No it’s not. Blizzard published official sub numbers back then. They were increasing by literally millions of players during that stretch. Not sure what you’re even getting at? You’re saying it’s a fallacy “because we don’t know if they quit after hitting the level cap?” lol… What?!
Subs went up by millions of people and you think concurrent users went down?
No I don’t think concurrent users went down. Here, allow me to explain with an example.
So Bob is playing WoW, and he’s having a great time leveling. He’s in a raiding guild so when he hits the cap he just transitions right into raiding mode and keeps playing.
Steve is also playing WoW, he’s also having a great time. But he doesn’t have the time for raiding, so after hitting the cap and spending a few weeks running dungeons, he’s out of content to do. So he quits until the next update.
At the same time, Adam and Eve are getting into WoW for the first time. Rolling two new characters, and starting out at level 1.
Net gain from this transaction? +1 subscribers, thus the subscriber count goes up, concurrent users goes up, even though someone hit max level and quit.
This has devolved so much I have no idea what point you’re even trying to make.
The bottom line is that Blizzard doesn’t know what changes the population will undergo. When Classic was originally launched, subs skyrocketed for its entire duration. However, the last 5 xpacs have seen a small spike at launch, and then a rapid decline. And now they’re going to be running two WoW games in parallel, something they’ve never done.
They have no clue how this will all work out, and for that reason, they should have had a better plan than layering.
Sure thing champ, I’m sure the server engineers who do this for a living will realize that Classic will somehow be unique in the history of online game launches and be properly prepared.
The same server engineers who got caught with their pants down during Vanilla and had to scramble to put more online so their game would stop crashing? The same server engineers who let factions get so imbalanced on PvP servers that there was literally a single one out of like 60 that was close to a 50:50 split? The same server engineers who brought us the fan-favorite phasing/crz/sharding features? The same server engineers who let performance get so bad that 40v40 WPvP is completely unplayable?
You sure have a lot of baseless confidence in these people.
Yeah, they might have to come up with solutions to those problems. Maybe they could like, layer a server so that big spike of launch players will be distributed properly and not overwhelm the server. And then its pretty important to avoid disruptive server merges so you might have to have low-pop servers share with high pop. Kind of like, i dunno, crossing realms.
Yeah it should, like there should have been localized EU servers and RP-PvP realms as well. Duh.
I meant Blizzard should implement this only for the starting zones not that it will …
Layering technology cannot be used on a zone-to-zone basis because it isn’t designed to alleviate zone population. It is a countermeasure against dying server populations beyond phase 1.
By 2014 WoW had 100 million different accounts created yet the highest peak of active subs was 12 million. You do the math.
I have not seen any Blue post about how they count players for capping server size. if it’s number of toons the count can be way off. If they count individual accounts that have toons on the server is a better count. I may have 5 toons but can only play 1 at a time so why should the other 4 be counted in the population number?
My fear about layering is if Blizzard over estimate the number of tourists they may come down the road and say oops high pop servers cannot have layering turned off so high pop servers have layering indefinitely, and probably would just leave layering on all servers because it’s less work for them.
On the flip side if they under estimate the tourist count then we have dead servers. The same issue if they never implemented layers and simply opened more realms.
Of course more realms costs more money and I suspect that is a bigger decision point to the bean counters than overall health of the game long term.
So exactly like how no layering solves it? Just roll on a high pop server if you don’t want a low pop realm that’s exactly how it worked in the past.
No, how it worked is a handful of servers ended up overpopulated with long queues while the rest ended up lifeless with unhealthy economies and no way to enjoy content.
Actually, they did. The servers had massive queues during the first few weeks of TBC release, which then died away again after a while.
Jebus. Scale. Do you not understand any of this?
I mained on one of those “lifeless” low pop realms and the community was exponentially better than any of these realm-splitting infrastructures. Fact is the game kept growing from vanilla-wotlk before any of these were implemented so they were obviously better than when they were implemented and subs/communities dropped. Tons of people in modern WoW say they feel no connection to random strangers and I haven’t become friends with anyone out in the world for 5 expansions because I never see them again.
Maybe you should start adding people to your btag friendlist. But that would require actually caring to meet people and make lasting friendships.
What you and people like you actually want is the illusion of community wherein you needn’t exert effort to interact with others, you party up for a quest or two, then drop group and move on having satisfied your desire for ‘spontaneous low-committment’ socialization for that session.
How am I going to add or meet someone I never physically see because of layering?
Exactly the opposite. That is what modern WoW is and a big reason nobody meets people in the world anymore. No layering means you would actually form bonds that strengthen with these people as you meet them throughout the world.
In modern WoW I can’t name a single person on my server that I have seen out in the world because it’s all a phase blur just like layering will be. Back in vanilla-wotlk I knew everyone on the server, I knew which zones people prefered and I knew where in the city they liked to hang out. I knew who were the kind players and who were the bad ones. I knew if there was a battle in Hillsbrad that I would be in that battle instead of phased into a new realm.
Splitting the realm kills the world.
You keep using this word fact. I do not think it means what you think it means. But here’s a fact for you. WoW launched with around a half a million players. They were about 8 million before TBC. Do I expect that amount of growth? Probably not.
It’ll start off a lot higher than Vanilla did though. Which is why I concede the purpose for layering. But I think the population will continue to grow. The solutions you listed split the community, break up friendships and guilds. Like the OP I fear the conditions needed to remove layering will never come.
And Blizzard’s statistics and metrics have been unreliable for a long time. So that argument means nothing to me.
No layering means a lot of people won’t meet anyone at all due to sitting in a queue for hours.
Then, they’ll get to 60 months and realize their server is dead.