I don’t see how that is worth it. A bit more breathing room at the cost of exploitable farming and duplication, broken wpvp, layering hopping for favorable questing/faction layers, and a broken community/realm that isn’t connected. All of these will be affected long after layering is gone and lots of people trying Classic will see this as the “classic” experience and leave without getting to experience the actual game. I simply can’t see how this is worth it to anyone unless they are selfishly thinking of themselves.
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They’re delivering an authentic “3k people on your realm” experience, per player, while allowing far more population. They can’t predict whether that needs to extend to the Starters only, the 10-20 range, or all the way to 30. So they’re cross-cutting instead of dicing.
They can predict very easily and with utmost certainty. It’s the start of the game and nobody is starting at 60 so it’s 100% going to be bottom heavy. Calling it an authentic experience is a lie, being teleported from other players and being able to hop into favorable layers at choosing is not at all an authentic experience. WotLK with huge numbers, super limited zones and servers was fine after a few days so you can easily base it off this. They should have faith in infrastructure that was tested and proven then with the numbers at the extremes. Layering just on the first few days (no longer than a week) would solve this for people who don’t want to experience that starting chaos and avoid nearly all of the bad effects. Having it any longer is ridiculous especially when we have the proof of the past.
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That’s a very bold claim for something that hasn’t happened, and has never had similar circumstances under which some other Blizzard product occurred the same way.
Those are a) a bug, and b) exploits that need to be addressed.
About a week. And if within a week, Classic settles down, they’ll remove the layering too.
At some of the expected numbers, they had massive queues and constant crashing, and had far more servers to spread the load amongst. We’re not getting 430 US servers this time. More like 30.
It’s not that bold, like I said nobody is starting the game at level 60 so it’s certain the launch will be bottom heavy with lower leveled players. This is irrefutable.
They are not bugs, it’s a consequence of layering in an mmo.
They should be more transparent with this. From the interviews about it they said they will before world bosses are out but it’s not feasible the population will settle down that soon. Why does the case for layering to go away have to be a bad scenario instead of planning for a good scenario. It seems Blizzard is going into this super unprepared and layering will extend all the way until their deadline of world bosses. If they don’t give an actual deadline or numbers they should just have some layer-free servers and let players who want that experience go there.
They dismissed the question “Will layering affect world bosses” by saying “Of course not, it’ll be gone before Phase 2”.
Ion also promised it would be gone within a couple of weeks. That’s about as transparent as you can get without signing up to a fixed date that people can rail against.
If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail. Layering is inherently safe for a low initial population, because it will collapse into a single layer if there aren’t enough people online.
It’s literally built to work in good and bad the best way.
I know I’ve seen the video but as many have pointed out that is going to work against them if they put layering in as a solution.
For example here you say we would get around 30 servers. That would mean within “a few weeks” those servers would have to hit under their non-layered cap for layering to go away. Also consider high-pop servers and ones with streamers or other popular players. Is layering going to leave when it happens on those servers or only the ones in the low end? If it’s something in the middle that means that layering would only go away with ~50k players and earliest case scenario ~100k players. Judging by reception and private server numbers this seems like they are really lowballing the estimation and like Ion said they are doing so to preserve communities. Ironically this is going to destroy communities because just like retail and people in beta have said the players teleporting in/out is extremely disorientating to community aspects.
I can see their good intentions but their planning will be their doom. Since they are lowballing it to preserve community they will either extend layering for far too long or remove it at the promised time and have huge server problems that would be even more so than if they didn’t have layering to start with.
Yep. Using a 40% peak value, 30 servers should cover about 225,000 people. I expect they’ll actually add more during the first few days when they see the popularity, but even at 50 servers, that’s 375,000 players at 40% peak.
They are expecting multiple million players at launch dropping down to a few hundred thousand within the first few weeks. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, though I do think that it will begin to regrow after that initial drop.
It’s not 50k or 100k by any means. That’s not how population caps work. Everyone doesn’t log in at once.
That’s why I use those numbers because even in the extreme example it’s way too low of an estimation. Take a look at steam charts and see the concurrent players of games there. For example Borderlands 2 and Rust are at 58k, you don’t think WoW Classic will be that high after a few weeks?
No, I think it’ll be about 250-300k active players by the time they remove it. But that doesn’t require 100 servers, because that’s not how population caps work.
This is about when they would remove layering though. It’s impossible for them to deliver on their promise of a few weeks because the population would be too high to do it that soon.
This type of profile is common among newer generation blizzard fanboys. Argue for the sake of arguing because they feel like Vanilla oldtimers should shut up. They don’t even evaluate the arguments they are trying to make which are often full of black and white assumptions and platitudes. I’ve concluded that many are just jealous that they were never there to experience this game in the first place.
Iève stated before that there are other solutions for a smooth launch. SHarding the starting zones is one which Blizzard even entertained at first. But like you say Heldene, give them an inch and they take a mile. My opinion is layering is entirely an accounting decision in terms of the bottom line. I simply cant understand anyone defending it as for the great good of the community long term unwilling to discuss alternatives like adults.
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They can remove layering anytime they want by forcing the overflow to a login queue. Then what remains is a Vanilla-like state. One population on one realm with a queue.
The only other alternative is server merges, which are absolute cancer especially for roleplayers.
So no thank you. I’ll take layering over that.
It’s not just Blizzard, it’s the playerbase.
They’re spoiled rotten crybabies who want instant gratification. Blizzard is just reacting to that.
No one has an appreciation for the idea of, “Good things come to those who wait.” Nobody wants to use any effort for this kinda stuff anymore.
Do you think today’s generation would still be gamers if they didn’t have the internet to find out how to do everything? Do you think that possibly this attitude of, “Can’t win, 0/10” would have ever made games like Warcraft and similar titles that are now gaming legends possible?
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So why not give a specific date for removal of layering at that point? They are being intentionally vague to keep it longer.
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No it isn’t. Limited sharding at launch to handle the tourists is an option.
Heck LAYER the first and second starting zones. Once the player base disperses, Blizzard can evaluate the total numbers.
Sharding an entire server, for a good portion of the leveling experience to 60, I don’t understand unless Im looking to reduce costs long term.
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How did Blizzard handle the TBC and Wotlk launches without layering?
They weren’t launching a previous version of the game on a small amount of servers. Plus, from what I understand, they didn’t handle those launches particularly well at all either.
Every launch except the last two expansion launches were abysmal.
Layering keeps players from fading in and out in front of you every time they cross a boundry. It’s there to basically be sharding, but without sharding.
Yes I think they should commit to something specific as well, maybe 2 weeks.
And then realize that a cohesive non-layered world is a priority…in other words accept a login queue as a fair trade-off.
Why should players wait, when the technology exists that makes that wait unnecessary? What “effort” is there in that?