If you dont want Layering/Channel system then what you will do “FIX” the congestion of 7.5M to 10M of players during the first 30 days?
For me the only way to keep the CLASSIC-WOW feeling is with channels system otherwise the game will need several changes like:
Increasing the amount of “Enemies” on the area x2-x3 times at least. So if the vanilla server had 10 wolfs now that will have 30 wolfs that will feel “RARE” to be honest
Reducing the spawning time of the “Enemies” to 1/2-1/3. If a wolf took 60 seconds in re-pop now he will take 30 seconds or even 15 seconds…
Reducing “agro” range yeah…. if you will have 30 wolfs with a respawn timers of 15 seconds the range needs to be reduced otherwise u will end with 10 mobs on your back.
As you see without CHANNELS system is imposible to keep the purist vanilla wow system.
I’d love to keep Classic as close to Vanilla as possible, but I do have to agree that layering is the only plausible way to keep the servers from catching on fire, lagging, crashing, and letting players tag a mob more once every 10 minutes.
That being said, I would enjoy a smart scaling spawn system, I don’t know how intelligent it was back then compared to now (I feel like it scales now? I could be wrong and it’s just a different timer). But if temporary layering causes this much distress, I don’t know how people would handle a permanent mechanic change.
But all that said, I really am glad for the layering. As someone who has been through the horrors of WoW’s many expansion launches before sharding… yeah it’s necessary just to be able to play the game haha. It will be here, too.
There is absolutely no way there will be that many players on launch, if it was free maybe but it still requires a Sub. I am expecting around 2Mil maybe.
What you are not getting is the fact that you can and will have people grouping up to tag the wolves, and so you won’t have 100 ppl fighting over some wolves, u will have 10 groups fighting to tag wolves, groups yelling at one another, demanding duels at lvl 5-10… just like how it should be. Classic…
Whose to say these 5 guys who were tagging wolves won’t become friends because they went through the **** together at north shire.
The prevailing counterargument is to open as many servers as the layering itself would produce (3 servers per 1 server) all with the same name, but a number next to them. After a period of time, if the population dwindles, they would then merge the 3 servers. The problems that come with this are people losing their community/names (both guild and character).
When it comes to layering, people are worried about abusing the layer in order to gain access to more resources (minerals, herbs, rarespawns, etc.), avoid ganks, or otherwise not see people they could potentially meet and group with because they are not on the same layer. That being said, if someone on another server is in the same area, you have no chance to group with them, whereas there may be a small chance of finding them on the same server different layer.
I think many people have trust issues with blizzard
The big problem with layering across the whole world is that it leads to economic exploitation of nodes and rares. IMO, the previous idea of sharding starter zones for the first few weeks was a better idea. The worst that could happen there is exploitation of the lowest of lowbie mats.
The average leveling pace through a starter zone with 1.12 talents and items is only a couple hours anyways, and aren’t particularly difficult to the point of necessitating grouping up. There are group quests, but they’re not necessary to get to 10 and move on to the next zone. Compared to the whole of the game, starter zones are nigh infinitesimal; a month of sharding them is nothing.
Either way, I’d rather be able to actually play the game on launch day and not have to wait a whole week just for ping levels to be tolerable. It’s why I’ve skipped every expansion launch up until Legion; there’s nothing fun or engaging about pushing a button for an ability, only to have it go off a full minute later, and then you suddenly disconnect and get put into the back of a queue.
This isn’t even about mob competition. There is no amount of grouping up that overcomes horrendous lag.
When phase 1 ends and there’s still 5000+ players on a server what will Blizzard’s new solution be? Have server caps over 2x the size of Vanilla? Make us wait in a 2000 person queue? Continue layering? They need a better system or more servers.
Itll only be like that for a week, if that. Brace, spread out through the servers a bit more and it’ll be fine.
I mean, layering will be fine IF Blizzard keeps to their word and/or GUARANTEES a HARD CUT OFF of like 7 DAYS before they remove layering. If they enter this layering dynamically, with a dynamic view of keeping it on to answer some dynamic problems with the players, we will end up with dynamic wow AKA BFA where everyone gets a trophy.
JUST GIVE A HARD CUT OFF WITH LAYERING PLEASE. I know they have said “PHASE TWO CUTOFF” but that is WAY too long for it to stay in
That’s the idea. Servers that don’t experience a population drop can expect server queues come Phase 2 when layering is gone. If you don’t want to wait in a queue the will offer free xfer to a low pop realm.
