Yeah i really hope they turn that stuff OFF in a few weeks after launch. I hate the feeling when you walk 5 feet from someone and they disappear right in front of you. How are people going to see the same people they grouped up with when they where lvl 25 and remember them when they hit 60 like that is what made the world feel alive. If that is not in classic idk what is going to happen.
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We all said over and over again that we didn’t want it and they are doing it anyways. I’m sure we will all play anyways, but who really knows what kind of impact it will have.
Eloraell already covered most of what needed to be said but I will emphasize this particular point. Queues are not acceptable a game needs to be able to be played paying for a game and instead of playing you’re sitting in a queue is not okay.
I simply love this layering solution they came up with and personally I am very glad it’s there. Some people for some reason are entirely willing to not have it and suffer the consequences and that makes me wonder if they are even planning to play the game and are in fact people who want to see Classic fail.
So the way layering is going to work, if you bothered to listen to Blizzard is that it’s continent-wide. As long as you’re not on the boat or zeppelin, nobody should be disappearing. If they are, that’s why it’s in a beta test right now.
Layers are also not concrete, you’re not in an instance 100% isolated from everyone else. Maybe today you’re with some of the same people, but then maybe tomorrow there’s some new ones, but then some of the old ones are back the next day.
All these people you leveled with, you’re going to be seeing again, because layering isn’t permanent. You’re obsessing over a couple weeks over a server that’s going to be live for the entire life of WoW. They’re not suddenly gone unless they quit.
Seriously, let’s just get the smooth launch, because layering is going to be gone by the time world bosses are out, which is very early in the life of classic, and then there’s literally YEARS of gametime without it. It’s not that big of a deal. What are you gonna be by the time they remove it, level 20?
Theme parks cost more, and have longer lineups.
If waiting in a queue is so bad for you, just make sure to roll on a medium or low population realm.
The rest of us will wait in line.
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And? I’d rather have that than sharding.
That’s a fair point, but if they’re doing so by providing layering, then planning to remove it, wouldn’t removing layering later on then lose the ones they “captured?”
Why rely on a system you plan to remove for that purpose?
Then all realms wait like they did in vanilla instead of adding crap to Classic that wasn’t in vanilla. If after a couple days the queues are still that bad, they can add more realms.
Alright, let’s use that math.
3,000,000 / 50 = 60,000
60,000 - 3,000 = 57,000
Every realm is full, 57k queue on every realm.
80% of players leave.
3,000,000 * 0.2 = 600,000
600,000 / 50 = 12,000
12,000 - 3,000 = 9,000
All realms full, every realm has a 9k queue.
So add 3 realms. Easy.
Now that assumes an even spread, which won’t happen, and probably isn’t even desirable by most players. Some players want “dead” realms. Some players want the overpopulated realms with queues.
Yeah, trying to avoid queues is dumb, though.
My solution is to fix Blizzard’s thinking so they realize those 4 goals are not worth pursuing if it’s done at the expense of the authenticity of Classic.
They don’t want long queues? Too bad. There will be long queues, and that’s okay. The longest queues will be on the most populated servers, and if people don’t want to deal with that, they can play on less populated servers.
Every server will have a long queue? Duh, it’s the launch and that’s to be expected. If people are upset they have to sit in a queue, they can wait until the initial launch population has died off some. Play later at night, wait a couple days, whatever.
Blizzard doesn’t want to open lots of servers? They don’t have to. They can open a few more based on the need. They don’t have to overreact to 3 million players with 1000 realms if they’re expecting massive portions of that 3 million to leave shortly after.
True. Typical of Blizzard, really.
It’s sad how it turned from sharding in the starting zones for the initial launch to sharding the entire world for all of phase 1.
I expect to see a “we still need sharding-- I mean layering-- even in Phase 2” announcement a few months in.
Not all of us. If it’s not gone by Phase 2, I’ll probably peace out. I can handle the horrible feature for Phase 1, because world PvP won’t matter, but once ranking comes into play, I don’t want an entire raid spawning on top of me due to layer swapping.
The effect sharding will have is very well known, because everything you can abuse it for is pretty obvious.
And to me, and many others, layering is not acceptable.
It’s just sharding, bud. It’s not new at all. It’s the same feature, except instead of applying to a single zone or area within a zone, it applies to the entire world.
It’s trash. It’s not a solution; it’s the problem.
Because it wasn’t in vanilla. It’s absolutely laughable to think that not having layering would cause it to fail, yet the game, by any metric, was the most successful before it existed.
How exactly did WoW succeed so tremendously throughout the years for several expansions before it was introduced?
Wrong. You don’t know how it works.
If someone invites you to another layer, you will disappear from that layer and appear in the one you were invited to. People will be disappearing and reappearing a lot.
Yeah, that’s one of the complaints we have about it. We want to be playing with the same people. That’s part of the appeal of Classic: no cross-realm nonsense and a fixed community within your realm you expect to be playing with.
