Is Layer Scalability Being Capped?

I thought layers were there to fix the queues. So why are queues still happening? Are layers being capped? If so, why? I thought WoW ran on Google Cloud and AWS. Shouldn’t that provide a backend that can scale based on necessity? Is there a genuine technical or hardware limitation for layering or is this a financial constraint because of the cost to scale upwards?

If this is a financial bottom line for Blizzard, do they believe that they have more to gain from players sitting in queues rather than paying to let more players play? I wonder how many players actually quit because of queues. I’m assuming very few if Blizzard is willing to let their queues take such a huge hit.

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Wow servers dont run on AWS. They run out of Blizzard’s own server warehouses they purchase space from it. Its their hardware that they control 100%.

The layers are largely meant to keep servers clean for the majority of players. I would GUESS Blizzard is probably largely doing this by running different layers on different CPU threads and thus they are capped by the number of threads each CPU has.

I don’t know what kind of hardware Blizzard is running on these days outside of the fact they are custom Blades running their own version of Linux.

For better or for worse, Blizzard was absolutely blind sided by WotLK. This might be a good thing in many ways.

And yet bene has had 15+ layers without issue at all major content releases thus far. If this cap isn’t just to ensure 3.4 runs stable before unleashing the true potential of the server, i don’t know what they’re doing.

Making thousands of people transfer to dead servers so that 3-4 months after wotlk release they can make a few million off character transfers back to the top 4-5 servers in classic. would be my best guess. As light basically said they could technically easily fix this, in many more ways then just upping the cap, but they chose to try and have alliance heavy servers go to horde heavy or dead servers, only thing I can logically think of is they want the character transfers (Paid) transfers in a few months without looking bad or are trying to re-balance PvP servers for world PvP but I doubt they care about that either. Sulfuras will have a decent alliance population for a few weeks and then will fall back to next to nothing after wotlk release. [Do not transfer a character to level alliance on Sulfuras, just get camped by horde 90% of the time thus far] I didnt even xfer just leveling while ques are high and can’t stand this server.

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We had 19 layers and no queue when BT launched. They’re trying to sell us a solution to and artificial problem.

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This one hundred %.