I still have a distant belief that it won’t be turned off until they shut down the Classic WoW servers in the distant future. I personally feel that they can’t actually handle massive populations in zones anymore and they are hoping that people become silient and complacent to it and just accept it.
Kind of like a kid being abused. I feel like a abused child, and I am screaming “look around this is awful” and everyone has stockholm syndrome telling me to shutup because “Papa actiblizz” is on our side and everything is going to be okay.
I agree with what you’re saying. The question is how long of a queue are we dealing with, and can I see the “greater good” in it? If I’m suddenly hit with up to a 1-hour queue to login, I’ll think, “Not bad for a healthy server.” If I’m gobsmacked with regular 1+ hour-long queues, I’ll be sharpening my pitchfork and lighting the torches because Blizzard seriously messed something up.
It’s not 2004. The percentage of “tourists” in Classic WoW is going to be far, FAR greater than it was in 2004.
Scaling servers like it’s 2004 is only going to result in dozens of dead servers in 6 months. Blizzard knows this. Many players know this. Layering is their attempt to avoid this problem.
I didn’t hit queues very often, but that was because I lived on the east coast at the time, and I was often already logged into the game by 4PM on most days. Others in my guild/raid saw login queues that often took anywhere from 40 to 90 minutes to get through when they tried to login between 6PM and 7PM.
We also did a fair bit of this:
And luckily people DID take up those offers when they were made, but it generally turned out that not enough people did so, and another free migration would be offered in a few months. But at least the queue sizes shrank for awhile.
If they stay that true to vanilla it will be around that number.
Judging by how layering works, working by your numbers, if they allow, say, 3 layers before capping off the server, you’re looking at 9000 players, potentially.
While that wouldn’t be a big deal for the hardware, it would be noticeably more crowded in-game.
People who want to play will play.
People who don’t want to deal with it will come back in a few days.
People who don’t want to play will just go play World of Worldquest: Petshop and Dressup for Azeroth
I am still unconvinced of this (feel free to bookmark and “told you so” if I’m wrong- I’ll own up). I think the inaugural launch of Vanilla probably saw a lot more of an influx than a re-release a decade and a half hence will. Call me crazy, but this isn’t a new product so it won’t have that new draw to it. MMOs were niche and even “fringe” back in '04; they are a known quantity now and other IPs like FFXIV likely are soaking up enough MMO players to dull the edge of Classic’s release somewhat. The only thing that will blow the curve on this is Blizzard failing to prepare for what demand there actually is, and giving us too lean a server list.
ohh no! i wasn’t picked to test it. I wasn’t a streamer shill. I couldn’t get in on the stress test either because the login Q crashed over and over.
I think they have setup a system that will be smoother than what is currently on BFA but I still don’t think that they will be able to handle massive server clashes in hillsbrad anymore. Lag is expected, i don’t mind it. There is this mindset that artificially controlling things to make it smooth for literal babies is better than just letting things happen.
I might be wrong! I really hope I am. Layering might be gone in a few weeks and world pvp will be amazing and untouched by layering.
Until then i will scaremonger as that druid says i do, and i will continue here. I will say this. I don’t trust AAA companies or any Blizzard execs atm, and i probably will never trust them again.
You’re forgetting that there was a “physical media constraint” on how many people could hammer the game back in 2004. You had to have a physical copy of the game in order to even log into it. After the initial release, they even “throttled” the release of new copies of the game to make sure they didn’t further overwhelm the servers.
There is no physical copy requirement this time around, so no throttle limiting the rate at which players can enter the game.
there will still be layers, most servers will just be dead. even blizzard knows it,
they don’t need to do anything like that if players spread out, but they do, because they know that most people will be picking the same realms before overflowing into other realms.
Well, there’s also realm layer caps, so that servers will collapse back down. I imagine a lot of the tourists will be streamer fanbois who leave after the non-Classic streamer does.
Second is the anemic second stress test. Very little participation, apparently, and it caught Blizzard by surprise (reading between the lines a bit, but there it is).
Third is the truncated beta test at level 40, with the remainder being done “internally.” This is the most tuned portion of the game, in theory, so it boggles as to why they’d pull the plug before the beta crowd got that far. And we all know how spotty the beta participation was toward the end there (which could also be a product of Blizzard under-populating their own beta).
Lastly is the timing of the final stress test. Thursday at 11am PDT? That’s dead center in everyone’s work day- including Blizzard’s. It tells me they aren’t throwing any extra resources at Classic (such as developer over-time, weekends, etc.) because something is telling them not to bother. Alternatively, the budget just isn’t there for Classic because of internal reasons that dovetail into this not being an anticipated bull like the original launch was.
Bliuzzard’s devs have been very forthright about this one. Classic is a much simpler game in terms of handling large player populations.
As the tech improved, they added more features/abilities for the players which leveraged that additional tech. Retail has over-leveraged the tech, while Classic WoW has none of those “new features” which created the over-leveraged problem retail had. Hosting a Classic population is an absolute cake-walk compared to retail. There isn’t anywhere close to as much “server overhead” to deal with on a per-player basis.
This was due to requiring subs, from a player base that is mostly not subbed.
Because they don’t want it to be like Retail PTRs where the entire game has been played out on streamer screens long before the content is released (again).
And 8pm in CEDT.
It tells me they’re trying to ensure that the European infrastructure is all put together, because they already tested the US infrastructure last time.
It boggles my mind sometimes, how narrow-focused US citizens are about the rest of the world.