I’m fine with those options as I experienced both in Vanilla.
I’m still on the fence with the layering. It works out in theory but being lucky enough to experience it during the stress test, it’s my opinion that it’s not working to well in practice. Needs to be refined.
Queues will do the job just fine, thank you very much.
Honestly. What’s the point in classic if it’s the same nonsense as the current version? Vanilla is not just lvl 60 cap and talent trees, it’s also one, single persistent world for everybody. Vanilla is not a convoluted system of layering that obliterates the entire point of playing WoW. I’m old enough to remember how amazed everyone was with the fact that the world in WoW isn’t a bunch of stitched together zones with portals in between but a large (by 2004 standards) single world for everybody. Fast forward to 2019 and we’re getting degradation in game design back to the stitched together world but this time around it’s even worse as it’s basically the SWTOR level of terrible game design.
How much does a WoW Classic Server cost to maintain?
If people enjoy Classic they are likely to just reroll if their server dies. There’s even many people who will want regular injections of new fresh progress servers.
To say Layering is needed seems like some head hauncho got on this path, and refuses to get off it because 1) its fun finding new tech solutions to old problems, and 2) this tech could be used in future Blizzard products.
But what this guy is missing is: Is Classic really not popular enough to need Layering to cut enough costs to save money? And: Were private servers going broke trying to keep up with server demand?
I think it’s interesting tech. But Classic doesn’t need changes.
Just make servers, some will cap out, some will die. That’s just how the game interfaces with humanity. It’s fine and made BILLIONS the way it was. Surely it can still generate a profit with the original way.
I think some of the complaints about layering were restricted just to the stress test with different layers having random bosses spawned in them. I will say that I’m sad that I couldn’t find some of my friends during the test though due to them being in different layers.
I hardly think that matters. The issues the OP raises are the same per-server regardless of how many overall players there ends up being.
Each server is going to be capped at a certain number, and 2 million or 10 million only changes the number of overall servers needed. Each individual server would still suffer horrific and completely unplayable overpopulation regardless.
We can have the debate about how many players to expect in a thread where that’s relevant. We already know, however, that there will be enough to cause overpopulation, which is what this thread is about.
This misses key factors, though. In modern WoW, if a quest item drops it drops for everyone most of the time. In Classic WoW (or at least in vanilla), a quest item dropped only for one person at a time. Which means that regardless of how many groups you get, the same number of wolves will need to be killed if you’re looking for an item drop.
Let’s say you need a pristine pelt, or some moss from some grells. Let’s say it has a 33% chance of dropping. For 100 people you’d ostensibly need 300 grells killed. For 100 people in 20 groups of 5, you’d still need to kill 300 grells.
The grouping makes it easier to tag them, and it means more experience for each group, but it doesn’t change the overall number of grells needed to kill for the entire 100 people. Couple this with non-dynamic spawn times (vanilla did not have dynamic spawns, and the respawn time was the same regardless of whether or not there was 1 person or 100 people), and it’s just going to be a logistic nightmare.
If it’s a kill quest, sure, that changes things. If it’s a drop quest, it changes nothing on a region wide basis. For individual players it might appear to change things, but the result is still going to be the same amount of player-time-spent overall.
Layers just need more permanence and shouldn’t look/feel like sharding. Layers should essentially be completely different realms, but looking/operating like a single realm, and be pre-set to merge once layering drops.
If someone invites you into a new layer, that move should be permanent–you shouldn’t phase back to ‘your layer’ once you drop group.
Well said. I still remember way back when i bought WoW, and how what excited me the most about starting to play it was that it was in fact one persistent World for everybody in there, not some instanced nonsense.
I was excited for a good reason, because moments after making my first character, not only was i enchanted by the authenticity of the world, but also by all the players running about, grouping up, talking, dueling, trading… you name it. Everyone in the community of the server was part of that one Azeroth, with a unique reputation, and it made it a very special experience, the most special out of all i have for WoW in my case. I’m glad i got to experience it, because there is nothing like it left in modern versions of the game.
To see them want to mess with those vital parts of the World of Warcraft, Azeroth, for modern levels of convenience, is already bad enough. If they do decide to go with it, and go against their own standards for what classic is supposed to be so they can make use of their fancy tech, any day it will remain in classic will make it worse and worse, leading further and further off what the classic experience is supposed to deliver. And that timerange could according to dev interviews be weeks, or even months. I really hope they revisit their choice on it.