There was a portion of people who didn’t want batching in. People clamored for it and got it. Careful what you wish for applies here.
I totally believe that leeway and batching function as they did then. Within the same time and in the same way. It’s just far more noticeable now with 1) better everything all around for everyone and 2) we’ve all become far more accustomed to faster twitch gameplay.
So the jankiness of the bad systems that were in place then are more noticeable. The systems were bad then and are bad now. They were just needed then. Now they aren’t and we (I didn’t) shouldn’t have advocated for them to be in.
Which is no surprise. Including trial accounts there were over 100 million accounts made in Vanilla. They needed room for everyone who was trying the game, but 90% of the pop was made up of 1-2 week trials. Even a server that looked like it should be active could be dead for anyone 30+.
People that were asking for batching thought you could control it. There’s still people to this day that claim it’s not server batching that you can time your abilities with someone else’s to land in the same batch. It’s insane.
Once when folks realized you can’t exploit it, there’s no API you can use to visualize the batching with an add-on and it’s not based on the time between player and target, things changed.
Not to mention the obvious changes to how batching functioned in Vanilla vs the modern client causing lag everywhere and not just combat. Simply using the same number of ms won’t cut it as that doesn’t feel authentic. It’s like asking Super Mario Brothers to remain authentic on Switch hardware by tying the framerate to clock speeds on modern hardware because #nochanges rather than limiting how quickly the game can run via emulation. You have to change things for authentic PLAY sometimes and people can’t see that.
Same with leeway. Dozens and dozens of videos from Vanilla show it’s not as extreme as Classic and even Blizzard admits it will be overtuned thanks to infrastructure - this changes the meta completely and alters how the game plays. It’s not a timed deal like layering.
This whole thing stinks as a Vanilla fan and is turning into a heap of inauthentic garbage. We didn’t ask for years and years for Vanilla-ish with classic. We wanted Vanilla. We ain’t getting it, it seems.
The hope is that if the population doesn’t drop by phase 2. They open new servers offer transfers off high pops to the new servers, while combining layers and going with the straight cap and queue system.
Queue the complaints about new server transfer economy and all that if that ends up being the case. Its aneurysms all around when you can’t make everyone happy. Works well enough for me though.
I was referring to mass server transfers. We all know that layering is the ultimate solution for everything and that it could never impact gameplay negatively in any aspect and you would have to be a fool to think otherwise.
Nobody seems to have a better solution to launch issues.
The few people that are ‘ok’ with hours long que times, server crashes and lag doesn’t out weigh the amount of people who complain about those same issues.
Any launch of any game with hype you hear the same issues/complaints. Server full, que times, crashes, lag, stuck in starting zone for hours, crashes while waiting in que and having to start the que again… Etc…
Only thing we can hope for with layering is that it doesn’t last long at all, like 2 weeks if that. Otherwise unless anyone can come up with a solution to launch issues this the best we got.
I’ve never bothered to keep up with a lot of these terms… So what was I experiencing when I’d be running around and see a bunch of mobs, or a vein to mine… I’d walk forward maybe 20 feet and suddenly it would all disappear and be replaced by other things (usually - nothing to mine, and less mobs).
If that is the case, during content droughts in retail, Classic will likely require extensive queues or layering in order to avoid “dead realms” when new content is released for retail.