How did Blizzard handle the TBC and Wotlk launches without layering?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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It didn’t, even low pop server’s had queues into the thousands amd crashed regularly.

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To play or not to play? That is the real question.

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I remember those days. I knew the odds of actually playing on launch day was pretty small.

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125

This sums it up

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Hour long log-in queues.

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When BC launched, I was only around level 40ish, so I experienced the queues but didn’t have to deal with the flood of people all trying to do Hellfire. Of course not everyone was trying to do Hellfire since they also released Draenei and Blood Elves so many people were in those zones which did split the crowd a bit. I personally did not like hour long queues so I played around with the new races on a low pop server that had shorter queues until my main server queues were back down to the 15 min level or less.

For LK, I remember queues though they weren’t as bad as with BC. The population was split between two intro zones plus the Death Knight starter area. Crowds were bad for a week or so but after that people had spread out far enough to make things tolerable again.

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With Phasing.

TBC’s launch was a catastrophe (the BE and Draenei zones were as bad as hellfire was, but anyone else making a new character or still leveling didn’t get hit by it), so Wrath was set up with several layers of redundencies to try and spread people out.

Multiple DK starter area instances to absorb some of the initial pop.

Multiple start zones to spread people out who didn’t make a DK. (you still had occassional bottlenecks though. I was stuck waiting for 20 minutes during one of them)

And using phasing in those zones to further sub-divide the player base so poeple in other phases couldn’t interfere with each other and thus created extra layers of room for people to play until they caught up and were same phase. Which again bought time.

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130

People were complaining about it back then, they just didn’t believe that any viable options were available to resolve the issue. If they were given those options back in 2006 or 2008, the players likely would have jumped on it, and whined about it without end if Blizzard said it existed but wouldn’t use it.

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131

Using a tech in a game built to deliver it’s experience without any of it is not viable.
It changes the whole experience, and especially in the case of layering, goes against early WoW’s biggest appeal that lead to it’s success, which was the community aspect.
Layering disrupts that the most, in addition to turning the whole game design on it’s head during it’s existence, leading to a wide array of new issues that will be asked to get “fixed”.

You’re assuming they would have taken something as destructive as this for the launch and beyond based on the modern MMORPG mindset.
A mindset which clearly favors such conveniences as layering even if, or rather because, it turns the game more into modern WoWs design.
It has no place in old WoW. That audience was entirely different, and there’s no way Blizzard would have gotten away using that thing for weeks or months into the game without massive backlash from the audience back then that got drawn to WoW because of it’s world exclusive communities in a fantasy RPG setting.

I started playing in TBC. If i saw any of what i saw layering do in the tests, even in the simple “group up to change layers! :3” moments, i wouldn’t be here today and WoW would have been just another instanced “world” with it’s “own people” in it. If it said anything about this on the box, it’d stayed in the shelf just like the rest. Thanks but no thanks.
Thankfully, it wasn’t like that, and that’s why it left such an impression on me and millions of other people. Most of which, funnily enough, don’t have any interest in playing modern WoW anymore because it’s simply not the WoW they got introduced to and enchanted by.

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132

Dear God.

You know, I never wanted to play classic server’s, not interested personally.

But I was always in favour of there being classic server’s so that the people who wanted it could play it.

But drama queens like you make me regret that.

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Ahhh, the memories.

(That he recalls not so fondly)

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I once joined a que, went out for dinner, came back an hour later, and I was still in a que.

And honestly if the stress tests are any indicator you will have close to the same experience we did. (Besides the que I hope)
If you get in the mob and quests item contention will be extremely high. Just as it was when the zones launched.

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That’s a very powerful opinion of several intense emotions you have there about my detailed view, explained with reasons as to why i think this system can be destructive. Thanks for letting me know!

I’m afraid i can’t help you with that, though. Sad state of affairs that even if you don’t care about classic, my very intense opinion made you stop caring about people who wanted to play this game too, and made you upset on the behalf of others who are free to discuss this with me.
If my opinion is all it took to sway you like this, it doesn’t seem you are very invested in this matter anyway, and in fact just came here to be what you accuse me of being: a drama queen, for the sake of it. :stuck_out_tongue:

Perhaps you can add to the topic instead, and let everyone know why everything i and others say about layerings issues is totally harmless to a game that never had it before?
Would love to know your thoughts about how you came up with your viewpoint about a game you have no interest in playing yourself. There’s gotta be a reason about why it made you so upset, some might say dramatically so, because all i presented was my shameless constructive opinion! :thinking:

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You’re ignoring the context in which I was speaking.

If you offered layering to the player base during the TBC Launch, or the WotLK launch, most players would have jumped on it if it meant they could play without having to sit in queue for hours, or otherwise need to re-order their life to be able to otherwise dodge said queues.

