So given the choice, do we want accolades, or customer growth? I guess you disagree, but me, I’d pick the customer growth.
No-one ever said “Hey, Blizzard royally flummoxed their launch. That sounds like a great game!” either.
Growth was from good gameplay and rewarding experiences. Not from sitting in a queue.
Detach your obsession with “Everything old was good” from the reality of human nature. No-one liked the launch experience. We put up with it because we knew how good the rest of the game was.
We would have given our left arm’s to have layering during TBC and Wrath launches. Same goes for around March 2005. The Vanilla launch wasn’t an issue with queues, but once it got popular we had them.
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Human nature is that people like to get together in huge crowds for special events. You might have “put up with” various launch queues, but many people loved that experience. Again, the RPPVP server launch was a good example: there were weeks of buildup and excitement, everyone expected queues, people made sure they were available exactly on time to be one of the few that got in early. It’s like the people who camp out the night before big movie launches to make sure they’re in line for the first showing.
To answer your earlier question, the BC launch was similar for those who were similarly excited about it. Others simply waited a day or two for the queues to die down. The time spent in queue was balanced by the excitement of finally getting in.
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People love queues? I’m guessing that was a pre-organised group independent of the queue, since you don’t get any sense of crowd by being alone with a number. Or your “reminiscence” is a bit polished.
I have never had a sing along around a gas stove, in a WoW queue.
People chatted on the forums while waiting in queue; no preorganization was required. Human nature doesn’t change just because the world is going digital.
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As someone who was on the forums during TBC launch…
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. That place was a dumpster fire of angry abuse and demands for more servers. It was not a bunch of people enjoying their 4 hour waits and happily making friends.
Every single one of those players, the 6 million or the 11 million, did NOT (1) purchase the expansion day 1 and (2) log in that day. TBC is recorded as selling 2.4 million copies day 1. Wrath is recorded as selling 2.8 million copies day 1.
Those numbers are global. If you assume it divides by three (NA, EU, Asia), TBC and Wrath each had a bit less than a million per region able to log in and access the new content.
Blizzard changed how their realms work in a region. During vanilla, TBC, Wrath, there were literal server blades in data centers. A realm had a blade for Eastern Kingdoms, a blade for Kalimdor, a blade for instances (dungeons and BGS), a blade for Outlands (and new race starting zones), and a blade for Northrend.
Every realm was completely separated, so lower population realms saw very little issue, while high population realms saw massive queues at launch.
Finally, a big thing - with every expansion of World of Warcraft, the players who would be heading to the new content, who would buy in, are the ones with max level characters, the ones who already have characters on a realm. They weren’t all adding new characters.
WOW Classic is different in so many ways, most notably the fact that nobody on day 1 will have more than three names reserved (which may, or may not, involve actual characters created). There’s no box purchase, so there’s no way to know that 0.2 million will log in or 6 million will log in.
NOTE: Do not take this to mean I’m arguing on behalf of layering. I despise it for a variety of reasons. I’m just answering why WOW Classic release is so completely different from early expansion releases.
I think Northrend had 2 blades. Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, you had the choice of these 2 starting zones for this reason. They wanted the population divided into 2 blades IIRC for launch
From Wowwiki
To alleviate some of the problems experienced at the launch of the Burning Crusade expansion, players are able to choose where to enter the continent more freely. Both Howling Fjord to the east and the Borean Tundra to the west feature level 68+ content, and it is possible to level all the way to 72 without visiting both
(if Northrend were 1 blade, 2 starting zones wouldn’t alleviate anything)
You’ve proven over and over again that you can’t hold yourself in a discussion without resorting to personal assumptions like these, directed to those of differing viewpoints in an attempt to get your point across. Which funnily enough always accurately describes your way of thinking.
I’ve seen the way you talk with others, and it’s always the same. I’ve just had a nice discussion with someone coming off strong at first, and yet even though we started off on a bad foot, and disagreed on the issue it hand, it turned into much more of a productive and valuable discussion then I’d end up having with you again.
Makes sense, given that you’re the one trying to justify changing an old game to be something it’s not, and expect everyone to fold over at the thought of having very temporarily more server stability, and less queues.
You can keep on staying in your own framework you laid out for yourself to believe in, disregarding facts that don’t fit within it, and keep on aggressively try to convince others who happen to see things differently to adopt your same opinion because it’s “the only reality”, as you make it out to be. And anyone who’s not in your reality regarding this, aka comes from a different viewpoint, is delusional to you. When in fact it’s just a different opinion on the matter. ![:face_with_raised_eyebrow:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/face_with_raised_eyebrow.png?v=6" ":face_with_raised_eyebrow:")
I’ll say this: save your breath on me. Because unless you show some flexibility in your stance, or some form of having an open mind, i have no reason to spend my time trying to understand and explore your viewpoint directly with you when you have absolutely no intention of understanding where me and others who take issue with layering are coming from.
You dismiss our concerns with this clearly problematic system as being out of this reality, and can’t even say that the way you see things is simply your personal viewpoint that you try to explain to others.
