Is classic getting dedicated physical servers?

Or are we getting the cloud based server architecture similar to BFA? Have they said anything about this?

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it’s all speculation at this point.

Not really.

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We are getting the existing architecture of retail. We are NOT getting dedicated severs. They explicitly said they’re not changing the retail network stack.

Not it isn’t.

https://youtu.be/RAKvIx6eQpA?t=741 Timestamp: 12:21

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Thank you for this. I’m now worried.

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About what? Far more stable servers?

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More stable? The servers could handle far more players years ago than they can now.

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Isn’t part of the stability issue caused by faster server ticks? Which they’re reverting back to classic speeds (spell batching) in classic?

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Yes, cloud tech is most certainly more stable than dedicated servers. Individual servers go down. Cloud tech allows for seamless transition between a giant network of servers which means zero downtime. It also means scalability. The potential is there to throw more power at a “server” if needed.

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Interesting. So explain to me how players crash servers by putting 150-200 people in one area? Streamers have done this. People have gotten banned.

Whatever technology they use now can’t handle even decent player population. Sharding has become a crutch. But that won’t work in Classic, so hopefully Blizzard has some other solution.

By the way, I’d love to see some kind of proof that WoW uses cloud tech. I see a lot of people claiming this, presenting no evidence.

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Couldn’t tell ya. I don’t work at Blizzard so I don’t know how their back-end works exactly. I just know a bit about cloud tech as I’ve done some projects using AWS. My guess is they may put some limitations on the resources that can be allocated to save on costs. If they didn’t do this then DDoS attacks could have the potential to cost the company a lot of money.

What I can tell you that cloud tech is 100% superior to what they did in 2006.

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And yet you still have yet to say why you think they use cloud tech.

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Because they’ve said as much. And also because that’s what you do in 2019.

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If they’ve said as much, then provide a link.

I’m not even disputing it. Maybe they are. Just provide some evidence.

I’ll even help you out. It seems to me things like CRZ couldn’t be a thing without some cloud component, so it’s quite likely it exists. But I’d like to see a quote by Blizzard that talks about their cloud-based infrastructure, and how its ‘replaced’ physical servers.

But beyond that, as I said earlier, whatever system they use now can’t handle the amount of players in a single area that the game used to be able to do. That’s going to be an issue in Classic. I’m not saying servers didn’t crash back in the day, but mainly the biggest issues was fps problems, which was a result of players’ computers not handling what was going on on the screen. It wasn’t a result of the stability of the servers. I mention this because now that our own computers are so much better and able to handle hundreds of players on the screen, the flip side is that WoW can’t handle it as well as it used to.

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I swear I read something about it. Having trouble finding much information. Maybe someone else can help me out. From what I was reading it sounds like they have all their own data centers. So it doesn’t sound like they’re using anything like Azure, GCP or AWS which isn’t really surprising. I’d imagine they save a ton of money engineering their own cloud tech.

I’m sure all their “servers” are all networked similarly to how any cloud computing service might work. I can pretty much guarantee you they don’t have dedicated server blades anymore like they did in 2006.

Edit: Here’s a reference to it courtesy of Kezlar.

Start at around 9:25

If you understood the tech, you wouldn’t be.

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Recreating Classic Wow Panel, 9:30
https:// youtu.be/hhKkP8LryYM?t=569

Its not hard to find times/places where they talk about using cloud servers.

200 Alliance charging into a Horde city isn’t “150-200 people”. Its 200 extra people on top of the normal city population, adding advanced spell effects and communication increases.

Vanilla’s dialled back effects and reduced need for communication should improve the stability of a given shard with far more people than BfA, when Classic launches.

But to some extent its a “We’ll see what happens”. I wouldn’t be surprised if they used a stress test to make sure.

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It shouldn’t be ‘to some extent’. It should be tested THOROUGHLY. Put 1000 players in Orgrimmar and see what happens. Stage massive world pvp battles and see how the server can handle it. And if it can’t…that needs to be addressed (in a way other than sharding). A wait and see approach is not acceptable.

By the way, I asked for proof they’ve abandoned physical servers and you link a 5 year old video where they’re showing us physical server blades, so…not sure what you’re trying to say.

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You mean the one where they did that as a joke?
OR
do you mean the one I linked that talks about how just using all the old stuff means the game cannot run on the Blizzard cloud…

Also modern models and spell animations require significantly more resources per player than the old models. Poly counts on the models was increased by like 5x+

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1:1 physical servers is obsolete, you really don’t want that