It’s more than a couple weeks. It’s all of Phase 1. Even so, we’d rather those “weeks” not be spoiled by layering.
We don’t need sharding/layering for a smooth launch, and sharding/layering won’t provide you a smooth launch, anyway.
Prepare to sit in queues, deal with login issues, lag horribly, get disconnected, and struggle to get mob tags… even though layering is simultaneously ruining the experience all the while.
60 on a couple characters, and farming MC/Onyxia.
Indeed.
Ignoring the initial launch queues, most realms aren’t going to have queues, but some of us are willing to sit in them for a better experience once we’re finally in the game.
Please stop trying to ruin the game for the rest of us just because you aren’t willing to wait.
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Huh? Removing layering doesn’t delete characters, or force people to leave. If a server has 2000 “originally dedicated players” and 1000 “tourists who stuck around” how could you tell??
Because a tourist in a 37k queue will quit immediately. No chance to capture their excitement.
Vanilla never had 37k queues ever. At most I saw 5k queues in TBC and in WoD people talked about 12k queues and considered the launch to be an abysmal failure. Your concept of “Queues are Vanilla Like!” does not reflect the launch at all.
They will need to add some realms and have said they will if their metrics justify it.
No-one is claiming otherwise.
And that’s why you’re not Blizzard. These aren’t things we “think”. These are the goals Blizzard has stated repeatedly in interviews, posts, and videos.
If the don’t use Layering and don’t open more servers, their queue goal is a failure.
Layering is an elegant solution that satisfies the goals they have set forth.
That’s because of trust issues, not reality.
Nor were 3 million players at launch of which 80% will quit after the first few weeks.
There were no more than 350,000 of us at launch, because that’s how many boxes they made and sold. There were no online digital versions. If your method was to succeed, they’d have to limit who gets access for the first month to no more than 10% of the people wanting to play.
Which is basically another form of queue.
90+ percent of people are absolutely against any form of sharding or layering. Blizzard made the decision to not remove it. It’s a very unpopular decision. But, as of now we don’t know what the impact will truly be as it is tweaked leading up to launch. From the few videos I’ve seen in the beta, it absolutely ruins the experience and that impersonal retail feel creeps in as resources/people appear and disappear. We don’t know yet how long it will stay, so I suppose the best thing to do is sit tight and see how it plays out. It’s entirely possible that it could be a smashing success and make the launch very smooth and can be removed very quickly. It’s also entirely possible that they don’t remove it and it’s disastrous as players unsub and walk away. I personally don’t know anything about the tech but in my opinion it should not be in the game.
None of these alternatives will address the main issue, which will be resources available. First I realize that a 3k capped servers will have more than 3k unique players, for the sake of simplicity I will just be using the cap though.
So say we have 5 layers of 3k, that is 15k players per server, the goal of which is to end up with a server of 3k at the end. That means you have 3k dedicated players spread out across 5 layers. Chances are the other 12k aren’t going to make it very far in leveling. So these 3k players have access to 5 layers worth of resources that the other 12k players will never see.
Even using the examples above, you are still spreading out the 3k dedicated players across multiple realms, giving them access to resources with less competition. The difference between layering and these ideas, is that layering can phase out layers faster than these other ideas can reduce servers.
Like I said above, layer exploiting isn’t going to be that big of an issue. Jumping from layer 1 to 2 to check on thorium spawns probably wont be that beneficial. Trying to lock down BL spawns on multiple layers would also be a challenge. It’s having the final dedicated playerbase spread out across multiple layers or realms that will cause the biggest problem.
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And yet the same people trying to walk back layering, are the ones that convinced Blizzard that just sharding the starter zones was unacceptable.
Dynamic respawns with a high population, weening down to normal cap over time. Is the best way to solve the problems, IMO
No to sharding/layering. No splitting the community
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Dynamic Respawns destroy the game far more than layering ever could.
I don’t care. The whole point of arguing against layering is to suggest that I disagree with what Blizzard wants.
Why would I even bother giving any feedback or making any suggestions if “Blizzard wants this” was an acceptable rebuttal to either?
Blizzard adds LFR. I say it’s bad, and then what, you rush in and say “Blizzard wants LFR”? That’s a stupid argument and you know it.
I don’t care if they want it; I disagree with what they want, obviously. Clearly so, since we’re asking for Classic, not BfA. If we thought what Blizzard wants was good, we’d all be farming azerite while paying for store mounts like good little drones.
I said they should just not implement sharding in the first place so the tourists leave sooner.
You said Blizzard wants to “capture” tourists if they can. That implies that the reason they’re adding sharding is to make the experience more tolerable for the tourists.
But if the tourists were convinced to stay because of sharding, wouldn’t removing it then make them leave?
They could always just check back later. It’s not like your sub only lasts 1 day and is immediately canceled upon closing the game client in response to a long queue.
Anyone not willing to wait to see what the game was all about probably wasn’t that interested in Classic in the first place, so I don’t really care to “capture” them anyway.