Instead you declare your opinion on the matter as the only one based on reality, and anyone differing from it is therefore completely out of this world with their opinion on anything to do with the topic. That’s just seriously dishonest and not worth any discussion, which is why i’ll have no part in it. Good luck.
I’m not trying to change an old game. I’m trying to see a successful launch of Classic, a recreation of an old game. Like I said, you can’t accept that its no longer 2004.
No flexibility? You are literally espousing an inflexible fantasy about people happy with queues in TBC and Wrath and even Vanilla, despite the reality of those times being rage, disappointment, and bad press.
If you were flexible, you’d accept that we have to have some sort of 2019 solution to fix the 2019 problems. You don’t because you are inflexible and unwilling to accept the reality of the modern world.
on illidan I had to have my gf start the log in process 3 hours before I got off work so it would be almost up when I got home
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Thanks for proving my point again.
I’ve nowhere stated anything like the playerbase being happy when they face queues or instabilities at launch, if you cared to read my arguments you’d know that.
I’ve said multiple times that regardless which way they go, people will be unhappy for some time no matter which decision they choose. They can piss off the modern audience by not using layering, or they can piss of the oldtimer core audience by giving them a different game than they expect. People will be pissed, that’s a guarantee.
That’s why in order to help Blizzard, i alongside of others of this viewpoint have suggested alternatives that also assist with launch and beyond, but in a way that allows the game to be as authentic as it can be today. It focuses on making the core audience happy, and also keeps in mind the new people or simply curious. As in, the core audience will be spared the big bulk of anger, while the modern audience is going to be flaming because there’s no layering or sharding like in the retail game they’ve grown familiar with.
You keep on trying to make it seem like it’s impossible to do launch the game without anything like layering, which again, is just simply not the case, especially in 2019. Blizzard have made WoW a success with much less at hand when releasing early WoW’s with heavy traffic times, like millions of players at a launch.
Now more than ever they have the tech to pull this off, and resources to allow them to adapt swiftly to demand.
The fact you keep repeating i’m supposedly not accepting reality really starts to make me worried for you. Not only because it’s seems so dishonest and grasping at straws, but because you really seem to believe that, no matter how much you’re proven completely wrong just by simply reading and acknowledging what i’ve said.
As one of the old timer core audience, I’ll be pissed off if they don’t use layering.
But clearly you refuse to actually discuss the points I raised, so I’m out. I answered the questions of the OP long ago.
Same. Old timer coming back here. Everyone HATED when the new expansions came out and you were stuck waiting in queue and then stuck in a laggy zone with hundreds of other people, and desperately trying to tag quest mobs before other people.
People were raging on the forums about it and asking why Blizzard wasn’t doing something about it.
With the current state of entitlement from people I imagine it would only be worse now. Whatever problems that layering may bring at the start they are bound to be better than them doing nothing and everyone having to wait an hour to even log on.
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This is why I think they’re planning to use Layering in Retail to help with launches.
They were just fine without sharding/layering and subs increased throughout the expansion because the game is exponentially improved without it. The first few days had ques and crowded zones but with so many varying playstyles this soon dispersed and the game was better for it in the long term. They also added it because they were worried about some low-pop servers. I was on a low-pop server and let me tell you it was so much better than when sharding/layering was implemented. With the low pop we still had a great community and progressed at our own pace relative to the server. Blizzard would also offer free transfers off high-pop realms and some of those players would come to our server.
Blizzard is killing their game by adding in systems that add momentary relief but poison the game long term. All signs point to the game being better before sharding/layering and it pains me they won’t even add a server option to play without it.
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And Layering will be removed once the crowd dies down, never to return.
Layering has never been implemented on a live server, and Sharding is to handle overpopulation. You’re talking about Connected Realms and Cross Realm zones, which Classic will not have.
And you’ll have this again if you pick a server that is unlucky enough to be 99% tourists and 1% players.
Why don’t they just put in sharding and limit it to the starting zones? The congested areas will be 1-20 but the problems with layering will mostly be those exploiting it farming rare mobs and resources in multiple layers. You don’t really expect them to take off layering fast enough do you? They would have to get rid of it within a week to avoid most of the damage it would cause and then deal with population control fallout. If they had a solid plan they would’ve revealed a date when it would be gone. It’s going to overstay its welcome and it’s going to wreck the game.
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Because of a concerted campaign here in the forums, demanding that they don’t do that. Where the primary concern was characters appearing and disappearing at zone borders, and mid quest.
So they came up with another technology that when working correctly will ensure people don’t disappear. They attempted to take the scalability of Sharding and make it feel like a single world for any given participant.
It may be removed within a couple of days if Classic is less successful, or as Ion promised, within a few weeks.
Yes people are against sharding the starting zones but it would be the lesser evil than having continent-wide non-level restricted layering. Weeks of layering is going to be a lot of time for people to exploit this and there’s no good reason to have this system in high level zones.
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