I was not speaking as to the validity of Layering as it applies to Classic. (Although I think it is addressing a valid concern regarding “tourists” and potential for dead realms)

Keep in mind, the player base at the time TBC launched were excited at the idea of getting flying mounts.

Players at the launch of Wrath were excited by the introduction of the Achievement system. Wrath players also asked for LFG.

Claiming the players of that time wouldn’t ask for, or otherwise accept certain features because you now know they’re harmful to the game, doesn’t mean they’d share your views, given the whole matter of their not having hindsight to guide their decisions or positions.

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137

It used to be something we were fine with as just another fact of life like walking to the dungeon or getting killed on PvP servers by people 20 levels above you, now though with all the sharding, the idea of not being able to do your quests right now without competition or having to wait for a while in a queue to get into your server is essentially on par with mass genocide and simply isn’t something human beings have the mental fortitude to deal with in the slightest, I mean, why would I wait an hour to play my MMO when fortnite will drop you into a new game near instantly? They just don’t make players like they used to.

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138

Well let’s see

  1. We had at least 5x the amount of servers.
  2. The queue times for some servers was close to 10 hours.
  3. The 11mill wasn’t on launch. You didn’t have 11 mill people attempting to log on. On launch day.
  4. A lot of people didn’t even get on on launch day because servers crashed or the queue was just not worth it.
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139

I actually agree with you.
You’re right, they did ask for a lot of things and were excited about some that had adverse effects on the game in the end, to the point where modern WoW is at now.
It started small, and kept on piling up, each time reducing the playerbase and changing it up as the game changed with each addition.

I guess that’s where it’s important for the game devs to use their knowledge and be careful about what the community asks for (but not ignore it, of course), because it could end up changing the game in a direction that’s not going to be satisfying overall to the playerbase.
I’m sure it must be difficult to say no, especially with things like flying mounts which at first glance seem very cool to players. The devs are just people too, and i can imagine they wanna be popular with their players, so they like to give them what they want… too much so, as we can tell by WoW’s recent big additions and their actual effects on the game down the long road, which players probably didn’t expect to go quite that way.
We’ve seen even the game devs have regrets about decisions that lead to modern WoW (Ghostcrawler saying yes to LFR for example, and regretting it after, Kevin Jordan cautioning against flying mounts & LFD, but people overruled him, etc).

I hope that the design team will reflect on layering again while there’s still time, and evaluate where this will lead to. They do have the advantage this time around to look at how these type of systems have changed the game before, and in which ways it got affected most.

Will the effects on the game really be worth the bargain with the modern players asking for it to improve their experience, over those who just want to play the old game, warts and all?
If they cave in to what seems like a “favor” to do for the more modern community looking to play Classic, who are expecting Blizzard to use their modern judgement for this old game… will it actually be good for the game and how it’s received, or will it just prevent a bit of anger coming from those who aren’t used to how old WoW unfolded? (with queues at launch and a few unpopular realms somewhere down the long road)

Personally, i think the game design that’s already laid out for Classic is going to be the better approach, even if it has those “pain points” in it’s design as some designers like to call unpleasant situations for players nowadays, because it’s tailored to provide the experience everyone is asking for in Classic: the vanilla (game!) experience.
And that one relies immensely on community and authenticity, which layering disrupts in more ways i’m not gonna list here again. In their language, i dare say layering is going to be a big pain point in classic, because it’s entirely out of place and bringing pain to the core foundations of the game at a time where it’s especially important that it’s fully intact.

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Your suggestion takes all the dynamic features out of layering which would make layering highly ineffective in what blizzard is trying to do with them. Layers need to spawn and despawn as required or else there isnt much point in having them in the first place.

It would do very little for making the world seem reasonably full to all players without too much overcrowding. Some layers would be overcrowded and have ques while others would get in right away making the whole thing pointless in the first place.

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141

Your “detailed and constructive” view was so overloaded with hyperbole that it wasn’t worth addressing seriously, as is your assessment of my response.

You cannot distinguish between an inconvenience that adds flavour to the game, and an inconvenience that makes the game unplayable.

Thousand player long queues make the game unplayable. 1000 people fighting over the same 20 mobs that have a long respawn time make the game unplayable, especially in starting zones where you don’t have the choice to go level somewhere else make the game unplayable.

Something like the wetlands run adds flavour.

I see sharding as something that was a good idea if uaed sparingly but was taken way too far in the current game.

Layering in the initial weeks until the playerbase spreads out a bit more seems like a good solution.

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I accept people had radically different experiences based on their server, but I have a hard time believing this. 10 hour queue? I experienced NO queue for TBC or Wrath launches. Maybe you were on a trial account (which were sent to the back of the line). And I don’t have any memory of my server crashing either. There was a lot of competition for quests though, but…we dealt with it. It really wasn’t bad at all.

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