering happening.
For testing is fine but I hope we have less layers at release since everything felt dead after the intial rush for me.
Another note is that despite all the people and Baron Geddon the server was actually running rather smoothly for me, good job with that.
I immediately got on Server 3 at 5:00PM EST on Wednesday and the experience was very smooth even if it was crowded. I absolutely like being in crowed areas but that’s just me. The starting area was filled with people even outside it around echo isles but the more I got away from durotar the more it seemed like no one was around. Orgrimmar seemed empty most of the time as well but I guess everyone was leveling is the reason.
Otherwise, the beginning seemed very populated at times in Durotar and Tirisfal Glades but did get stagnate after those zones. I feel like more collapsing after those zones would be better if possible but not sure if that would be best at launch.
Towards the end I had a great amount of fun and met a bunch of great people leveling. I look forward to the release. Thanks Blizzard
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It felt good being back into the old version of Azeroth again. I felt it was too crowded for sure, it would have been better with a high respawn rate to even gain a chance at tagging mobs for the first zone quests. It did get better moving outside to the second zones. Forgive me, but I forget out of the two, which server I ended up on. I just clicked the top server in excitement to get my feet wet with classic again.
Server 3, played undead. Starting zone had some nasty bottlenecks (particularly the first 2 quests killing zombies and skeletons), but once out in the open world is was smooth sailing for the most part.
I was on one of the server that was taking down after about 30 min. i made it to lvl 5 and was on my way out of the first area when the server came down.
Then i had to reroll on the other server and it took nearly an hour to finish my second quest, and i decided to take a break for awhile. then maybe an hr later i decided try again and the server was very laggy, so bad the game would freeze for 10 to 20 seconds.
I was on realm number 3 and while the starting area was a bit hectic after I grouped up with some people it was fine and I was able to do the quests. After I got out into Tirisfal Glades and out of the initial starting area I felt the population was good, not too many people or too few people. However once I made it to Silverpine Forest it felt like no one was there, when I did /who it turned out it was me and one other person but when I searched for Silverpine Forest in the who menu it turned out there were tons there, just on different layers so I feel like the layers for that zone were way too small and made it impossible to do group quests.
Here’s my idea instead of layering:
Have parent servers that each have as many children servers as needed. Then, when necessary, collapse the children together. Ultimately, after many months, just the parent server would exist after all collapsing has been done. It is basically a compromise between layering and just having individual servers. More static than layering and can’t be abused because only Blizzard can merge child realms, but more dynamic than just having 100 servers to begin with and doesn’t ultimately lead to dead servers, but stable populations.
E.g., parent realm Shadow Council has children 1-5. After a month, child 2 and 4 are light in population and are collapsed together into new child 6. There are now only children 1, 3, 5, and 6 (four instead of the original five). The servers would keep collapsing with their sibling (other child of same parent) servers as necessary, and in the end, when population drops dictate, you would have one parent server with no children left.
I leveled a number of characters to 5+ (highest was 12) on the stress test servers at various times. I’ll mainly reference the rogue I leveled on Realm-3 in the first hour and the shaman I leveled on Realm-2 five hours before shutdown.
Rogue (right after stress test launch Realm-3 - Alliance)
Was it too crowded, even for a launch day experience? No, I do not believe that it was too crowded. It’s expected that there’s going to be many people trying to level right after launch. It was hard to compete for mobs, which was a little frustrating, but that’s part of the experience. There was quite heavy lag, but it wasn’t unbearable. I feel sorry for any of the paladins trying to tag mobs.
Did it feel too empty or too crowded after you moved to the second zone? It felt emptier than I would have expected for a launch day experience. There were still quite a lot of people, but definitely not too crowded.
Shaman (5 hour before stress test ended Realm 2 - Horde)
Was it too crowded, even for a launch day experience? Definitely not, I saw maybe three people questing in the starting zone all up, two of which were AFK. I may have just been leveling at a bad time, but it felt ‘very’ empty.
Did it feel too empty or too crowded after you moved to the second zone? There were a couple more people than the starting zone, but still no more than 5-6 people. It still felt very empty. If this was what it were like at the proper Classic launch, it would be a bit disappointing.
Thanks for the stress test, I had fun playing. Can’t wait to either get lucky enough for a beta invite or to play Classic when it launches.