At 6:00 during this interview with ion, he states layering will be gone after first few weeks, and he understands it is not classic wow with layering.
7 Likes
Yeah but see…I make it my personal mission in life to wake up every morning and ask myself “Have done I enough to slam these people who make a video game on the internet?” If I can’t answer “Yes” to that, I don’t really care what Ion says; the mission comes first.
24 Likes
Blizzard also officially stated that the bear nerfs of patch 2.0.10 were based off of “internal testing” instead of forum QQ. Yet so obvious was the brokenness that a hotfix has to be implemented that ANY amount of testing, internal or otherwise, would’ve identified before hand
Just because a statement is official doesn’t mean it isn’t a flat out lie.
4 Likes
Death Knights in Wrath were released in such a broken state that literally no other class could 1v1 them, and it was usually difficult to even 2v1 them.
Blizzard outright abandoned Warlords of Draenor halfway through the expansion and delivered a half-hearted patch that gave Twitter integration rather than something new to do.
Hunters in the MoP Beta were pressing all their cooldowns and outright one-shotting people with Stampede for months before MoP’s release date, but it still took Blizzard almost 2 months to give it any substantial nerf.
Mission tables in WoD were met with overwhelming negativity, so Blizzard of course re-implemented them for the next 2 expansions rather than discontinuing them as the playerbase would prefer.
And then of course the infamous “You think you do, but you dont”.
A healthy amount of skepticism of Blizzard’s promises and design goals is good, because they’ve dropped the ball so many times and failed on so many promises and fallen short of so many of their own standards that expecting anything less would be insane.
But still, I have hopes that they’ll pull through this time.
10 Likes
How will Herod be handled than without layering? How long can we expect queues to be without layering?
1 Like
Your talking about retail
They will have massive queues, because blizzard clearly did not have a cap on the pop. We have no idea how many layers, players per layer, or how many are going to leave after the tourism wears off. It is clear that if blizzard has an idea, they did not structure the limits to reflect it.
2 Likes
6:06
Ion promised and we will hold him to it.
Thanks for the link.
1 Like
Yea i did think there was supposed to be a server cap? But with how many people are om herod that doesnt seem to be the case does it?
No, I’m talking about Blizzard. Specifically, Ion’s promises and design path while in charge of things at Blizzard.
Retail is run by the same people who are at the wheel of Classic. Dont forget that.
He is working under the assumption that “The Drop” will happen after a few weeks.
If it doesn’t layering will be around much longer.
2 Likes
Or they’ll open more realms, which they’ve already stated they’re ready to do.
2 Likes
And how well did Blizzard predict demand when the servers crashed during name reservations?
This is a prediction of active users; not a promise.
If they wait until a few weeks after launch to open the extra servers people wont populate those in the same way.
It will begin the early stages of two of the bigger problems in retail. Faction imbalance and Dead servers.
2 Likes
There was indeed no cap, but there were “indicators” in the way of low/medium/high, which they repeatedly lowered during the day “adjusting the algorithm”. Making the servers appear more full after the fact. There SHOULD have been caps based on what they predicted to be the desired number of players per layer, per server, with the predicted exodus numbers incorporated. They could have raised the caps over time, but the way they did it was in essence the exact opposite. No caps and they adjusted the indicators the wrong way. On day 1 the indicators showed that pops were lower than they should have, which led to the adjustment of the labels after the damage was already done.
They should not have allowed the servers to get out of control and then attempt to squash them back down after the fact. They should have had caps and raised them slowly, allowing those not committed to a specific server to properly disperse.
Lastly, rather than waiting 2 days before opening up the added server, that should have happened day 1, while people were still fighting for names. Why? Because opening it 2 days after the fact is not attractive to players who would be risking the names they managed to snag on day 1.
The optics are of severe lack of foresight and flexibility on blizzard’s part.
I would honestly love to believe that blizzard actually has a plan, and that they actually understand the demand for classic. They have yet to demonstrate it, however.
2 Likes
I think its pretty obvious at this point that it is going to be in the game for longer than a few weeks.
1 Like
Then it becomes a matter of players being obstinate. There is no perfect solution here that pleases everyone. Opening with tons of realms means some realms die off and people scream. Opening with too few realms causes queues and people scream. Temporary layering and opening new realms as needed is the most adaptable solution I’ve seen. Frankly, I didn’t know Blizz was capable of actually thinking outside the box still but they surprised me here.
Either way, its plainly obvious that people here are going to scream at Blizzard no matter what happens.
3 Likes
Here in lies the issue, what is your interpretation to a few weeks compared to Blizzards? If they expect a 2 year roll out for all 6 phases(that would be 104 weeks), 10-15 weeks is a few in comparison. I still think layering will be there until patch 2, which will, IMO, release around the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday season.
Yes, this is going to happen no matter what but the deeper problems that come from opening servers too late CAN be prevented.
While i have zero insider knowledge, there have been several indications that blizzard is vastly underestimating the coming storm and once its upon us, it will be too late.
They could have predicted player behavior by looking at retail. Nearly all of the highly populated servers are original release servers. People don’t want to move and new players want to go to the high pop realms because that’s where the action is. For better or worse that’s what players do.
Blizzard could have taken this into account but instead they are repeating their mistakes. It’s astonishing really. They had a chance to release the game a second time and they’re making the same choices that ultimately lead to dead realms and sharding.
1 Like