And hopefully Blizzard has already recognized that by that point, and is already shoveling new servers at it during the onboarding process.
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Because that option is a âClassic Experienceâ as free realm migrations for dealing with high realm populations were very much a Vanilla thing.
While Realm-mergers due to low populations didnât happen until after the Cataclysm.
The majority of their playerbase wonât encounter it. Only those people on over-represented servers like Streamer homes. And really, who cares about the streamers? 
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the full at the end of phase 1 realms will be the majority of the playerbase, and they will also affect all the other realms through transfers. everyone will be affected by forceful layer removals.
Only if they allow transfers.
so what, remove layers and force day long queues on people on full realms and donât allow people to transfer out of the queue? thatâd be even worse lol
Oh, theyâll âease into itâ If they have 9K player concurrency, theyâre not just going to turn layering off and create a 6K player âdeepâ queue to encorage free migrations. Theyâll start collapsing layers and forcing real queues to exist as they start offering free migrations. Probably about 600 players in queue to start with, with the queue getting progressively larger if people refuse to xfer.
but people want the true Classic experience, let that keep up for 4-6 months then open free migrations that nobody takes as they expect others to take it and leave their realm.
It shouldnât be in the game. The starting zones get clogged, people find ways out, over the course of 72 hour things smooth out. A leveling bubble bursts at around 20. If itâs too hard for you to compete for mobs feel free to come back later.
Life finds a way. Artificial features are not needed.
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Except for the layering part.
Yes, and they waited way too long and didnât go far enough. Kinda the point. No one wants to risk ending up on a dead server (even if getting there is free).
I tend to err on the side of Blizzard on this one, because the logic is sound. Simply put, âWe donât want more than one Kazzak up at a timeâ (referring to layered servers with multiple world mobs up on different layers). This is a logistical hard-stop for them that also makes a ton of sense, so I imagine come hell or high water they will turn the layering off when world mobs go live.
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vanilla didnât lure you onto a realm for month(s) and then randomly decide to introduce a super queue
Classic did indeed have stages where thousands suddenly followed random youtubers around and try to find them causing the population of the server (all low level characters) to balloon
Vanilla didnât have to contend with a âtourist issueâ that is likely to swamp entire realms for days at a minimum, weeks at worst.
Part of that was due to the differences in the logistics between the two releases. For the release scenario Classic is dealing with, Layering is the only âdecentâ option(not even âgoodâ) among a lot of bad ones.
maybe it did, but thatâs temporary. removing layers would be a permanent adjustment
I think I can count on one hand the number of queues I hit during the Vanilla era. The only consistent queues I saw after were during the Wrath launch (5+ hours- I took the free server xfer), and Cataclysm launch (up to 1 hour- just rode it out for the week).
That said, I understand that historically there were some Vanilla era servers known for their queue times, and exacerbated by constant crashes. Server migrations were a thing, for sure.
I have never been under the illusion that layering was going to be removed until absolutely necessary. The only hard statements Blizz has made about layering is that it will have to end by Phase 2 when the world bosses come out.
So Iâm kind of working under the assumption that it will never be turned off before then.
The only servers that will risk being dead in PVE servers. PVP servers will always be active and attractive. A huge part of Vanilla is world pvp. Itâs more of a player vs. player game than WoTLK, Cata, +âŚ
People who are so fearful of being killed while killing some dumb cat in STV are going to be the ones who find themselves on dead servers.
I like the cut of your gib! For the Horde!
they didnât suddenly get that way though. if you just remove layers from servers while theyâre still overpopulated, you go from no queue every day to a super queue every day, and most people will not be happy with that.