Do you mean 39000 characters?
If you’re referring to me (OP here), I wasn’t complaining. I was just sharing thoughts I had one night in IF. I’m enjoying the fact that as we level, IF is filling up. Stormwind is crowded, but more and more people are moving to IF organically as it becomes the central traffic hub for Alliance…just like in Vanilla.
I simply observed that there were probably a LOT MORE people in IF than the ones I could see…and it made me long for having layers removed so I could see my server.
It was not and is not a complaint. Smolderweb has never had a queue, so I would imagine my experiences in zones and with resource gathering have been quite different than someone on Stalagg or Whitemane.
It would be cool if they could at least remove layering for cities, but for now I think it’s a necessary evil outside of cities on most servers given that most are high pop or full, and a medium server is equivalent to an OG Vanilla full server.
Like I said though, most people aren’t just hanging out in cities because everyone is out trying to level. Once most of the core playerbase has hit 60 I’m sure the cities will be more crowded. I’m on Kirtonos which is at high pop most of the time and every zone outside of cities has tons of people.
It’s from the wowhead report using the census addon. Essentially what it does is run a /who against the server at certain intervals to check for unique names and active players. While this isn’t exactly reliable data for a lot of things, it IS a good way to determine rough player values if enough people on the server are gathering the information. One person doing it for a server, not ideal, but if you had 500 people doing it over a week period then you would have a fairly nice representation.
Additionally, that’s not how many players there are total at any one time, that’s the total number of unique characters that have been spotted. The number is likely going to be muddied by lack of knowledge on alts, or how wide the system is that is supported.
And like I have been saying before, the issue with layering is one that you have to tackle by asking “What if Classic WoW remains popular?” Because the reality is that people don’t like layering, but they also seem to not understand anything about it or how it works in practice and why it might be necessary.
The game world cannot support a high playerbase, it just can’t. No matter what you do, there is zero chance the game world would function with the populations we are seeing without layering. Zone density, server lag, mob respawn rates these are all issues that do not work well if you can’t scale them based on player. And if you can it would cause a lot of other issues.
Layering is the PERFECT solution to population issues for the GAME WORLD but people fear it creating issues with the community aspect of wow (anyone complaining about it here so far has merely made inference and suggestion on how they feel about something unknown rather than a hard look at the problem)
I can say, on Anathema, the server according to the data has roughly 11k players, and I have seen the same alliance and horde players consistently over my playtime there at all hours of the day. So with layering on, I’m not noticing a difference. I’ve gotten into a guild, I have little to no problem with running into them regularly even when not grouped.
It’s entirely possible that the layers themselves are being used as homes for players, and in that case you might be on one server, but you’re segmented on your own version of it with your own community. Splitting people up between layers is literally NO different than enforcing a hard cap on servers and making a billion servers for people. If anything, layering is better because it allows for a larger pool of community while maintaining the server integrity.
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That’s not true actually. It’s pretty clear to me that you didn’t play vanilla or you don’t remember it well. When I played it was rare for me to see more than a handful of people in any given zone, unless it was a zone that supported a raid. And the reason you saw a lot of people there was because of said raid. Often times places like Arathi Highlands might have 10 people, Tanaris might have had 30, currently there are upwards of several HUNDRED in these areas. That is NOT vanilla.
Even if half of those are alts, 20k is STILL more massive than any vanilla server ever was.
The reason for layering was to accommodate using less servers in anticipation of tourists and near immediate leaving of tourists.
Except the game is only growing…
So what do you propose blizzard does if people dont leave?
Welcome to the light.
Do what they did when Burning Crusade launched - make new servers and offer free transfers.
That is what happens if your roll on a server that’s been out a while, or a dead server. On a fresh server, everything is crowded for the first several months.
They tried that. People dont want to move.
So whats next?
Then deal with a heavily populated server and all of the competition that comes with it.
Yea, and that’s what was great about Classic vs Retail. Classic WoW = true MMORPG whereby players exist together in a persistent world. WORLD not layers, not temporary instances, not sorta-worlds, not %30 of a world.
In contrast, Retail WoW is a single-player game with OPTIONAL multi-player interactions via instancing and cross-realm grouping with people you will never meet again.
Layering is the best bad solution to the problem. Just deal until it’s gone.
And im fine with that, im just saying though, that at some point in thw nearish future, layering is gone. So all those saying “its needed” better buckle up.
Sharding 1 to 30 would have been better.
Systems already tested.
Doesnt impact high level resources or world pvp.
Okay so I’m gonna see if even I’ve understood it after all of these weeks…
Within your server there are layers of your server. Each layer can hold some # amount of players, the next layer holds some # of players and so forth. It was made so zones weren’t cluttered with players. However it also means you don’t get to see your entire server in a zone (hence OP’s situation on a low/medium realm population I’m assuming)
Can think of it similar to phasing on modern/retail wow.
Ditto. I played on Stormreaver, which was pretty populous in 2005/6. We would always see SOME players, but never more than a handful, in most zones. The world wasn’t crowded. It was populated–not crowded.
It was common to ride through Desolace and only see 2-5 people in the entire zone as you passed through. It was common to /who in a given zone and have only 10 folks there.
This wasn’t a sign the world was underpopulated. Ironforge had hundreds of people in it at any given time. People were in dungeons and raids and spread throughout the world, so it was nice and sparse.
The only real solution is to leave in layering.
Because the alternative is changing the fundamentals of how the game, mobs, and scale all work and that’s going to drive the nochanges community up a wall (not that I give a rats backside what anyone that spams #nochanges and nothing else thinks, but apparently Blizz does)