Blizzard is going to drastically increase the server cap populations. How will increasing the overall server caps impact the experience?
First, a quote from Blizz:
Hazzikostas said “aiming at launch for much higher concurrency caps on our individual servers than what was possible” .
“It’s actually vaguely related to the sharding that we have in Battle for Azeroth. But it’s actually running multiple entire copies of the world. Rather than copies of individual zones, there will be three entire copies of Azeroth, each with their own populations equal to what a launch server back in 2006 would have been. When you log in you’ll move seamlessly throughout that world, but we can load balance between them.
After a few weeks, Hazzikostas says, population caps will go up and players should spread out a little more. Once that happens, all of those realms will “collapse down to a single cohesive world per realm, no sharding or anything like it. But that will help us manage the early day player load while still keeping healthy populations in the long run.”
So this means instead of capping a server population, you will be able to log into the game and be placed into one of three layers. This keeps launch bottlenecks from occurring as all of the players start out. This addresses some issues in a positive way, but also leaves new issues in it’s wake.
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They will use the new layering technology to make sure the actual world is not overcrowded. But, that still changes the overall experience of the world. For starters the auction house and economy. You will have different layers, but I am assuming the same auction house. Therefore, your auction house has 3x the effective population of any classic server. This changes the economy drastically. You could see an economical difference in vanilla on high pop servers vs low pop servers. However in vanilla WoW, high pop servers still had a population cap. So you are basically taking an old vanilla high pop server and possibly doubling or tripling that cap.
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You also have the potential to abuse the layering system by layer hopping, which is switching between layers. (Each layer is it’s own copy of Azeroth). This was seen in Everquest classic servers when they layered dungeons. Some have pointed out you can put restrictions on layer hopping. but there are still possibilities for abuse. A rare spawn isn’t up on your layer? Contact a buddy or guildie who’s in a different layer and join his group, so you can transport to the new layer and grab the rare spawn there.
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What about when the layers collapse? If each layer has 2-3k players, at what point in time does this allow for these layers to collapse? Private servers use dynamic spawns, etc, but WoW classic would not be. So what happens when you have the layers collapse and the server population is still incredibly high compared to a classic server? It seem’s like a huge issue. I suppose they are assuming the population will dip after the initial hype wears off, but what if it doesn’t on some servers? There is no possible way the layers can be collapsed into one server with a population that high.
The dev team said that layers will be gone by phase 2 last week at their invitational. However, if the population doesn’t dip, it would be chaos. There would not be enough NPCS, etc to sustain a server with that high of a population. They would then have to add permanent layering or sharding, or dynamic spawns, all of which have their own issues. For instance, perma layering would mean there are multiple spawns of World bosses, etc.
Conclusion:
I like the idea of layering over sharding at initial launch. but it still has it’s own problems. One of those problems is creating an insanely high population on the server that is triple that of classic WOW. Server population has drastic changes on the overall experience.
-PvP. An example here would be trying to get a higher rank while competing agaisnt triple the amount of people of a vanilla WoW server. It was already hard enough to grind out ranking on a 3k pop server, it would be even more competitive on a server with 3x that.
-Economy and Auction House- This affects all stages of the classic gameplay, even if all layers are later condensed into one.
-Future issues when layers are supposedly suppose to collapse into one world. For instance, if server population remains high on all layers, you simply cannot collapse the layers without creating other major issues.
Is it better to simply put more servers into the game rather than layer each server with 3 layers? Vanilla WoW had server population caps, which determined the size of your community. Community is the fundamental principle of vanilla WoW. The size and population of that community changes the experience. There was never a vanilla server with with 3x the population limit. Population size is a big factor in classic WoW and it matters. Increasing the concurrent server cap does not seem like the experience that is most similar to classic, which is the primary goal of classic. Do you guys have any other issues or ideas that come to mind with the increase in server cap and the use of layering?