going to have a guild just for guarding all the black llotus spawns on all layers cant wait. At least ill be able to easily get some devilsaur since they cant protect all 10 layers
I 100% agree that Layering is going to be really upsetting for the first month or two that itâs on. I mean, the whole POINT of the game is to be social, we shouldnât limit the people youâre interacting with. Itâs not like the servers and clients canât handle the increased pop, itâs 15 years later.
I will say, though, your concept of time for Classic is WAY different than mine. It took me several months to hit 60 the first time around, and that was in college when I had basically no life outside of class. I think itâs gonna take me at least 4 months to hit 60 with my first champ. I think a lot of the people who expect to be able to grind to 60 in under a month will be surprised at how slow leveling is (by design).
I havenât been on the forums in a few months. I logged on today to see the server realm list, and I was absolutely shocked.
I remember debates with ELoraell and others about server populations, layering and numbers and server numbers.
This is not nearly enough servers however you cut the cake. I am absolutely shocked! Layering at the start is irrelevant because:
- If layering is to be condensed by phase 2, there is simply no way the server will be able to hold the numbers of players in one world. Blizzard has vastly underestimated the number of players coming to classic.
Please do not give me the whole tourist run, most players will quit etc. because even if 80% of the population quits by phase 2, there will still be far far more players on each server than one world can support. If there are indeed even 10k players left on each server by phase 2, one layer canât support that number. And there are going to be far more than 10k players left on each server.
Please consider it. Hypothetical situation: 10k players on each server during phase 2, equally divided amongst the 11 NA servers. thats 110k players total playing classic WoW. Does anyone truly believe there will only be 110k players total?
Result: 
This was a huge issue with layering we all talked about. What happens if there are too many darn people when the layers finally condense? This is irreversible. You can delete the layers, but not the players. So if you are left with too many players at the end of layering, then that is just as bad of a problem as having a dead server with no people on it. ITâs exactly the same, but the opposite end of the spectrum, a server that is immensely overcrowded and unplayable for many. Why do people fear dead servers with no populations so much more than an incredibly overpopulated server? Itâs so much easier on players to fix a dead server because you can merge it, but you can never fix the overcrowded server because you canât force players to quit.
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Please do not say they will open new servers, because this isnât fair to the people who donât have the time to re-level new toons on a new server. We have jobs, families, kids, etc. We also took time off at the server release, and once many of us start on these toons, we simply donât have the time to restart later just because the server is too crowded.
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World Immersion and COmmunity Breaking: 1-3 layers was doable with the community. Imagine 10-20 layers. You are now breaking the immersion of the whole server community. You will no longer be seeing LittleJohn in every zone you level. You wonât be able to pay back that troll (or gnome) who ganked you in strangelthorn because next time youâre on they will probably be in one of the 10-20 other layers. This many layers disrupts the entire sense of community. Instead of recognizing the same people of your quaint little town, you are now walking through the crowd in New York. You are no longer one person of 3k, or even 6k. You are now one of 40-50k, and itâs going to be disrupt that vanilla feel of community for both allies and enemies. Having this many layers disrupts the vanilla feel of leveling with that community greatly.
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This also brings up the fact that itâs now impossible to avoid a major streamer for a large number of players who wanted to avoid a streamer server. Please donât get into the whole streamer good or bad thing, as this is not the point. The point is, there is a large number of folks who want to simply avoid streamers, and that is entirely fair. Now this seems impossible to doâŚmost streamers are sticking to one server, but there are so many that there are guaranteed to be some big streamers on every server.
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And how does this affect the Auction House? At first I thought the supply goes up, but so does the demand, so itâs all relevant. However, then I thought deeper and realized that itâs far more complex. There will prob be far more supply than demand as there will be gold farmers, hardcore nuts, etc farming all day long, and now these servers may have 20-60k players each for one AH versus the 3k for original AH. This insane number of players on each server (all layers combined) is going to drastically alter the AH compared to vanilla. One tiny example would be, No longer are you the rare merchant on the server making that helm. No longer is that super rare world drop you found this amazingly rare findâŚbecause there will be about 20-60k people on that server finding those too.
There are also static gold costs such as epic mounts etc, so if the number of players does alter the gold you earn, then it could be much harder to get those epic mounts for casual players.
4 Likes
Thank you. This is exactly the problem.
The problem is that itâs not consistent. If players were to be assigned to a layer and be kept there, itâd be fine, but as far as I know, people are moved around dynamically, and that means youâre playing with different people all the time, instead of following the natural pattern and moving up as a block with the same people.
6 Likes
They spent too much money on Sharding and Layering because Activision money said so. Let it go, it is staying for the time being. The name reservation probably gave them enough of a clue that 2-3 more PvP servers should be on the table, especially since you know damn well that more people will re-sub day 1 of launch.
