I was curious if we know how many servers there will be (hopefully few to keep populations stable) since I run a recruitment discord and people are asking to advertise classic guilds already.
I want to have it set up by realm/faction. Since vanilla had no transfers, I can’t imagine that classic would.
When will we have the realm names/information? We’d like to be organized going into Classic. Thanks so much!
Nobody knows but I would expect at least 30-40.
Why would you expect that? That seems insanley high.
No it isn’t. I might be low-balling it actually.
I would guess more servers cause 40 at 3k a pop is only 120k, i feel we will have more then that
So agree 30 to 40 is low balling it
Blizzard is likely calculating how many realms they want or need based on Beta opt-in and the recent stress test. It will probably be similar in size to Vanilla launch.
Vanilla launched with about 90 servers or so, with the population about 240k at launch (200k accounts first day, with 100k players logged in concurrently).
With layering in place, or limited sharding at launch, the question is whether Blizzard should consider post-launch shrinkage as the populations flock to specific servers to prevent the problem of empty realms. Maybe fewer realms, with higher populations.
Layering is likely going to support more players, but if Vanilla numbers still hold, you can expect about 20-25k players per server with 3k+ online at any one time.
The demo had 20…
I think he’s right. 30-40 probably. They’re going to use layering to have as few servers as possible. But you’re still talking squeezing millions of players into those servers. I also agree that’s low-balling it, as I don’t anticipate a big player dropoff. I think they should have more, but will probably end up adding servers very quickly and offering free transfers off the most populated ones.
I say do like what i hear those p servers do, just let some dynamite respawns in for zones under 20
The players will group up and progress and once 20 hits, their should be enough of a spread of players
This is what layering is supposed to do, rather than dynamic respawns. In order to keep to Vanilla respawn rates, they’re splitting the players into shards, rather than increasing the respawn rates.
Either solution is not 100% vanilla, so Blizzard’s taken to the solution that eases server load and focuses on individual experience rather than the communal experience.
I know my realm is picking one classic server to focus on. I just think 30-40 servers is overkill. We have live realms with 40k people so there shouldn’t be an issue having that many on newer technology.
Formula:
Goal: 3k active players at peak times.
Assume 40% of all Monthly Active Users are active at any given peak time, means you need:
5,000 Monthly Active Users per server.
So simply divide your expected population at 3 months, by the number of servers.
For me, its 500,000 across US and EU. Splitting that roughly even, its about 50 servers to hold the US population.
I expect about 30 with how layering works. If it isn’t enough they can just add more. The whole point of layering is to try to not go all in and end up with abandoned servers.
There will be too few servers at launch.
Prior to launch you will also be able to subscribe earlier to reserve up to three names. This probably means the initial Realm list will be available since otherwise you won’t be able to choose which Realm your names will be reserved on.