Heya All :). I have been strongly opposed to the sharding idea, and even layering. I was very bummed when I heard about layering because it doesn’t fit the vanilla idea. I played WoW day 1 release on my old account as a troll hunter on Boulderfist. I was looking forward to the game because i use to play Everquest if anyone remembers that.
However, after the stress test beta and the nostalrius launch (huge bottleneck in starting zones), I see a need for something. My mind has changed, and something simple must be done to address the beginning bottleneck.
Unfortunately, during this stress test and day afterwords, the starting areas and zone population were so immensely populated, it detracted from the overall fun of the experience. Just having 15 people run around with the boars made it difficult to tag any during this test. However, at times there were 50-100+.
The real release is going to have many more than that. That is not actually a vanilla experience, and i can tell you that because I played on day 1 release. There were never that many people in a starting zone in Vanilla. I love the fact the game is hard. I want it to be hard, maybe even harder than Vanilla can offer as my first MMO was EQ. However, having a bottleneck from a swarming population is not fun period. Waiting 30 minutes to finish a boar quest that took a few minutes on day 1 vanilla launch is not something I look forward to. At launch, 30 minutes would be optimistic. You could be stuck on boars and scorpion tails for literally the entire day.
Imagine 500-1000 people in every layer at launch tracking 20-30 boars with a 5 min spawn timer. Imagine the 10-15 scorpion tails you need, which even a group won’t help. You will literally spend your entire first day in the valley of trials on a few mobs.
The game is more well known now, whereas before it was not. This creates a vast difference in the starting areas upon launch. Even on the crowded launch servers, Players in vanilla didn’t compete with even 100 people for boars when they started the game.
They need to find a solution to this. It may be necessary to shard the beginning zones, not just layer. Maybe both, or maybe shard the starting zone then layer everything after Durotar (and other beginning zones). Yes it’s disruptive, but during layering, I was also kicked from a less populated layer into a heavily populated layer just as I was tagging sarkoth, which disrupted my play as much as any shard would.
Maybe sharding isn’t the answer, and they need to add 10 layers at launch, then condense it down to the 3 they want in a week. The point is, they need to find a solution to this problem.
It has nothing to do with being hard or dealing with it folks. This population bottleneck is also not a vanilla experience in any way. Vanilla experience is about community and increased difficulty (along with many other things). It was never about competing with 100-500-1000 people just to tag level 1 boars and scorpions. Honestly guys, can you say that most people find it fun to sit at the boars for even 30 mins to an hour simply because they can’t tag the mobs? That is something you should be competing with for devilsaurs or something, not level 1 boars.
To counter this problem, Forming groups seemed to improve the problem for some quests that give credit to all party members like boars, etc. But even with groups this is a major issue as you need to collect items.
I feel like a bottleneck in population at the start disrupts the game play and overall fun of the game, which blizzard has stated they want to avoid with layering. It would not stop me from playing, as I would grind through it. But I can see this stopping people who are on the ropes about Classic from continuing. That is something we do not want. We don’t want to lose players and future community because they didn’t want to spend 10-20x the amount of time (versus original vanilla questing) solely because you can’t tag a mob. You don’t want to lose players who could end up liking classic and become part of the community merely because they sat at Sarkoth and boars for over an hour. Then spent hours on the next few quests.
imagine new players coming in from BFA or who never played Vanilla, people who never played WoW period, and they are excited to play the game.
This bottleneck is going to drive out a lot of players. Heck, this could drive out people who actually played vanilla but are on the ropes on whether or not to return Nor is it fun for anyone really. Independent of your views and philosophies on no changes, Will anybody actually say the game is more fun as you wait 3-4 hours to finish the boar quest? If you had fun in a crowded starting zone, you will still have fun in a starting zone moving at intended (designed) rates. There is no downside for these folks, The only downside is for all of the folks who aren’t Ok with spending an entire day tagging level 1-2 mobs.
I hope blizzard can find an answer to the population bottleneck at launch, and I hope the community can come together to let them know this is indeed an issue.
Thank you ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
Hope you find happiness
Edit New video from tips out, Go to 11:30. He confirms exactly what I experienced and fear. Ignore the private server comparison, and focus on the fact there are 500-1000 in the starting zones at launch going after 20-30 boars on a 5 minute respawn timer.
2 mins in, ohhgree haptix who is pretty much a purist “no change” and hardcore player even acknowledges something needs to be done to control populations at launch.
edit 5/30 Stress Test 2 has proved this point correct. Tested a different starting zone this time, undead. Even a group of 5 of us running around had to sit at zombies for over 40 minutes to try and tag the mobs. It was brutal, this was with layering intact. We need more than 3 layers in the starting zones.
Even streamers like asmongold and esfand were on their streams for 30 minutes last night in Elwynd forest saying this was “cancer” and that they couldn’t do anything or level because there were so many people tagging mobs.