This has never been the case. Ques solve themselves shortly and a non-layered 60 will last much longer than a layered 60.
I really get where your coming from. One of the things that drives me nutz is peoples refusal to use the in game voice chat system. They have always used systems that encourage selective isolationism. Itâs really a multi-faceted problem that has become continually prevalent in gaming over the years. A lot of it is with good intentions like avoiding harassment We isolate ourselves as much as we like to blame the systems in place. This has become a cultural and philosophical issueâŚ
Having no layering pushes people to socialize though. The system incentivized bonding and grouping to solve problems and what you did on the server resonated through the playerbase.
With layering people are going to layer dodge zones with faction imbalances, switch to layers with less populated questing zones, and miss any benefits or punishments of behaving good/bad. Same as they can in modern WoW so I think this is much more a system issue than a cultural/philosophical one. Other modern games have whole worlds and you can see the participation that happens so itâs much more the system.
I dunno, forced interaction isnt meaningful at all.
New player and new player retention is not a new battle. A museum game is doing nothing to draw in those new players. That is the fact of which I speak. Itâs not a new concept.
Thatâs not even the purpose of Classic. They are not attempting to pull in new players. They are making a viable place to play for people choosing to play on pservers.
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They are making a viable place to play for people choosing to play on pservers.
^^
This is right on the money âLiterallyâ
It is. You are more likely to meet friends from school, work, or a shared hobby than you are sitting in your house seeing nobody.
Itâs quite the opposite though. You are more likely to develop friendships recognizing a person youâve already seen in the world before, than just some random you got placed in a group with that youâll likely never see again. That latter is low commitment. Even irl, itâs just human nature. Youâre more likely to be friendly with someone youâve interacted with prior, than a random person.
I made about 10xâs the amount of friends before cross realm and sharding were implemented, because I kept running into the same people.
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Honestly your desired intent for this game happened completely by mistake in the first place and there is no way for the current incarnation of modern companies to âMonetizeâ it. We would have to self teach and create a new game as a labor of love and distribution in such a saturated market would lead to it not being vary successful. What happened in 2004 can just never happen again. There is always hope and we must always strive to roll that boulder up the hill no matter how many times it rolls back down. Your a hero man! We all want a great game and that social Phenomenon to experience. Itâs one of the great human experiences and itâs not just video games that give it to us. That one time a video game did it was World of Warcraft and August 27th is a celebration of that moment I think.
If it happened by mistake why do they say they know they shouldnât have layering and said they plan for it to be gone before phase 2? They are only putting it in because they canât accurately guess how many people are playing.
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You canât change human behavior on the scale you hope to do. People nowadays will sooner go and play something else.
Layering gives Classic its best chance at creating healthy long term server communities. Ultimately though, the responsibility of building those communities will lie upon the players. If they donât want to group up you canât force them to do so.
Donât forget the blatant ripoff of the pokemon franchise.
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I donât have to change anything, thatâs the beauty of human nature, to prefer a more familiar name or face.
It really doesnât though, it splits it.
What if I donât even see that player on my server because heâs in a different layer?
Back in the day, my server had guilds that held down certain locations, like Stromgarde Keep for instance. Anyone who tried to quest there, had to deal with them. Now, thereâs no saying if Iâd be in the same layer as them, so I wouldnât even know they existed on my server. Thatâs not how you build a community. You build community with name recognition, and player interaction. Something which has all but vanished in retail and is at risk of being absent in Classic if layering lasts longer than those first few weeks.
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If you donât see someone because they arenât on your layer then you were not meant to see them. Each layer will hold enough players to fill a vanilla-era server, which is roughly around 3,000 players.
So you think not seeing players on your server helps server communities?
In this particular instance, short term as it is, yes.
Short term, as in the first few weeks or beyond phase 1?
If you think not being able to consistently recognize players in the world is beneficial to server communities (beyond week 2), I think we have quite opposite definition of a what a SERVER community is.
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You donât know that. Theyâre making a recreation of Classic, and I expect the amount of players from private servers will be a very, very small percentage of that playerbase.
Look, Classic might have more active users six month after release than on launch day. I expect it will. The point I was making is that you repeatedly stating âBlizzard has their data and metrics to analyzeâ means nothing.
I donât think they know how to interpret data, or even what data has value. Certainly not from a game design perspective, and that extends to all avenues. I believe that fundamentally the higher ups at Blizzard have zero understanding of, or connection with, WoWâs playerbase. And âyou think you do, but you donâtâ is still the doctrine by which they operate in regards to Classic. Also, obviously I think theyâre drastically underestimating the amount of non-current players who are just waiting to hop into that Classic experience.
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Or youâre overestimating it.
Blizzard have said that they understand layering canât work past P1, as thatâs when the first world boss is added. Iâm giving them the benefit of the doubt. Theyâve already said if they still have a very high population theyâll remove layering anyway.
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