But it could have. Classic isn’t meant to recreate, with exact precision, the number of players that played in vanilla, where they played, what they did, etc.
It’s meant to recreate the game. The game was more than capable of having queues that large, given enough people attempted to connect to one realm.
I didn’t really care about the queue sizes enough to call WoD’s launch a failure, and I played on Tichondrius at the time.
The abysmal failure was the 30 minute delay on every single interaction in the game world. Talking to an NPC and hoping several minutes later that the window would actually pop up and let you accept the quest is what people considered to be bad.
That, and the constant disconnects, rubber banding, rollbacks, phasing issues during quest progression, and
The people sitting in a queue were lucky by comparison.
Queues did exist in vanilla; sharding/layering did not.
The size of the queues is inconsequential. I don’t want “the vanilla launch experience,” I want vanilla. That means I want the game as it was in 1.12. That means no layering.
Then why not just do so instead of layering?
Right… I said “Blizzard’s thinking,” not our thinking.
Yes, based on the thinking that those are worth pursuing. I don’t necessarily disagree, until it’s done at the expense of Classic’s authenticity.
Their thinking is that it’s okay to ruin Classic, even temporarily, to achieve those goals. I don’t agree.
I don’t care about their queue goal. They need to get over it and provide us with vanilla.
Layering is far from elegant. It’s a horrible feature.
Yet the reality is not too long ago you were saying that if they had sharding everywhere, you’d be protesting along with the rest of us.
Yet here you are, defending layering. You know it’s the same thing, right?
Doesn’t matter. The amount of players playing the game is not a change to the game.
If 10 million people are playing Chess, that doesn’t mean Chess is a different game than if only 2 million people were playing it.
No, if my method were to succeed, I’d just provide the game as it was in vanilla, with no changes.
How the game was distributed is not a change to the game.
Downloading Digital Chess online doesn’t make the game different than if you bought the CD for the same game at a retail store.
Not in vanilla, so no.
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I agree that layering will most likely be gone by the time the bulk of players start hitting 60, I don’t see layering being around on most servers after the first month. I also don’t think layer jumping for resources is going to be much of a problem.
The problem is that each server will have 1 servers worth of players that will stick around and make it to high level, watered down by the thousands of tourists who will will not. So while the population will be heavy enough to warrant multiple layers, most of those players will not be occupying high level zones. Say for example we are at a point where we still have 2 layers, and 500 level 60s. Those 500 level 60s would normally be on a single realm competing over a single realms worth of resources, but due to retail tourism, layering will spread them out giving them access to 2 realms worth of resources.
And they don’t care about your opinion. The launch goals are set and are tied to business reasons unrelated to your gameplay experience.
Because some of us are suggesting ways to meet those goals…
Goals are not implementations. If Blizzard said “We want people to be able to find groups easily”, we’d have a million “not LFD” ideas.
Also more tolerable for us, since you don’t get priority over tourists.
That’s not how you sell subscriptions.
IYO.
Basically all this boils down to is
You: “I want my game how I want it”
Blizzard: “You are not our only customer, and we’re running a business here”
You:
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Can you explain how it would be more detrimental than sharding/layering?
I see a pserver that still has 8000k players logged on at any time after a 15k launch.
I have. To you. Repeatedly.
Primary reasons:
- Individuals can farm a given mob to generate more chances at a piece of loot.
- Resources respawn faster and can be farmed by individuals.
- Entering a cave means fighting your way in, AND fighting your way out.
- Respawns on top of someone drinking within the 30 second mark are far more painful.
It comes down to the fact that layers exclude players from all the other copies (once exploits are fixed) such that they can’t farm given mobs faster.
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Also keep in mind that Blizzard has said that the 3k cap was by design, and has no intention of running pserver like megaservers. They don’t want more than 3k players on a server/layer, so there is no reason to even consider dynamic respawns.
I keep forgetting🤪
The points listed are fair. I see your reasoning now
Careful. You’re sounding like the wall of no.
But you’re right. Blizzard doesn’t care about their customers or their opinions anymore, which is why the most popular game of theirs is a version of WoW from over a decade ago that remains relatively unchanged.
Alright, then why does Blizzard seem so deadset on changing the game with sharding/layering?
There’s a million solutions to all their goals that aren’t layering, and things that would have no impact on gameplay in the way layering does.
Classic enthusiasts probably don’t mind sitting in a queue for the first few days to experience the game they’ve waited over a decade to enjoy again.
If they do, they can just insist Blizzard add more realms. You already said it’s not ruled out as a possibility, so I don’t see the issue.
You didn’t answer the question at all.
Or are you suggesting Blizzard’s intention is to sell subscriptions to a game only to then ruin it for the people who subscribed once they’ve already got their money?
Is that actually something you want to defend?
No, it’s more like:
Me and the vast majority I’m a part of: “I want the game how it was in vanilla.”
Blizzard: “gives middle finger”
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