Right now I’m hearing they plan to start with 3 realms per region? Is that right?
Well, it doesn’t matter that much… because if classic starts with 3, or 5, or even 10 realms - what does that translate into when millions of people are playing?
1,000,000 / 10 realms = 100,000 players per realm
1,000,000 / 5 realms = 200,000 players per realm
1,000,000 / 3 realms = 333,000 players per realm
Thats if JUST 1 million players in NA play classic…
Of course, that’s not active concurrent players, but consider this -
During wrath of the lich king, the last expansion before sharding, wow had about 200 active realms.
there is no way a handful of realms can provide the same experience as original wow, without a major amount of sharding. It just isn’t possible.
we should have 20 or so named, permanent servers are launch. It’s not my opinion - that’s just what the numbers say if you want that “old wow” experience".
A lot of it depends on the actual execution of it.
If the point of layering is to have healthy realm populations after the dust settles, it would be stupid to have 10 realms with 100,000 people each split into 33 layers. Even if we assumed 90% of the population doesn’t stay, that leaves you with an overpopulated realm of 10,000 players.
There’s no rule that says with layering if they get more players than expected that they can’t also open up new realms.
With layering the world you see is static. If you see a player, he isn’t going to vanish by crossing some invisible line or when some internal criteria is met. If you see a copper node you can walk up and tap it, it’s not going to disappear as you approach it as it might if the server is using sharding.
What about 30 and 50, which are far more reasonable estimates, given statements like “we’re going to start off lean like Vanilla and expand as required”?
1,000,000 / 30 realms = 33,300 per Realm.
1,000,000 / 50 realms = 20,000 per Realm.
No, its absolutely inane. This is the closest we’ve had to an actual number from any Blizzard employee.
WoW had 89 servers running by the end of the first month… in North America alone.
Yes, but they’re capping layers based on zone size, not world size. You think on launch day they’re going to have 3k people in the starting zones? Of course not. They’ll cap it much, much lower (as evidenced by the stress test), and that’ll only apply to a small handful of zones, while 99% of the rest of the world is void of players anyway. So they can say it’s ‘layering an entire world’, but early on the entire playerbase is only in a couple zones anyway. Even for the first few days or weeks.
So they’re capping it for convenience. Most of the world is empty of players anyway. Layering is pretty much sharding. Especially early on.
If they LOCKED the layers it would be easy to collapse them as needed
OR split them off into new realms as needed.
Before anyone bashes Locked layers they do not prevent you from playing with your friends people… it is a CHOICE at Character Creation… just like a server…
Which is what they should have done. But they want layers dynamic, because they don’t know how many people will be on each layer. And how that might fluctuate.
True, that is the downside of locked layers… one group might stay full for a long time while another drops off quickly. Just like on actual servers… except in the case of locked layers… they can collapse the small ones… unlike with servers…
Of course I am going to bash that. The whole point is that is supposed to feel like one server no matter how many people are on it. It’s supposed to feel like a community, not separate servers that are suddenly smashed together a few weeks down the road.