Oh sense when is high server population dead?
Oh, just a liar then. I was on a medium pop server when i was dealing with that.
Is it overly simplistic to ask people not to make these topics every single day?
Itâs basic arithmetic. Itâs not complicated.
The evidence at hand is that they are willing to implement a new version of sharding again, except itâs changed slightly to avoid constant phasing out, and instead does so less frequently (but unfortunately due to layering being dynamic, that still has to happen). Aka layering.
Theyâve already stated themselves before that this sharding technology is antithetical to the original WoW game design philosophy, and they know people donât want it because of that. By admitting this, they imply they know that itâs damaging what Classic WoW is all about in itâs core foundations, and therefore modern approaches like this canât be considered to be used on this old game.
To quote J Allen Brack and a small part of the Article the quote came from:
Brack is clear that using modern server architecture doesnât mean that these Classic servers will have the same features that current World of Warcraft does. There wonât be cross-realm servers or Looking For Raid and Dungeon Finder automatic party matchmaking.
Thereâs still a lot of questions about how the team will tackle it, but Brack says theyâre committed to recreating an authentic Vanilla World of Warcraft experience. "One of the tenets of Classic WoW is none of the cross-server realms and different [server] sharding options that we have available to us today. Thereâs a lot of desire on part of the community that this is something that they donât want."
Ion also said at Blizzcon theyâre aware sharding type of systems go against what Classic is, which is why back then for the sake of easing up the whole launch process on their end (and on ours), he very carefully tried to get the community to compromise just slightly by asking to put in modern sharding just for the first couple days, and exclusively starting zones (northshire valley, valley of trials type of areas only).
Needless to say, thatâs not what we ended up with here. The community gave them an inch, and they took the whole mile.
Weâve also got Mark Kern for example, lead dev on Vanilla who commented on Classics approach to launch. He even was on board with the first, very limited approach layering, saying it should last for a couple days or a week at max to help with launch only.
But he also said, that anything beyond is going to damage the community, and therefore the game, which makes sense since systems like layering/sharding/CRZ have proven to do this each time they got implemented, even in modern versions of WoW which are very different games to Classic and have a different audience as well at this point which doesnât put nearly as much value on community as early WoW does.
Classicâs success as a game depends on having the community be the most prevalent and supported aspect out of all. If it had any less of it, the game would show itâs weaker sides especially in the face of polished gameplay left and right in modern WoW versions. What made leveling in Classic interesting was that it was a journey, and other players were a key factor in making it one by running into them over and over again as you leveled. It wasnât great because killing 15 boars for their elusive livers was such an amazing gameplay experience.
Layering is going to disrupt this community building aspect that supports the game so much, due to combining the way the system works with the amount of time itâs looking to stay in the game (several weeks or months).
And thatâs a time estimation depending on assuming that Blizzard didnât guess the demand for Classic wrongly (which is very easy to do since thereâs no boxes to sell at all, no seperate subs, and rereleasing an MMORPG from 15 years ago doesnât help exactly either in knowing how the current years people will react), and will not have overwhelming interest in the game instead, which is absolutely possible given thereâs no MMORPG experience like it anymore, and hasnât been for a long while out there.
If they have much more interest than they thought, itâs only going to increase the time layering will stay in the game, as Blizzard depends on having the layers collapse to 1 layer as quickly as possible in order for this to work out in their eyes.
Thereâs still other ways to do this though, as some of us suggested in earlier threads. Blizzard does have the advantage to look back and reflect on this modern approach this time, and evaluate what aspects of the game will be affected by layering, and how much.
Right now, even from just an experienced player PoV, itâs possible to see that this is not going to be providing the authentic vanilla game they set out for with Classic, but rather change it into a modern version of the game for a good part of itâs first weeks and months, in a time where the community has to be able to form properly, guided by the games design.
I personally donât put much stock in what Mark Kern has to say. I think the hype built up around the man far exceeds what he can actually be given credit for.
I highly doubt this will be detrimental in the long run. Less than ideal at the start to be sure, but I think you are over selling the problem.
Ultimately this highlights the biggest reason I have for not wanting to play classic. I donât think the levelling experience in classic was good. In fact it felt like a chore even then. I did it because I wanted to join my friends in the end game content. (I just realised I quoted the wrong part, but Iâm on my phone and cbfd fixing it at this point).
The best thing wow changed when it came to levelling was scaling the zones. Classic levelling pretty well railroaded you into going to a set selection of zones at select levels, and unlike now where you will chose certain zones based on efficiency, or because you really like them, in classic you didnât have a choice where to level from 30-35. You were stuck with maybe 3 places to go. Every time you leveled. To say nothing of how poorly paced and placed quests were.
In 2005 when there was no conception of an alternative this was something you simply put up with to get to the part of the game you actually wanted to play. I have no desire to go back.
In short: I did Hemet Nessingwary quests in STV 8 times before the cataclysm. I played the waiting for elevators game in 1kN 8 times. Iâve more than had my fill.
Honestly I think this is how it will play out: the dedicated will stay around the same levels from launch until around the 4 week mark when they cap. Layering will be needed for that huge clump of people. These will also be the people that are the veterans, the people who know about what the community was like and donât need to be taught about it.
