I wish it was just the economy that was affected by this. Huge populations hurt even more than that. I still have bad memories from doing the epic hunter quest for rhok’delar on Nost. Imagine trying to kill 4 demons with 8 hour respawn timers, that also despawn after any failed attempt or if more than one player attacks the demon, while there are 30 other hunters camping the demon spawn around the clock.
Literally the only reason I was able to get that quest done was because the server was unstable and crashed occasionally. I was able to log in first after a server crash or restart and take out each demon before people got back in. Got lucky that it crashed at least once while I was waiting for each demon spawn. 10k players occupying a single world has all sorts of issues.
The population cap for vanilla servers was dynamic according to one of the devs, and the old hardware could handle 3500-4000 max.
Lets just say they allowed the cap to go up to 5000 because hardware was no longer a restricting factor. That’s a bit overpopulated, but wouldn’t be as bad as it is now with everyone trying to level in the same zones.
Right now at prime time, Herod is at about 13000 players in game with another 3000-5000 in the queue. That’s already down from 10000 players in game during the first week with another 15000-25000 players in the queue.
So the activity has dropped by almost half. I expect activity to take something like twice as long (a month) to drop to half again, at which point we’ll probably see the population start to level out.
According to Ion, Phase 2 is going to come at 2-3 months (depending on how the playerbase consumes the content). If they wait until three months, and the activity drops to less than half of what it is now, we should see a max queue of around 4k on Herod. That’s not great, but it’s manageable.
think of it this way. Server capacity is 1000, no matter what. Having 10 layers means that those 1000 people that just logged into the brand new starting area wont overcrowd it and each layer will only have 100 people in the starting zone.
the entire sever still has 1000 people but each layer has 100.
@sorry Tin didn’t mean to reply to you, you were 100% correct lol.
Look, the game, inside the game, is mostly the same. Same quests, same leveling, sort of, same everything, a fairly genuine representation of what it used to be. THAT is what Classic is supposed to be. The behind the scenes stuff doesnt matter.
Truly, which is more important? Being able to play the game, while layering is a thing, or not being able to log in for 2 days, without it. If you truly think that the latter is the better choice, well, thats your opinion, but it seems a little disingenuous to me.
If they drop the population cap to 4-5k once layering is removed, then I’d be totally fine with that. I played on a full realm on vanilla and I’ve played on pservers where the population was confirmed to be about 5k players online concurrently. The world felt lively but was not negatively impacted by the amount of players in any significant way.
If we have long queues because of that, then I’m willing to wait in those queues lol. That’s preferable over realms with 10k+ concurrent players in the same world.
You have yet to throw up an argument other than “It wasn’t in vanilla”. I’m not defending it because I like it. I’m defending it because nobody has given a solution to the long term dead server problem.
It not being in vanilla is the best reason to remove it. they can merge/offer xfer from said “dead” servers like it or not layering is leaving in phase 2 if Blizzard wants to keep customers happy they wont back down from this.
Everything i said there, and this is what you pulled from it?? Its cool, i was exaggerating, but that’s not the point. Realms that do not have queues now, at all, will have decent sized queues. Realms that DO have queues now, well, they might as well go play Retail or Madden 2020.
How is that better that layering? Give me a real solution, not just “It wasnt in Vanilla, so it needs to go” That argument doesnt hold up for me.
Edit: By real solution, i mean one that doesnt result in the same Cluster F as retail right now.
I’d say blizz should consider stretching that number a little to find a balance between queue times and overpopulation. And by “a little”, I mean like… 6k players, which means that during the week the max queues on Herod could be as low as 2500 players during phase 2.
Of course that number is built on SEVERAL assumptions, so take it with a grain of salt.