Read the part of the article where he talks about tourists.
As a longtime World of Warcraft player, even I don’t know whether Classic servers will be a success. My guess is once the initial wave of tourists dies down, there will only be a small core group of people left. “That’s OK,” Brack assures me. "I don’t think that’s wrong. There will be a core group of people who are really excited, and that’s the game for them and that’s the thing they want to play.
“I think there will be a lot of tourists,” he adds. "But it doesn’t matter what I think because once we’re committed to doing this at a Blizzard level, which we are, whatever happens is going to happen. If millions of people show up and play for years, that’s awesome. And if just tens of people show up and play for years, we’re fine either way. What’s important to us is that we have this Classic experience people can enjoy, that people do have the opportunity to go back to. This is an important game in videogame history and there’s not a way to go back and experience that today. This is also about preserving something that we think is really important.
When philosophy meets reality, something has to give. In this case, they took a look and said “We think this game is going to be so popular we need to handle the tourist wave in a way that doesn’t break the rest of the experience for the core group. They may not like it initially, but it’s the best way forward”. (Paraphrasing Blizzcon 2018)
You don’t trust them. I get that. But if you accept that that initial sharding isn’t going to break the game and will go away, then I’ll happily hold their left foot while you hold their right foot to the fire if it turns up anywhere else or later.
Considering the nature of the AQ event, if Classic is anywhere NEAR as successful as people are hoping it will be, and if Blizzard hasn’t come up with any better options for how to handle their servers, sharding better fudging turn up.
A 2.5k to 3k server cap should give them enough headroom to either limit who can enter the zone (must be L60 or L50 etc) or they’ll be able to handle it.
And here we are months from release, probably a year+ from AQ and people are already asking for the AQ event to be sharded. And people wonder why I have fears.
Two videos of recent server crashing madness on the servers we got AFTER they auctioned off the originals imply the technology hasn’t, in fact, gotten better.
When did you get your job at Blizzard’s server farm and know what the reason for the crashes? For all you know it could have been unrelated, or because of some other bug they’ve subsequently fixed.
Why do you think we’re both still here. Both of us want the game to be a success, except for the people who’ve decided that Blizzard can’t be trusted and are going to destroy it anyway.
Blizzard still has the population of a medium sized country as their Monthly Active Users (38 million). So either everyone is just hoping, or they’re doing some stuff right.
Canada 36 million
Poland 38 million
Iraq 38 million
shrugs I don’t know. They’ve been making design decisions with Retail that have been slowly trying to push me away. I keep finding something to enjoy about it but that mostly boils down to RP, soloing old content for the lulz, and leveling alts.
Modern WoW, in current content, is simply unfun to me without flight to mitigate all the frustration I have to deal with when it comes to their new Timeless Isle inspiration.
Classic will not have that problem at all. Ever. So long as they don’t start tacking expansions on, anyway.
Blizzard’s numbers may indicate WoW’s still a success, and clearly it is otherwise it would have been shut down by now. But don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m speaking negatively of it because I think it isn’t; I’m speaking negatively because I don’t like the direction it’s headed. I’m speaking solely for myself.
It is far easier to say “NO” at the outset and continue to say “NO” than it is to say “yes, but just a tiny bit” and then try to take away what you’ve already given people by saying “NO” later.
Does the crying over flying ring a bell? Does the moving of portals and the removal of some portals ring a bell?