Heartseeker is going to be opening gates at the end of this work week.
Lets discuss how unplayable the servers have been. I am not in IT but if private servers can get it right…why cant Blizzard? I am not looking forward to the AQ event given the massive amount of server issues being posted here.
what was the population of a typical private server? I didn’t play on them, but I’d imagine it was substantially smaller than the classic megaservers. Deviate Delight is about 1/5th the size of the megaservers and we have zero server issues.
Some private servers (some or the popular ones) had higher populations than blizzards 10k player cap (10k is “Full” server status)
Nost just given their published numbers were beating 10k active per server. Its all googlable information
Do we have Blizzards published #s? Because i can tell you that any 3rd party site telling you server pops is wrong as most of them just calculate #s from raid parses
No, Blizzard hides that information, the raid logs are all we have to go off of.
Which is why comparing the two isnt really fair. A good chunk of people dont raid at all, so populations may still be far bigger than w/e #s Pservers were trying to convince us were true
Its just a different beast all together.
Pservers made compromises to view distance and spell priority to keep the movement as smooth as possible.
If you watch some of the videos you cant see enemy players til they are like 15yards away. I would rather see the mob from a distance so you can better prepare.
Active players means nothing. Its all about concurrent player load. 5k players all logged in at once will stress a server. 15k players spread throughout the day won’t even phase it.
This isn’t true.
Because private servers made technical compromises that Blizzard can’t. This was explained in the Nostralius postmortem document they released.
There’s a reason no 3D MMORPG in the world has population density like WoW does, because there is no server technology that exists that can handle the number of characters we see at once in Classic without lagging.
Gotta say, the private servers definitely seemed more community like. Maybe it was the idea of it all being one server. You know, no xrealm stuff.
I think it was kinda selfish even though it is there game. It’s like the older brother who is done playing with a toy as he gets older and sees his younger brother playing with it, he gets jealous. But now they don’t even care about it again, coulda just let the guys who were running those private servers keep it rolling.
Because the private servers were putting more effort in terms of quality and money into their servers. Money = performance in terms of servers, and Blizzard wants to make as much money as possible so they get by with as little as possible because the electric bill is not free.
Also the servers are not dedicated in WoW like they once were, and like the private servers are, instead the server hardware hosts not only WoW Classic, but Retail, Diablo 3, Starcraft Remaster, StarCraft 2, Overwatch, Heros of the storm, Hearthstone, and maybe a game I forgot about.
So they are trying to get by with as little hardware as possible, and because they have now too many things on shared resources there are areas where the quality will suffer.
This same issue takes place in retail too, its not just Classic, the servers there can get really chunky some times and it does not even take 20 players to get that way either, its just how their servers are and how much resource budget our game is given.
Blizzard has the best server hardware available, nothing better exists. Private servers ran off on an old Xeon; your lack of knowledge here is showing.
I never saw lag like that when I was able to do World bosses and there were epic PVP matches with like 200 people. I also never saw lag that bad pretty much anywhere. One exception being the AQ gate opening with the crashes and everything but what could be more Vanilla like than lag and crashes at the AQ gate opening.
It is a matter of scale. It isn’t just the one server with 10K, like you had on some of the largest IP theft servers. Instead, you have, say, 10 servers with 10K players each in the same building. The problem isn’t with the servers. The physical servers can handle all that and more.
No, the problem is with the connectivity and throughput. In other words, the physical internet connection and bandwidth limitations of the infrastructure, not just in their building, but in the area the building is in.
Let’s use an analogy. We’ll compare the connectivity to plumbing in your house. You don’t like your shower because it doesn’t have enough water pressure. So, where does the problem lie? It might be that there’s a flow restrictor in the shower head which limits water pressure for various reasons. That would be like a physical server which is overloaded. This is something you can fix, either by removing the restrictor, or by getting a different showerhead.
But what if that doesn’t fix it? Well, then you look at the pipes in your house. Some might be leaky, or they might be old pipes, which were run badly and keep the water from flowing properly. This is more difficult to fix without remodeling the whole house, so you may need a new building.
But what if that doesn’t fix it? Well, then you need to consider what happens when you run the shower, the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the garden hose all at once, and whether that affects the available water pressure.
But what if that doesn’t fix it? Well, then you have your connection to the city’s water main. if the pipes coming onto your property aren’t the right size, then you may not be able to get all the water (and water pressure) that you want/need. That’s harder to upgrade, but it is still in your realm of possibility.
But what if that doesn’t fix it? Then you have to look at the neighborhood. Are there too many houses using too much water nearby for you to get pressure? Is the water main old, and hasn’t been upgraded, despite more people moving in over the years?
All of this is an approximation, of course. But remember, the lack of layering/sharding also adds into the amount of throughput required for each character on each server. Say you have 200 people in viewing distance of each other, in Orgrimmar, for a buff drop. With shards of 20 people each, you have the equivalent of 4000 people’s actions streaming to and from servers (each person sees the actions of themselves plus 19 others). Without shards, those 200 people now account for 40000 actions constantly streaming. And that’s just their movements. That doesn’t count the environment, people AoEing, etc. Just 200 people. Now expand it to a server of 10K. And put it in the same building with 10 other servers of 10k.
The problem is scale. Things that work at small scale (and yes, the IP theft servers were small scale compared to Classic) do not generally work the same at larger scales.
I will say, I read your entire post and it makes sense.
But who cares, private servers provided to a smaller community and did a fantastic job at providing a well streamed game and community.
Blizzard decided to take back what was there’s, they have the right, but they didn’t expect it to hit so hard. And so being as big of a company as they are, they failed to provide to their demand.
Regardless of whether or not the private servers had less or more stress is irrelevant. They provided to their demand.
Private servers have a lot less load than Blizz’s.
It’s not nuclear science.
They do also have more resources and $$$. And they also had the same information we all have, and they didn’t listen at all.
What did they have like 9-10 servers available at launch. That exploded in their face the first minute it touched down.
They could have just made max 6k pop servers and did a 45-55 max racial difference, not allowing players to maximize on pure faction size alone. And maybe had at least some reasonable number of servers. Then xrealm bgs wouldn’t be needed to sustain any single server. This is something that was an issue in the past and they let it happen again.
They decided to give a half tune effort and put layering in. So now even your own server isn’t really one server.
Blizzard just figured it would be a cash garb and so that’s what it became. A bigger one than expected.
Some of you players are able to whine about low population and high population at the same time.
No matter how you do it, if you attract a lot of crowd, user load, you’re going to have problems.
Even the cell phones are going down on holidays.
It’s a user load thing and you’re going to have the problems that goes with it, always.
IMO Blizz did pretty well, considering the quarantine period, no school,work from home for many people and everyone being online.
The problem is people want the best of all worlds. They want to be part of large servers but dont want any of the drawbacks that come with them