The people who didnât play then, the curious newcomers, will proceed at a far slower and more spread out pace, by the time the dedicated hit cap they probably wonât even be 40, and will likely be spread across the 15-35 range. When layering rolls back most will only just be hitting the part of the game (level 20) well the well designed questing areas disintegrate and the poor design of the mid levels that forced the community to behave the way it did back then. They will get that education.
In short: I think layering will be fine, the people who need it likely wonât be effected by it, and the people who might be affected by it wonât need the lessons it teaches and will have the rest of the next few years of the game as it was.
Eonar on launch day for both TBC and WotLK had queues from 3 hrs up to 10 hrs (estimated). Only 2 people out of a 120 person (not characters, persons) guild toughed it out on Day 1. The rest of us spread our initial login over the next 2 or 3 days. Laggy in the initial areas (Hellfire, and Howling Fjord, Borean Tundra) even when we did get in; but, as stated before, we were of tougher stuff then and muddled our way through it. About Day 5 it was pretty much back to normal.
There were those on Eonar who had better experiences; it kinda depended on which part of the country a player was logging in from ⊠some west coasters had it a bit rougher than east coasters.
This is what i think most people getting outraged at layering donât seem to understand. We either have layering, or we have half a week of being unable to play. Iâll gladly take layering.
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Intelligent game designers and code writers who were working on the code that they created
Server queues and lag waves.
WOTLK had 2 starting zones.
They clearly stated they did this to avoid overloading Northrend as different areas ran on different servers (or w/e its called)
BC, they just HANDLED it! lol
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Thatâs a bold statement. I think youâd be surprised at âwhat they knowâ.
Do they CARE? Thatâs a different question.
I can know what you want, and not give 2 craps.
Iâve never had a trial account. Ive been playing since vanilla beta.
I never experienced 10h queues. But i knew people who did. And they didnât have trial accounts either.
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To be clear, and not to detract from my own point, but Vanilla has 6.
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Thatâs great.
I was responding to the BC and Wotlk question though.
Having all those area in Vanilla to start in will definitely help the load.
Actually, we would have been quite happy. Partly because we werenât obsessed with recreating the community, because we already had it, but partly because we all wanted to play. We accepted a version of dynamic respawns (which was horrible for front runners BTW) but weâd have happily taken layering back then if it got us onto the server.
IMO if it werenât for this obsessive disregard for reality, people wouldnât be anywhere near as concerned about layering. Theyâd be clamouring to fix the exploits, and that would be it. Back then, if youâd seen layering for a week or two, it would have been an oddity, and youâd have dismissed it and kept playing. You wouldnât have quit in boredom if you always saw a serverâs worth of people around you.
And none of that started until very late Wrath and into Cataclysm. Flying wasnât seen as a problem when they built the worlds for flying. TBC and Wrath were designed to allow you to fly, and it worked well. It wasnât until Wrathâs connected realms, cross realm LFG and other community issues, that the community started to falter.
My longest ones were about 4 hours, in TBC. You were really lucky, and I wasnât a trial.
Especially since Blizzard has never merged realms, so thatâs not a Vanilla option. (If anyone can provide evidence of a true merge, not Connected realms, Iâd accept it)
Actually, theyâre looking at it like a game producer who needs to avoid the negative media response of a bad launch with heavy queues, and the negative feedback of dead realms down the road.
We all lose Classic if Blizzard goes bust.
Theyâve also repeatedly said that they have one shot to get a smooth launch, and they donât want to repeat Vanilla (or TBCâs) long queues, server crashes, and long term problems of population.
Balderdash. Thatâs absolutely nonsense. Firstly it will be a few weeks. Secondly, if a few weeks of having a 9k population where you can see 3k of them, will disrupt the population, then having a 3k population which turns into a 1k population three weeks in, will have FAR MORE NEGATIVE RAMIFICATIONS.
You want dead severs? Because thatâs how you get dead servers.
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Didnât we get free game time during either TBC or Wrath because of the servers crashing so much because they couldnât handle it?
I do remember the death knight area being a big problem at first, only one player could escort koltira deathweaver at a time and people where gathered around to be the first one to click that gossip option.
The battle for lights hope was really awesome though, it was the first quest that was a world event and players could just join in at any time, you might do the whole thing or you might just run in while the lich king was finishing his last line and you still got credit, it was so fun back then, we needed more of those kinds of quests.
Speak for yourself. There were multihour queues for RPPVP server launch, and âyou wonât be able to see most of the people on the serverâ layering would have been an absolutely unacceptable solution when people were forming guilds and creating the community.
âBlizzardâs new game is so popular, people are queueing for 6 hours to get inâ is not bad publicity; quite the opposite, itâs about the best publicity you can get. Any producer worth their salt would realize that.
Canât repeat the launches of the only two expansions that showed substantial customer growth, no, no! Gotta repeat the ones that caused the game to tank!
Blizzardâs approach, which treats Classic as another dose of PVE content instead of as a way to form long lasting server communities, will result in most or all the servers being dead within a year anyway.
great question OP , is funny to read all excuse why he need layering so much in 2019 , and you dont have this the last 15 year ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
this forum have so much fail manipulation , some user work hard to be mvp
At the TBC launch? Was it a fresh server for TBC??
It would have been, in 2004. Today its âBlizzard, with its long history of spectacular crashes and insufficient capacity has yet again failed to have a smooth launch of a WoW productâ.
No-one ever lauded Blizzard for their rocky launch days.
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