We’ve seen the result of Blizz not merging or clustering the servers. They were NOT too many at launch, rather too few. at least the RP server served as overflow, not as servers in their own right to the later detriment of said servers.
More realms at launch. Active closeing whenever a realm is full, and merging/clustering as needs arise - with an eye to big, medium and small realms all existing.
But this means work, monitoring and thinking.
Layers is the lazy solution.
That would require blizzard to be merging and splitting(yes splitting because there are also population spikes not just decreases) servers on a weekly, daily or even hourly basis to account for fluctuations in active players.
I don’t see how that is better than layers.
It would require constant monitoring during launch only. Then it would be needed regularly - like weekly with the resets or something. We should not expect any realm to constantly have the exact same number of players - we do not have this with layers either.
But given that the population will over all inevitably decrease leading to merged realms why not just start with the smaller number of realms? That way there’s no potential for people to end up of dying realms for weeks or months before they get merged.
And of course layers become necessary when there’s major player spikes like at launch of new content anyways.
We played alll the way from 2004 to … I do not know when without layers - it is possible. Weekly adjustmenst will not leave players
And your definition of dying is not necessarily everybody’s I suspect that you come from the Pservers.
No I came from a healthy Realm in vanilla, which was ~2500 or so players are prime time.
Which is enough that you can reasonably find groups for most content and have an active AH. So it would be more accurate to say that is my metric for a healthy realm not player count.
You know the saying where there’s a will, there’s a way … I played RP-PvE realms alll the way - and loved it. Small is beautiful.
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That was in TBC Classic when Blizz brought layering back and thus created megaservers.
But players are idiots. They’ll make decisions to the detriment of their own fun based on an idea, and then quit when they’re not having fun.
Megaservers might sound good in theory, but the experience is awful.
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How do we learn if we don’t talk about things we don’t understand?
“you say probably the worse conceivable”
yet you offer no solutions for how to make it better.
remember the zones are not tuned to host all players on the same layer everything would be constantly dead all nodes would be constantly farmed.
multiple servers doesn’t work as we’ve seen as first servers will under populate, then two factions will migrate to make 1 hyper alliance server and 1 hyper horde server and then you’re back to the same problem anyways, but now unbalanced.
Which realm?
Which may not even be a problem…
I gravitated towards mostly large or the largest pop servers for most of Classic, but found later, (much later really, ironically it wasn’t until Cata Classic) that I really enjoyed the smaller, community vibe of much, much smaller populations.
Playing on the smaller faction (Alliance) on a very imbalanced server (Faerlina) gave me an experience that was much more similar to OG WoW with regards to community, running into the same people, and actually having recognizable guildnames.
I’m sure that it’s much smaller minorities that prefer things that the majority doesn’t, but the impact of those smaller communities on the larger ones can be incredibly outsized.
An example that comes to mind IRL is those who tend to prefer rural settings and farming over those who prefer city life. Farmers are a minority, but essential for the survival of humans; city-folk, not so much…
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The Gnome speaks truth, /thread
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Doomhammer
I mean the exact opposite can also be said. Farmers don’t exist without people who want to consume what they’re producing.
They sure can/do/did throughout history. That’s about as self-sustaining as it gets. But sure, they don’t need to produce as much of the same thing(s) if they aren’t additionally providing for many, many others.
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And more importantly farmers rely on others to get them the tools they need to actually farm. Plows and fences don’t just pop out of the earth.
Lol, nah man. Farming communities can and have been self sustaining for the majority of human history, and likely for much longer than that.
Majority population cities have never been self-sustaining.
This is in no way meant as a contentious point of view. Cities are just not self sustaining. Of course, much of farming has been industrialized and even automated, and looking forward we may not be too far off from having fully automated food production and logistics. But that’s an aside to the point.
In real life, larger, majority communities absolutely rely on minority communities for their existence, and they have to by design, while the reverse isn’t true, even if you argue that irrigation, dams, electricity, etc. are cooperative efforts and outside items and services can and are solicited in small farming communities, which is true, it doesn’t have to be the case, while cities where the majority of people live, simply cannot sustain themselves.
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Yeah but people have been calling realms dead for years when they had 3,000+ active players, no issues forming groups. But because some other realm had 10k, the 3k must be dead.
It’s like saying Minneapolis is a dead city because NYC has way more people and I can’t find a hot dog at 5am.
This happened to me on Chaos Bolt (SoD) and on Mutanus (SoM). I didn’t play TBC or wrath but I saw the same thing happen on those.
It’s not semantics. It’s players calling healthy servers dead because they demand mega realms. Blizzard responded by giving us mega realms with anniversary, and finally the players are seeing the implications of shoving the entire playerbase into two realms.
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There has also never been a society that existed solely on small entirely self sustaining farms /shrug
At best you have examples of people who live somewhat self sustaining temporarily but still rely on the larger society as a whole.
Not 3k active, 3k online. Very very big difference.
I honestly don’t care what number is/was. Was it playable? Without a doubt yes. Dozens of guilds, healthy communities, no issues finding groups, people questing in the zones. People playing the game for you yo play with. That’s all that matters.
But people obsessed over “active player” census data and WCL raider counts and decided realms were “dead” when they were far from it.
All in the name of megaservers.
Now we’re on the “f— around and find out phase” and people are realizing this sucks having just two realms with layers propping them up.
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