Okay, here he is on this specifically. Bear in mind, prior to this discussion on Layering, he’d previously advocated for 500 player concurrency:
At 1:06:50 he even goes into my option, acknowledges it as valid, then goes right back into advocating for much smaller player population caps than existed in Vanilla, and why they targeted the population they did in Vanilla.
I’m very skeptical of their implementation on Beta. I don’t think there’s enough people to actually properly activate it, and its causing them problems.
Also, Server 15 was dialled up far higher on congestion. Server 3 was easy to progress but it felt empty.
Also, regarding “what it should be”, I totally agree they should consider it for WoW 2.0. Whatever comes out of Classic’s experience. But for the Classic Launch it should be representative of the numbers we had, because that’s what its supposed to be.
You act as if the merging of stable, persistent server populations is somehow worse than multiple server-sized populations randomizing themselves constantly, and then merging anyway. How in the world does that compute?!
Blizzard strategizing in a meeting:
“Hey, if there never is a realm community to begin with… you won’t have to say that you’ll have to break any apart later on, cause there is no community to be broken ![:sunglasses:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/sunglasses.png?v=6" ":sunglasses:")
”
Blizz Admirer:
“someone give this man a raise right now!!”
…Too bad that is really gonna suck for us, when we won’t have a stable community for weeks or months into the game and no one world to get immersed into. ![:disappointed_relieved:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/disappointed_relieved.png?v=6" ":disappointed_relieved:")
Part of me wants Classic to outright fail just to shut you people up. All of you.
Merging is a myth.
They would implement Connected Realms and CRZ.
Do you really want that?
Their plan is to merge the layers. He just wants static layers until they do.
But… you came to the Classic forums. That’s where you are, you know that right?
For those that care, here is Kern’s take on layering:
“Instead of layering, WoW should go back to it’s original intention…smaller servers and more of them. Each one a micro-community. With virtual machines and dynamic allocation of computing resources on the back end, this is finally possible.”
LoL at this point what is he even talking about? The issue is not computing resources, you need a certain amount of people to make a world as large as WoW work. Smaller servers and micro communities do nothing for that.
Honestly Kern just sounds more and more bitter he left WoW for reasons during vanilla.
Like, he was instrumental, but he didn’t “collect” the sigs. He just printed them. He wasn’t out pandering for signatures. Most of that came from internet and the classic community itself.
Don’t get me wrong I appreciate Kern for what he did, even though I don’t care for all of his development history. He just wasn’t the main reason the signatures were collected.
After the tourists have left, that may be viable. But that would make the tourist effect even more destructive in the first few weeks.
It only works if you have a very dedicated group of players who will never quit.
Small realms would suffer from large losses, but be less damaged by gradual losses, as long as they could find replacements. But WoW was designed around 2k average, with 2.5k-3k caps, 1000 players on each side. That’s how the space in the world is balanced, the resources are balanced, even the size of the raids (though that’s partly also the Class count and Party size).
lolwut.
That “has been” was a major component in the creation of World of Warcraft, we should be listening to more advice from old devs.
He also hand delivered the signatures to blizzard and helped get classic rolling again.
Your lack of respect to og developers confuses me alot, if not for them classic would not exist, why are you so fast to hate on them?
If your a classic fan, wouldn’t their words actually be important?
This reminds me a story told by Kevin jordan, he said by the end of wrath he was arguing against lfg, lfr, but it didn’t matter, the “new” developer’s just saw the old guard as washed up has been to be scoffed at.
Personally I think its clueless people like you who don’t respect the old wisdom of original developers that led to the downfall of this game.
Everyone since wows creation has thought they could improve or do a better job than the original developers, ALL have failed, NONE have come close to recapturing or advancing Warcraft.
It’s time to start actually pay the origin creators their dues on creating such a magnificent game, personally I’d like to see them all re hired and over seeing classic.
His small, tight-knit community ideal is great in theory. It’s horrible for how WoW is built, even in Vanilla. 500 Player concurrency per faction would amount to a small window every day where grouping for instances was even possible. Trying to do 40 man raids would be even more of a challenge.
It wouldn’t be impossible, but it would take a lot more work. Yes, it’d be “great” from a community perspective. Because it brute forces Community into center stage.
From a game play perspective, it is a nightmare. Want to run an instance during odd hours? Forget about it, nobody is around that is interested.
So instead you’re playing the balancing act of trying to give the “small town feel” that a 500 player concurrency offers, while trying to move closer to “the city that never sleeps” instead. Which means you need to move into a concurrency population that numbers in the thousands in order to facilitate game play.
What you have to be careful of from there is making sure you don’t move the needle too far in that direction however. Which is what went wrong with LFG as implemented in Wrath.
You went from a largish (but mostly rural) town population where “the social network” covered most everybody on the realm within 2 or 3 degrees of separation. To dropping players into random locations scattered across Oklahoma City, where their social network didn’t matter much at all, and where developing a new one is pointless because they’re going to end up in Kansas City 2 hours later, and who knows where the day after that.
It’s designed around 2-3.5K average people on at one time, but to maintain that you need far far more than just that as active players. The average high pop server had what 20-30K active members?
That is hardly a small community, that’s a large town.
I’ve always seen numbers more around the 7.5k-10k. A general rule of thumb is that your active monthly population should be such that your hit online cap around 40% of your monthly population.
I can’t speak to that as it would take into account what you consider active players, but I would consider it by any means far larger than a micro-community.
Sure other than the conflict of interest as he is developing a competing game (ember), his opinion is going to be based on what is best for his game and if classic wow fails, that’s more potential customers for his new game. Sure layer it, shard it, more customers for meeee!