No. They are worried they will have to spend extra money on servers. So they decided to shard the hell out of Classic WoW and potentially ruin the gameplay.
Everyone heard you, chicken little.
In this video ion says they will look to start tuning the number required to shard people over down at a few weeks in as needed.
Good in the short term, bad in the long term. But based on what I have been reading, if it is a few months, it could become a very bad thing for people who stay for the long term.
Good if you’re a retail tourist, bad if you actually enjoy vanilla.
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It sounds awful in all aspects, I would rather wait in a queue then have some weird sharding gimmick that just seems like a lazy way out of a problem, and I can only imagine how much time they spent trying to set it up for this.
Queue or buy more servers - stop half assing.
At which point hundreds of thousands of people have already created their characters on a specific realm. Opening new realms will do NOTHING to alleviate the congestion of launch servers.
Sharding/layering only bandaids a specific problem on launch if the expectation that after a few days/weeks the population does one of two things, or both:
-
spreads out as people level at different paces and the population is spread across 20+ zones instead of 4
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tourists leave after deciding that they “had a look” at Classic and it wasn’t for them, so back to retail, or back to whatever other game they were playing before
Layering/sharding does nothing if the population does not drop dramatically due to tourists leaving. It necessitates the continuing existence of shards if the servers are to remain stable. So what is the solution if the population doesn’t drop by a third or more after two weeks or a month?
Opening new servers will allow new players to stop drowning an already full server, but it won’t provide much respite for those already levelled and happy with their current server with 3 shards with 3k concurrent players in each.
What do they do then?
Split each stable shard and call it a server? Just think about the repercussions of that for about 10 seconds and you have your answer to the viability of that proposition.
This issue would be lessened, and sharding most likely not required past week one, if they had not linked the retail sub with the Classic sub, but that is done and dusted.
So now they are scrambling to solve a problem that might exist by implementing a solution that will cause it’s own problems. It seems like a bit of a lose/lose proposition for Blizzard at this point and I am leaning towards the lose side at the moment, but if they clarify a few technical aspects that might convince me to lean towards the lose side.
Because obviously they can’t do transfers, like they did in vanilla?
Of course they can. Some people will take a transfer, many more will not. Transfers have been offered multiple times and multiple times they get ignored by the majority who is happy where they are, have formed the bonds they like, are in a guild they like, etc.
Saying they can “offer transfers” is one thing, getting people to take them is another. They aren’t a particularly popular thing. I have taken a transfer once when they opened Oceanic realms but I knew a number of people who stayed on the NA realm because they had solid roots and a good guild.
I wonder how many of the hyopthetical 10k people would accept a transfer and if that number would make a difference. I have no idea, but once again this is creating a solution to an avoidable problem.
Plus, in reality, none of us are going to even notice. Unless you stalk random people’s characters and just stare at them, layering has no effect on you, since your group is always going to be in the same instance of the server.
What group?
The 3 person levelling group?
The 5 person instance group?
The 40 person raid group?
The 300 person guild group?
The 80 person friend group, that turns into a thousand person extended friends of friends group?
The opposing group of pvp players that you enjoyed fighting against two days ago and are looking forward to engaging again in STV or EPL or Blackrock Spire?
Some of those questions are easier to answer than others, and the difficult ones, or the ones we can’t answer, are exactly the issues giving some people serious cause for concern.
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