Instead of assuming the name reservation to be a cash grab, consider instead of the Classic launch is different than any other game or expansion launch.
What is the main source of information that developers use to gauge how many people will be playing their game upon launch? Pre-orders.
What does Classic NOT have? Pre-orders.
Without pre-orders, how is Blizzard supposed to prepare for a real launch, having very no metrics to base their decisions on? Stress tests aren’t meant to test OVERALL player count, just how much one server/game state can handle before it goes belly up. Not exactly a great prediction of what the launch will be.
But name reservations? This allows Blizzard to look at their active sub count and say “Okay, 80% of our active subs participated in the name reservation. So we can count on AT LEAST X amount of players on launch”. This allows Blizzard to say, a week before the REAL launch, “Hey guys, things on Herod? It ain’t gonna be so hot. May we offer this preemptive opportunity to avoid thousands of unneed forums posts and ‘Blizz doesn’t learn’ comments?”.
Or you know, hey, Blizzard isn’t actually full of real human beings. Nope, just money eating robots who don’t care in the least about their game and community. /sarcasm
No, but i have 30 years of MMORPG experience (since they were MUDs) and have seen this song and dance many times before.
WOW classic isn’t going to be any different, unfortunately.
ONE realm always emerges as the alpha realm, and once that happens (for us, it happened pre launch) then it just pulls in more and more players from the other realms who gravitate to where it’s the most populated.
It isn’t rocket science here and literally every single MMORPG that has ever had servers, INCLUDING Vanilla and retail wow, always have ALPHA servers for each type emerge and become THE servers to be at.
Blizz screwed up by not adding a handful more servers at their original name reservation; now the damage is done and there’s no turning the tanker around, people have the names they want on Herod and that’s that.
I’m not sure what this is a real solution to and it creates a buttload of foreseeable issues down the road. People start and stop streaming everyday (big names excluded). This kind of censoring is troublesome to me on many levels.
keep telling people that blizzard is prepared more so now after name reserves and they have long had the resources and capabilities to adapt to any realm related issue, like people got to calm down and not panic
Why not lock all the servers one day to launch? And if a player hasn’t created a name on them, they will end up on 1 of 4 new servers and just have to deal with it for a month or until phase 2.
My suggestion for those who want to keep their name but don’t want to give up a character is Blizzard gives them an extra character sort of (a 4th) on the other new server if they are maxed on Herod. So they can make it, delete a character, and make another over there if there name is not taken. Just an idea, I don’t know if that is possible.
I really like the idea someone else gave of opening another server with 2 day “Transfer Only” so people can keep their names. Names are a very big deal and I know several people that even took off work to get the names they cared about.
This seems reasonable but at the same time I don’t think Blizzard wants to run the risk of dead realms. They’re playing it cautiously and I completely understand why they are.
Can you please tell us the approximate number of players on each server so we know exactly how over populated the realm is. If we know Stalag has 10k vs Herod with 80k people would be far more comfortable switching over knowing Herods numbers are absolutely insane. Simply saying you will have queues in excess of 10k is not enough information. People need to know exactly what they are walking into. This seems like a warning that will act as an “i told you so” when 50% of Herod pop has to wait in an 8 hour queue at launch. You need to be more transparent if you are serious about getting people to move.