So you are trying to prove your point by making an anecdote and comparing 20 minutes lunch in a “fast-food” restaurant with people who talking about 12 hours play marathons in Classic. Of course you will most likely encounter same players after a couple of hours break.
Every move Activision-Blizzard is doing, including release, beta or announcement dates are all about their agenda. They have zero respect to their customers, beta is not meant for bugs or feedback, we all know they don’t get feedback. The bugs will stay same as they are in the beta, they will not change anything because of the community feedback.
Beta meant to keep the subscriptions up and give a sneak-peek for BFA players and get some 1-2 months money from some over-enthusiastic crowd. Not need to say, of course for free advertisement from streamers. No one ever again can convince me Acti-blizzzard is a company for gamers, they have no difference than a stock market company whose only aim is profit.
I really think classic WOW team right now is short-handed. If I already have so many bugs to fix and don’t have the men resource to implement it, open beta to more players won’t help me as it is already capped.
If I was short handed and could not handle fixing bugs that were already reported, and I still had the most complex 1/3 of the game left to test, I probably would regret having given a release date so far before I had a clue.
12K of friend and family, woah if that is the case then those people have very very little interest in playing bliz games or wow vanilla, seeing that they got in the beta much later and how few people are playing atm. That would mean that most of them only barely touched the game and played and then completely forgot about it.
I’m sure beta serves many purposes - all of them aimed at releasing a Classic game that is as polished and playable as Blizzard can make it. Blizzard doesn’t owe you, me or anyone else an explanation. Blizzard didn’t hold a gun to your head and make you play the beta.
How can you possibly gather the percentage of “classic players” with such a small sample size and there is no control group (People Without an active Account)
So how can you collect useful data…
The layers data will come on August 13th. But even that will be inaccurate because of the tourists and the name squatters.
You cannot even zone into Diremaul unless you are level 45. Its a completely different ballgame than 60. At 60 people have Raids with weekly clears to gear up their guilds and prepare for the next tier etc. Not to mention a higher population overall.
WoW wasn’t for everyone, even in Vanilla. While it began with 400k players, and TBC launched with about 8-9 million subs, it’s not like only those 8 million people played WoW, it was a lot more.
It was simply then that more people subbed than dropped off. And this rate grew through to end of Wrath, before more people started unsubbing than subbing.
My raid’s main tank quit at BC launch, saying he’d seen everything WoW could do, and to his credit, I think he only popped up a couple times when WoW had those free week trials.
The issue is what happens to the hype train if it only starts strong and then deflates? Blizzard is betting that the initial hype will die shortly after Classic launches, instead of repeating history.
If this were the only reason then everyone with existing accounts would have access to Classic Beta instead of just the streamers and their friends right now… If you want a fair representation of your playerbase, right?
What community are you talking about? Bunch of young adult streamers, employee’s friends and some early teens who are still subbed for BFA? The beta is nowhere near reflects the community Classic will have. Current players who are “testing” the beta is just a marketing movement by ActiBlizzard nothing else. If you honestly thinking the current beta is for fixing the bugs or community feedback, I believe we need to agree to disagree.
p.s: While talking about community feedback, pay a visit to European realms and enlighten yourself about how ActiBlizz cares about community feedback.
Would you have preferred I use Applebees? Red Robin? A 5 star Country Club Steakhouse?
Even for the “business luch/diner” people, still being there 4 hours later(or being there again) is unusual. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but its rare.
Yes, WoW has “Marathon players” who can be online for 12+ hours at a time. I’ve even been that person, still am on occasion. I know they’re far more common in WoW than they would be in any kind of restaurant.
But by and large, I think you’d find “normal play” even in Vanilla was a play session of less than 4 hours at a time outside of raids and dungeons. Many sessions could be MUCH shorter. However, this is data that only Blizzard has to reference against.
Remember, hard core raiders, even raiders in general, made up only a fraction of the player base in Vanilla. People playing 4+ hours at a time consistently was almost always a hallmark of somebody who wound up either raiding, or doing extensive PvP.
But even going back to the “hard core raider” profile for a moment. Yes, many go for alts once they’ve “beat the game” or otherwise maxxed out their available progress on their main. But many others simply curtail their playing time. Which “shifts the population numbers” in regards to how concurrency correlates to player population on a realm that is on the edge of having login queues.