I still donât understand why name collision is even a problem. When they let us transfer from Arthas to Nathrezim, if we had a matching name they just had us choose a different one.
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But you literally just made that all up
Why are we protecting against fiction, or laziness, instead of encouraging Bliz to create new technology for classic that supports massive online communities?
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10 layers seems about 3x the max you will see is my guess. 3-4 should hold even the most densely populated realm
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load vocal minority protesting.
Get over it. 90% of the issues with layering where solved in the beta. Most any youtube video you watch with exploits or bugs has already been patched.
Those of us who ACTUALLY played vanilla for launch day and for fresh start servers saw what happens to player populations. They tank within 30 days. By 90 days less than a 1/4 of people remain. Of those remaining most are max level and logging in far less frequently.
In the rare instance a server was exceptionally popular. The 90 day mark is also when you saw ques pop up again during popular raiding days. It was not uncommon on the most popular servers in vanilla for queâs preventing people from raiding on time, or at all.
So let layering stay. If the game really doesnât drop in population most likely they will open new servers. That will crater a significant amount of population as those who had bad starts, or fell behind, or realized they would never be the best on the server leave and join them instead.
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It really doesnât seem that bad.
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Quick question, do you want 130 servers, or do you just want massive queues for the 13 servers?
The problem with having so many servers is that we will end up with a ton of dead servers after the retail tourists leave. Blizzard has never merged servers, just combined them with that CRZ crap. CRZ allows you to keep your name, but good luck finding any true vanilla player willing to support that. The other option would be to merge servers for the first time ever. Merges are atrocious, and it also creates problem with names, who gets to keep the name? Of course you could always just leave the servers dead and drive away the few people still playing.
If you want queuesâŚthat is another big problem. If as you suggest we have 10 server size layers (doubt it is that many), we would have ~30,000 people in queue. Obviously that number would drop quickly as players would leave when they saw that they were x,xxx in queue with an estimated time of 3 days to get in. You are now playing the lottery, if you arenât one of the lucky ones to get in, you probably arenât playing the first day. Those who do get in will go to extraordinary means to stay logged in for as long as they possibly can when they hear about how bad the queue is.
Layering sucks, but look at the alternatives.
This. I was on Stalagg the entire time, and played from opening hours through to the shutdown.
I saw the same people over and over again and only witnessed one phase outâŚit was when I was turning in a quest with a guy I was grouped with. He disappeared when we went into SW and reappeared when we came out of it. One time I saw this in four solid days of no-life play.
I think it worked remarkably well, and if it keeps our servers viable after drop-off, it will have been worth it.
Also, regarding queuesâŚtwo weeks ago, all of the âwall of noâ people were telling everyone who asked questions about queue times to man up and accept queue times as part of the Vanilla experience. I laughed when I saw that because I knew todayâs tears and lamentation would happen the first time you had to wait in a queue.
We used to wait in a queue for 30 minutes every time we logged into WoW back in '05. It eventually dropped off to the point we didnât see that anymore, but that is authentic Vanilla, baby. Grab a beverage and some chips and throw on some YouTube while you wait.
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Barely any advertisement.
Few servers.
Layering that functions WAY more like sharding than they said.
Pretty obvious what the mindset is hereâŚ
Cheap and dirty, which is I suppose the only way we were going to get it.
So be it.
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Did you not see the 11k queue time for the herod server? Layering is the only chance of you being able to play the game.
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Layering will destroy classic just like it played a hand in hurting retail. The only way to overcome this is if layering actually was only used in the first week or so until player population is spread out accordingly.
Unfortunately I have a brain, common sense and Iâm capable of critical thought. Blizzard is lying. This layering is on purpose and meant to stay forever. They will keep it around so all the retail dorks are in forever ideal zones, each zone with its own special blizzard certified ideal player cap.
So stormwinds layers might cap at 150. But loch modanâs zone will probably cap around 50. While a different zone like Desolace will be capped at 120. Each zone will have artificial blizzard certified player caps set in place to force a picture perfect ideal number of players per zone. As to not disrupt the sensitive retail crowd that is only willing to pay blizzard money if their characters are on top of the world drowning in easy quests, exp, and loot 24/7.
3 Likes
Dude that was a queue for freaking name reservation. And you think layering is going to stop it on release? How deluded are you?
5 Likes
Did you play every single stress test like I did? The servers canât handle what you want. Not initially they canât. The game was unplayable when they had layers turned off. As soon as they turned them on it was still overcrowded. As long as its only temporary then layering is fine. If layering is such a big problem then go play another game until they turn off layering.
Every blizzard release EVER has had queue times.
Even with sharding. Queue times.
If you think Classic wonât have queue times at release, I donât know what to tell you.
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Im no stranger to queue times. I just trust blizzard to eventually turn them off. If they break my trust. Then i break my subscription.