New server is opened, people migrate, it gets full, people are stuck in queue, repeat… Stop torturing your customers Blizzard, whats wrong with you?
Oh oh, but layers! in phase 2! go ask people in a queue if they care about how many layers they’re gonna have, nobody cares, at all. A couple of purists care but screw them, make a few big servers, obviously a lot of people want it, others can go play on smaller ones
I think there would be something to basically having a free for all with many more layers and over time forcibly reducing the layers to make queues of manageable size and also offering free server transfers to realms with lower populations.
In a few months, those low pop servers are going to want transfers to the fuller servers.
Hang in there, peeps! 5 hours left in my queue…
https://clips.twitch.tv/RacyZanyAardvarkDAESuppy
Layers have absolutely nothing to do with server queues.
If you have more layers, then more people will be able to log in, so there are few people waiting in queues.
Right now there are more than 3k people in each server thanks to layering
No. All layers do is limit the number of people that you can actually see at one time to about 3,000 or so to match what we saw in Vanilla.
A server places you in a queue because it has a finite cap of logged on players it will allow and requires that someone get off so that someone else can get on. Whether there were six layers or six hundred layers, the max number of players allowed on the realm would still be the same. Adding layers does not immediately equal increasing server capacities.
Now, they just increased the server capacities. THAT will result in more layers being created and should alleviate some of the queues.
I don’t think you quite understand what layering is for, or how it works.
You can’t just add layers and get rid of queues. The servers all have a limit of the number of players they can sustain. Blizzard thinks the number of players any particular zone can hold without excessive lag, and excessively poor game experience is much lower.
So to keep the number of players in each zone down to an almost reasonable number they add layers, thus increasing the sustainability of azeroths resources. Arbitrarily adding layers will not remove queues because queues are not created or negated by layering or the lack of layering.
New realms are filling up and hitting big queues because there’s simply that many people playing in the peak US hours. Try playing in non-peak hours say 1-2am. You won’t see queues.
As hype fades and so called (excuse the term please) “tourists” stop playing, you won’t see as many long queues in peak hours. Adding too many realms now is a permanent solution to a short term problem.
What if everyone’s wrong and the player base doesn’t shrink by 50+% in the coming months? That’s the best case scenario for everyone playing the game, and it’s solution is very easy. Slowly (VERY SLOWLY) add more realms, and offer a limited number of free player transfers from the highest population realms to the new realms. Again, adding too many realms too early in classics life span, can and will lead to a shortened life for classic.
So calm down, relax, and don’t get too frustrated by queues. Classic isn’t going anywhere, it’s here to stay.
first stickied thread on this forum
It’s not the point, the point is they said they could have a much bigger server cap but they chose not to. And they’re opening servers one by one, and this stupid strategy has failed
Another point is a lot of people if not most people don’t really care about layers or shards or whatever, they wanna play with a big community. So what was this limitation for?
That is the point…
They said the servers can hold many times more players than in 2004. A medium server today in Classic is more populous than even the highest populated servers were in 2004.
They have already upped the amount of players from 2004, they’re on record stating that each layer is roughly 2500-3000 players which is what an entire realm was during Vanilla. They simply don’t want to up the population cap further because they believe it could lead to more server issues, crashes, increased latency, and overall a general decline in player experience.
Even with layering in place I was in a group of 5 melee players last night trying to get 8 gnoll armbands and the amount of people in the area caused me to spend an entire hour trying to kill gnolls because there was just none alive for more than a few seconds. I don’t think anyone would enjoy that x10, plus lag.
A layer virtualizes continuous open world regions (like Kalimdor or Eastern Kingdoms) that are part of the world space (a “server”).
If 2 players (grouped or not) walk from Orgrimmar to Gadgetzan, they will see each other the entire trip because the layer is the same. The environment is virtualized; mobs, ore nodes and quest clickies, stuff like that is covered by this.
They have some leeway in tuning the layer concept I’m sure. But they are still bound by certain resources they still need to access and integrate with to operate the overall server world, which go beyond the purpose of layering for populated environment separation.
Shared server databases where they login, or read server-wide info, or update player state are shared by all players in all layers have increased load and stress with each layer added to a server. Any resource that isn’t independently cloned to support a new layer is at risk of this.
If you have 10 layers, you don’t have 10 distinct databases; more likely you just have some table schemas extended with columns like LayerId, and everyone is still slapped into the same database. Because even though we see the virtualization as a separation, behind the scenes it is still just a features of a huge server they have to maintain.
So, adding more layers isn’t as encapsulated an effect as we wish it were, and certainly not an easily horizontally-scaled setting they can just dial up.
What they can do, and IMO is what they are doing now, is increasing the per-layer cap (not the number OF layers) since players are much more diffused throughout the continuous zones in a layer now that everyone isn’t level 1-5. At launch they had to fit 100% of the layer population into like 6 starter areas and later that day spilling into probably another 6-10 city and level 5-10 areas. Each day that passes, they have a smaller % of the total population in any one place, and a much higher % of used zones.
As more distribution across levels progresses, they could opt to make the per-layer cap even larger.
Queues will be gone after one week, if not before, due to this.
Rather than tech being a limiting factor, it’s definitely more about the content itself.