The above was in the context of live(Vanilla), where everything you’ve done isn’t going to turn into vapor in just a couple months. Beta has the “little issue” of things turning into vapor sometime in August, which greatly discourages people doing everything they can conceive of on their toon when stuck at a progression block.
End result: Players greatly reducing their time in game if uninterested in alts. Concurrency rates drop, but total number of players logging in may not “significantly” change in that they may still log in daily, but now they’re only on for 5 to 30 minutes, then back offline again, rather than being online for 4+ hours.
Which gets into a side-issue of the “business end” of things where companies like Activision actually DON’T want you playing for 16 hours a day if you’re on a subscription. As they have to dedicate resources to hosting your gameplay. Resources they’d rather “spread around” multiple players(overbooking), which they cannot do if you’re almost always online.
Instead, from the finance end, they want you logging in daily(demonstrates you’re “committed” to the game), doing a handful of tasks, playing for anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple hours, then log out. Once you are offline, the resources they used to host you can then be used to host someone else, thus maximizing their ROI on hardware. Sound like established/encouraged gameplay behaviors that can be found somewhere?
But getting back on the general topic: Population “churn” over the course of a day on a realm is a LOT more significant than many people think it is, even the healthy ones. This is an even bigger factor in regards to Layering at launch than “the tourists” are, because player schedules will change over the span of just days in most cases, weeks in the case of a select few. But until those “binge sessions” end, realm concurrency is going be very difficult to manage around because of that.
Of course, I also one other data point that wowclassicpopulation.com does NOT have. I have a (manual) census from the Morning of May 26th, and it covers all realms, all factions. (An advantage to focusing play on the PVE realm, I can delete and recreate characters on the pvp realm server at will)
I reported 521 online, on a Sunday morning playing alliance on the 26th. classicpopulation starts their tracking at the end of May. 7 days and not quite 2 hours layer, Classicpopulation counts 425 people online playing Alliance PvP, with no horde data. and no PvE data A decrease of about 100 players from what I’d reported a week earlier, during an earlier time of the day.
Level cap was increased on the 4th of June however, and that evening witnessed a peak Alliance population of 641. A number which hasn’t been matched since from user submissions. Wednesday saw numbers in line with my Sunday morning report of 521, with it ranging between 495 players and 544.
The other thing you can’t really see easily from the displayed data, but the people gathering census data can see. Especially if they have Census+ running very aggressively(5 minute interval between sweeps), is how “spiky” the population concurrency actually is. Seeing population swings of +/- 20 players in the span of just 10 minutes is actually very common.
So again, “player population churn” o_ver the course of even a single day_ is far more common than most might think it is.
The other thing to bolster that assertion? Ion’s Developer Insights video linke to on post 23.
If anybody knows how many people have participated in the Beta Test, blizzard should, and as the Classic Dev Team reports to him, he should certainly be in the know on that.
Concurrency gives us a minimum threshold for what the population could be. Raw character counts gives us an idea of where the maximum is(but characters invariably end up being missed), it’s a whole lot of “fuzzy logic” to extrapolate where things fall between the two ranges. Unless you’re Blizzard and have all of the data.
I’m nearly 40 years old. I’m on the young side of the spectrum for the most active members of the very large guild I’m in on the beta. Your numbers need some work.
If you really think someone will sit and read some anonymous person’s block of test, you need to re-educate yourself. Try to keep it short! As you understand I didn’t read your block of text.
And also, “exceptions do not break the rules”, just because some random anonymous 40 years old plays on beta it does not justify what ActiBlizz is aiming for. Work on your numbers more and come with a summary later… Maybe I will consider reading your aggressive claims.
It’s so fun watching people who have never worked in a development environment tell software companies what to do.
My thoughts.
I agree with a couple of people.
Test current big systems and ensure the conversion is working.
Get some buzz and advertising (not just from developers)
Just because you saw and reported a bug in stress test does not mean its not already fixed. Most software development works in sprints and it could already be fixed and working on internal QA servers or ready to push to beta servers.
Here we go… Now honestly everyone in her/his guild come to this forum and attack? Anyways, I have more important things to do than arguing with some randoms. I made my point clear. Agree with it or not, I can not care less. I use forums to represent my perspective. I can not also care less how big your guild is or not as long as you don’t represent me.
When ActiBlizz begins to treat Europeans the same way they do americans, or when they treat individual casuals the same way they do to hard-core “big guilds”, I will change my stand. Otherwise don’t expect that I will come the forums and defend, justify their stock market agenda.