This is the fundamental thing that those misunderstanding what blizzard has stated.
The realms literally have server populations vastly higher than the highest realms during vanilla. The current server caps that include everyone from all of the existing layers of a server are NOT the server caps that will be in effect when layers go away. Yes, if you kept the current server caps and did away with all the layers, the queue would remain the same, but this is the important thing that many are not grasping: the server caps for phase 2 are going to be typical vanilla server caps, NOT what the servers currently have (megaservers split up into layers)
Of course one can only guess at a) how many layers a server currently has, b) what the server caps are currently, and c) what % of people are actually going to remain on each server by phase 2. Blizzard certainly isn’t telling us. Many trust them and trust that they know best how to handle this. However, in practice as witnessed by classic’s rollout, grossly underestimating demand, and the apparent steady retention of players, my trust is at a pretty low level.
thank you. blizzard literally themselves said that they will have authentic realm sizes (See interview above on youtube) and that they expect to have insane queues come phase 2 as stuff stands. see blue text.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hnewman/2019/08/26/warcraft-classic-layering-and-realm-queues-ion-hazzikostas-explains-why-youre-waiting-to-log-in/#76287ede7e45 We are trying to manage long term healthy populations on these servers around a unique sort of game launch. There’s no box that you have to buy on a shelf in a retail store for an outlay of dollars. We are opening this world up to millions of people, many of whom are just going to want to check it out as a matter of curiosity.
There are others who’ve been waiting for this clearly for years and they are in, as in as can be, but they’re all going to be there contending for the same server space on day one.
We are fairly sure — we can’t know for sure without being fortune tellers, but most of them align — there will be a fairly steep drop off compared to that day one interest, and we want to make sure because of how important community is in Classic in particular, that we have healthy server populations. That’s why we’re not jumping to, hey, let’s just open up dozens and dozens of servers. We have the ability to do that. This isn’t about limiting costs or available hardware or anything like that. We could do that easily if we wanted to, actually much more easily than having complicated tech like layering.
But where we would that leave us down the line is with underpopulated servers that we have to start looking at merging or offering transfers from them to other servers to get back down in population. That’s tremendously disruptive to communities and something we really, really, really want to avoid.
None of this is about overcrowding starting zones. The starting zones were overcrowded. Layering is implemented to combat player drop off after the initial rush wears off.
they literally talk about keeping the realm pop the same as it was in vanilla. its quite common knowledge that the realm pop back then was 2500-3000.
also. the blue post compliments this.
the blue post further explains that as stuff currently stands, high pop servers will see extreme queues starting when layering is gone.
Ok. I see now we’re arguing a technicality. I won’t say I’m wrong, because I’m not, but I don’t think anyone else is wrong either. We’re just arriving to the conclusion is vastly different ways.
Realistically, WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas told Forbes, the population is going to drop dramatically after the tourists leave and the committed WoW Classic players settle in for the long haul. To deal with that disparity, the company is using “layering,” which creates multiple copies of the entire game world of Azeroth to hold people in the short term.
We are trying to manage long term healthy populations on these servers around a unique sort of game launch. There’s no box that you have to buy on a shelf in a retail store for an outlay of dollars. We are opening this world up to millions of people, many of whom are just going to want to check it out as a matter of curiosity.
There are others who’ve been waiting for this clearly for years and they are in, as in as can be, but they’re all going to be there contending for the same server space on day one.
We are fairly sure — we can’t know for sure without being fortune tellers, but most of them align — there will be a fairly steep drop off compared to that day one interest, and we want to make sure because of how important community is in Classic in particular, that we have healthy server populations.
the reason why we’re doing that is so that down the line and not too far down the line, once the initial rush has passed, we are left with long-term stable, healthy communities that can support raid guilds and PvP across both factions and folks that are going to progress into Blackwing Lair and Ahn’Qiraj and Naxxramas and all the rest.
Layering is a solution that allows us in the short term to run multiple copies of Azeroth as a whole. And so there will be several Azeroths running in parallel on our busiest realms at launch day.
-Ion
Faily certain that “Layering is a solution that allows us in the short term to run multiple copies of Azeroth as a whole” means exactly that. Denying that server caps are higher while layering is on is some flat-earther-level lunacy.
Will the Dev’s remove the layers if the population does not decrease to the extent that they think it will? I think that is the real question. I can’t see them removing layering, and causing either massive amounts of people trying to get stuff done, or massive queues.
Before someone yells at me that “They promised they would get rid of them by phase 2!!!”, lets be realistic. Getting rid of all layers, before the population shrunk enough, would cause massive issues, in game, or in queue, depending on the rout they took.
No I’m not. I’m highlighting the fact that allowable realm pop has to be decreased as well, and that queues are not tied to layers, they’re tied to realms. It’s really semantics though.
The forbes article does state that they will reduce realm size as they increase layers. That’s two different things that people are combining into one.
You are completely wrong, vanilla servers were designed with about 2500 people in mind, with today’s technology, it probably could be pushed to 5000 without significant changes to the way spawns work. Having been on 10000 population private servers, they had to have insane dynamic respawns to handle the population, to the point where caves and other small areas with high mob density were avoided due to them being death traps due to things respawning almost as fast as you killed them.
If they removed the layers, there would probably be about 20-30k people in queue at peak time on the most populated servers. If you think that they are just taking the total and splitting them across multiple layers, you have no idea why they implemented this in the first place.
The implemented it expecting a massive drop in population by Phase 2, by the time phase 2 rolls around most people still wont be level 60 yet and will have zero reason to stop playing, Blizzard bungled this launch and is going to have massive problems when they go to drop layers. They have server populations of 25-35k with at least 5 layers. (no one knows the exact numbers because blizzard hasn’t put them out.)
Removing layers and lowering the cap to vanilla-like levels are handcuffed. They are NOT going to have the realms become megaservers when they remove layering. That is what you fail to grasp.
Again, my statement was specifically that if they remove layers, queues will go up. I never said nothing else was involved. My statement stands and is correct in regards to the over populated servers.
When you said I was wrong because that’s not how layers work, you were wrong because “how layers work” was irrelevant to the point I had made in the OP. Not trying to be pedantic, but you argued against my initial point and people who take you at your word will assume that when layers go away, Queues will not happen which is misinformation compared to what I’ve said.
I respect your tone through most of your responses, it’s rare that people will actually debate on here and not just be trolly buttheads, so I don’t want to be confrontational with you. I appreciate the civility and wish more people communicated in the style you use on these forums.
Hilarious when someone that doesn’t know wtf they are talking about tries to act like condescending know it all while being 100% wrong lololol
Very simple, a layer is essentially just another copy of an entire server, its basically having multiple realms that share the same auction house and name reservations ect.
A normal realm having a cap of 5k can then be copied to allow multiple realms full of 5k people to play on the same "mega server " without having to wait in a queue because of the max amount of players being online .
If they removed layering and the max amount of people allowed to be online on a server at one time was 5k then instead of there being 4 layers of 5k people online and 3k in queue it would then turn into 5k people being online and 18k players in queue
Yeah, something sub/playtime related is what I had in mind too. Half off next month’s sub, free two weeks, 30% discount on a six-month, etc. It’s motivating and doesn’t have any in-game impact.
I don’t know why we are wasting keystrokes on Tin at this point. It’s rather like leading a horse to water and the horse rather than drinking is attempting to breathe the water instead.
