I never would have known sharding was even in the demo if I hadn’t seen people screaming about it on Twitch chat and here on the forums.
Is it bad to say that I feel a lot older than I really am…?
1 Like
Fun stat: 70% of the people who try the World of Warcraft trial quit before level 10 (per Blizzard). I assume that some fairly large % of the remaining 30% quit before max level. The overwhelming majority of people who try WoW quit fairly early on in the experience.
With this in mind, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that 70-80% of the people who try Classic WoW will quit within the first 90-180 days. Based on past player behavior, that’s a totally reasonable estimate. The $15 that non-current subscribers need to plunk down to play likely isn’t enough to make someone feel invested and stick around long-term, and current subscribers get to try it with no further investment at all.
Let’s pretend they release Classic with enough servers to perfectly handle the number of players at launch (which is probably impossible to estimate, but I’ll leave that alone for now). After 90-180 days, one of 3 things will be true.
-
70-80% of the servers are complete ghost towns and provide an awful gaming experience for an mmo.
-
All servers are only at 20-30% of where they should be to have a healthy mmo community.
-
(What would actually happen) Many servers would be completely dead and a large number would be at an unhealthy (too low) population.
If you’re planning on playing Classic long-term, does that sound like a good place for the game to be in 3-6 months? Obviously not, and the only real fix at that point would be to shard servers together (unacceptable long-term solution) or merge most of the servers. Nobody likes server mergers, and I don’t think kicking tons of players off of their home server would go over well.
So what’s the solution here? If you only launch with enough servers to handle 20% of the launch population, you’ll have 80% of the launch playerbase sitting in a queue. What a disaster that would be (you got in but your leveling friends are in a 12 hour queue). The rage would be palpable. They could launch with the one hour play time limit that the demo had, but that’s an awful idea too. Getting booted out of the game during a dungeon run would be infuriating.
I’m honestly not seeing any real good alternatives to temp. sharding at launch, and some of the suggestions being thrown around (huge queues) are far worse than the temp. sharding option.
2 Likes
Most people don’t know it exists. It’s the reason sharding gets the blame for lots of the problems actually caused by phasing and CRZ.
I was always an old soul myself.
Outrage over sharding as seen in the demo was understandable, and justified on the part of everybody.
Do not confuse that opposition to the Demo with opposition to Sharding on principle. Yes, there are players who will do so, but they’re likely to be an extreme minority all things considered, at least so long as Blizzard handles things properly. If they botch their setup of sharding and it’s plainly evident it’s going on and set at a very low bar, they’re in trouble, with everybody.
It they have it setup to only trigger in very extreme situations and a handful of people notice and complain? It’ll be a tempest in a teapot.
Read interviews abd watch blizzcon
Not so on Reddit. On here, sure.
We did. They’re not against it, but they’re certainly not for it, either. They’re rather neutral on the subject; kind of like me and a few others around here.
I’m in the “spirit of the game, not the letter” camp.
1 Like
Could you explain this phrase please?
Meaning they want it to be Vanilla, but every single tiny detail doesn’t need to be exact.
1 Like
Ah.
Well, Blizzard already said they might not hit 100% exact anyway. XD
Pretty much.
Yeah, makes you wonder how they’ll combat this.
We already know they won’t because of loot trading, mailbox, and other similar things they have confirmed to be different or not worth changing.
1 Like
Well… the only thing about the mailbox that’s changed is the UI, just to beat the addons to it. The one-hour wait time is coming back though.
Similar to the Spirit of the Law, not the Letter of the Law.
Some things don’t have to be perfectly exact, as long as it feels the same, and the big things we want from Classic are maintained. The community, and the things that engender that community are the big ones. Having quests that you need to team up for. Having dungeons that take an evening. Having quests that get progressively harder. Not feeling like you’re playing a single player game in a giant world. Not being the center of all activity. Knowing the people you play with, not just for a 20 minute instance.
1 Like
So… basically like the demo! 
That was feeling pretty good, I thought. I even thought dying so often was fun! I haven’t felt like that ever since when I was a small kid making Crash Bandicoot die over and over again just because I thought the animations were funny.
The demo felt empty to an extent, because of the sharding. Which is why everyone’s against it.