I can only go off my pserver experiences when it comes to population sizes this large, but I think you could be correct. I was on Nost when it was growing and it still felt okay when it was at roughly 6k players concurrently. Granted, they had already started increasing spawn times on most things by that point to deal with the growing population, so the Blizzard experience may be different.
That said, around 7500 concurrent players was when the population started to become a noticeable detriment to the game experience, even with the increased spawn rates on Nost, so Blizzard should definitely not have a population cap that high once layering is gone imo. 4-5k is probably the sweet spot if you ask me, but it could possibly be pushed to 6k without harming the experience significantly.
Yeah, time will tell how they handle it. Ultimately I think they’ll make the right decision. They designed the world in the first place so they should have a good idea of how many players can exist in it at the same time without hurting the gameplay experience. We’ll probably see more free server transfers pop up when we move into phase 2 for realms if they’re getting significant queue times after layering is removed. I admit I’m an optimist though, lol.
Some of them are still around, aren’t they? I was under the impression that Omar and a few others were around from those days, so they should be able to provide some good input on the subject hopefully.
That is not how it works. If the layer is not on the server it will que you up. I think they started with four layers of 2500 per server. Then increased it to 6 layers of 2500. Niw sounds like larger sevrrs are back to four. My server us always high but never had a que time. The layers dont just split players it makes server layers in the main server. As layers go away population of the server has to decrease to keep resources in balance. 10k people with one layer will break the resources of the game.they probably can do it but wont.
I noticed this too. It’s smart of them because it shows a more accurate picture of the server status, and it makes the realms you are transferring to more appealing (they are now shown as “medium” pop instead of low).
That’s raw population numbers which is different from the amount people online concurrently. To give an example, Nostalrius had over 100,000 active players, but there was usually around 10,000 to 15,000 players online at one time at any given time.
Also, for these forums you need to put a ` on each end of the link so it doesn’t get blocked:
I feel like they have been pretty clear on this not being the case? They don’t remove layers but combine them. Blizzard doesn’t just kick you out because they decided to lower the number of layers.
Yes, in a way layers do allow more people to be logged in at a time because if everyone was on the same layer the game would crash due to majority being in the same area. However, blizzard has the layers set to allow what they currently plan to be the final number of players logged into the server. Of course, this number can be changed at anytime by blizzard.
But still, if the server max is 3k and you have 5 layers. Then blizzard decides to lower to 4 layers. The final result would be 3k players across 4 layers. This works as more people are spread out into different zones.
“We’re not releasing specific numbers as that will change drastically” from Reddit AMA
In the same AMA they also explain that they are dedicated to removing layering by phase 2 so there will be a max number of players connected to a server and increasing more layers when needed will not cross that threshold.
