You’re making my point. Failure is not what a good company strives for and doing something a second time around should show learning from mistakes and better operations.
I like how people just assume that blizz doesn’t have projections and contingencies and what not.
Story time.
IRL, I’m an Enterprise Architect for a software company in Richmond, VA. I know the meme “small, