Neither will be a constant influx of players who where discovering the game like it was in vanilla.
My point is that it will be closer to a private server launch, because people will want to leave that zone as soon as possible, it will not be this magical experience where people form groups and talk to each other, people are gonna zerg rush the starter zone.
It’ll be at least 2-3 million people trying to get in on the Tuesday and the weekend.
I believe the cap has been 2k or so for a long time. I had a 3 day que time during wod release, and a 1day que time during legion release. So riddle me this, what exactly does sharding accomplish if the thinking is that it is “que time or sharding”?
Just curious
EDIT: I actually couldn’t play the first 5 days of legion due to the que time.
Now, that must be old tech right? I have to imagine they will need to have sharding, or the servers will die if thats still even close to the limit.
At least on release/early zones.
wow, thats nuts. So the limits must still be there. I dont know, I’ve been away from the game so long, looking up old servers I used to play on their forums are just dead and silent.
Is that just a most recent thing, or was the game still very active during Legion for example?
How do you know this? Also, where’s your PvP title, tourist?
PvP title here. Blizzard knows what’s best. ![:hugs:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/hugs.png?v=6" ":hugs:")
Have they set any definitive limits for sharding? NO, they have not.
Have they consistently REFUSED to set ANY definitive limits? YES, they have.
Have they stated that they number of servers will be “on the lean side”? There have been claims that they have, although I have not seen any links to confirm that claim.
If they do plan to keep the number of servers “on the lean side”, what exactly is “on the lean side”?
Even if they estimate the population stabilizing at 100,000, that would require at least 34 servers to keep server caps at 3,000, assuming an even distribution of players.
I suspect that the stable population will far exceed 100,000 players, which would require even more servers to maintain that vanilla pop cap of 3,000.
I doubt that they would consider even 50 servers to be “on the lean side”, but that is just my opinion.
I am concerned that they will not have enough servers to handle the number of players without extensive use of sharding, especially since even retail cannot handle more than 50 or so players in a given area without problems. If it were possible to simply raise the shard populations to 200-500 players, why would they not have done that for retail?
At the risk of sounding incredibly cliche…
Trust is earned, not given.
Blizzard has done nothing in recent years to earn the trust that they have lost from many players. Announcing classic is a great step. But until it has been released, and we see what they have produced, nothing has been earned.
When blizzard says things like “we just want to change ____ for ____ amount of time” we have to ask ourselves, where does the line get drawn? If they change this aspect of classic, what’s to stop them from changing something else they deem necessary?
Everyone knew CRZ was going to be garbage. We told them over and over we don’t want it from the fiasco we witnessed on the first servers plagued by it. Just merge servers. And blizzard being blizzard took the “We know best” approach. CRZ was buggy, it gave the illusion of a full sever with offering none of the benefits. It killed the AH of small servers that were connected to large servers before they changed how resource looting worked. It drove another nail into the coffin of server community/identity.
Blizzard has to stop taking the “We know best” approach and truly listen to what its customers are saying to them. We do not want server sharding. We do not want any form of phasing that separates players outside of what was present in Vanilla WoW. Give us what we asked for. Nothing more, nothing less.
The veteran player is Omar Gonzalez, hes a senior software engineer at blizzard since like 2003 or so. He had a panel discussion at blizzcon.
Pretty sure I heard Brian Birmingham say he was on the WoW team in 2006.
WoD had login issues because of some hackers iirc.
The realm forums are as dead as the realms themselves. You may see characters running around, phasing in and out around you now. No one is talking or interacting.
Realms are dead. Sharding and phasing have killed any sense of community or place “where everybody knows your name.” Players actually randomonly appear and disappear in front of you. No longer do you actually know anyone.
Physical servers don’t exist anymore. They have been replaced by cloud architecture and cloud-based services, such as AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.
These new infrastructures have replaced individual physical server blades with microservices, each which run in their own instance, typically as EC2 containers hosted in the cloud provider, assuming Blizzard is using AWS. But it doesn’t matter, they’re all very similar.
Cloud wervices “abstract” and distribute what a single physical server used to do all on its own. The services are handled by the cloud provider so, for example, AWS services handle dynamically increasing/decreasing resources according to auto-scaling and load balancing configuration of EC2 containers - all of which is based on cost and how much you want to pay AWS to scale up.
What is truly tragic to community-based gameplay that used to be foundational to WoW, is no one at Blizzard apparently ever asked the question: what will this do to community?
The fragmentation of the IT infrastructure (combined with all of the modern conveniences of current WoW) has fractured the human social bonds. In a way, fragmented infrastructure == fragmented community.
What use to be a single server, as a single home-town ream of ~2,500 people is now a global matrix of microservices across Amazon Web Services, for instance.
The realms show it - no one is anyone, anymore or from a home-town where they call home. Coupled with the conveniences of Looking For Group/Raid tools, I don’t have to talk to anyone, much less know anyone, to play the game.
You might as well say, “Hi, I’m from shard #2253! Oh, time to phase out. It was nice to see you, good-bye and by the way, you’ll never see me again.”
Now, they want to utlize such cloud-based load balancing solutions into Classic (i.e., sharding). So, instead of adding another physical server, the Auto Scaler creates another instance and, I would guess, another a quasi-realm within your realm (i.e.,. shard). That cost money. The more you scale up resources in AWS, the more it costs. Every second cost money in AWS.
Instead of finding a new permanent home in another realm/server, the infrastructure scales random players (who you will probably never see again) around you around you, and before you know it, community is gone - because who cares about you? You’re just an anonymous, random NPC basically to me, who will disappear in minutes and never see again.
Its all very sad to me. I certainly hope Blizz can honestly look at what all the tech (lfg, lfr, shards, cross realm bgs transfers) did at a behavioural and psychological level.
Its kind of funny though, people promised social media would bring us together too, hows that worked out?
The people afraid of sharding don’t understand server congestion. In the end Blizzards techs will do what must be done in order to keep the servers functioning.
I am absolutely AGAINST Sharding, but completely for it in starting zones. Theres almost no way around this… They’ve said they will remove it after congestion dies down…
Why don’t all the complainers just start playing after the congestion dies down and they remove it?
Well, they’ve already used variable capping based on zone before, because Sharding allows it to be bigger.
No, old tech was “Server would fall down over about 4.5k” according to him. The cap wasn’t due to server instability, but rather what they thought a suitable cap was to ensure the realm was populated but not overcrowded. It was also variable so that at peak times they could have a bit of flexibility.
Modern cloud server tech allows those numbers to be much higher, offset by higher effect counts and communication loads from Retail, which hopefully we won’t have to offset in Classic.
Legion’s sales put them at 3.3 million in presales and projections by 3rd parties back to the 10 million mark at launch (but falling off rapidly afterwards). I don’t know where the “5 day queue” came from, or at least what server, as I never experienced even a queue.
Have they said there will be no set limits? No they have not.
Silence is not refusal, otherwise they refuse to respond to thousands of demands a week.
Yes. https://twitter.com/WatcherDev/status/1109832561704878081
We don’t know, but it indicates they’ll be lower than 400.
It would. My estimate is that they’ll start with 30-50 servers, but I’m estimating a higher residual population than that.
And I’m sure they’ll add more servers if and when the demand presents.
If its “Like Vanilla” it’ll be 89.
Because Retail is a single player game with raids. They want every person to kill everything alone or in a group at most. That’s the nature of the modern environment. It’s self-defeating but its hard to laud the player as “The Champion of the Alliance/Horde” when you’re waiting in queue to kill the named mob.
Under retail conditions, they can go to at least 200 before it becomes unstable. As evidenced by retail experiences. However, retail also has a far higher effect count and communication load, which Classic should not suffer from.
He started on TBC development.
When I started playing Vanilla it was a couple of months old. I don’t remember any starting zone problems that didn’t exist in all zones with the competition for mobs tagged by other players. If they did, Blizzard must have survived without sharding.
So I vote for no sharding. Over-crowded starting zones will clear up pretty fast by themselves.
Will be fine with sharding, based on current zone populations.
Can’t wait for the next thread on this.
In order to replicate that, Blizzard will have to limit access to 89 servers for the first 3 months to only 350,000 people. Are you ok with not being one of those 350,000 and told you have to wait to play Classic for 3 months?
No I wouldn’t, but is that how Vanilla started on day 1 if you were around or know? Maybe 20 servers isn’t enough.
Yeah, how ridiculous of that person guessing what will happen in the future, unlike your statements in this thread where you… guess what will happen in the future.
Hmm. Awkward.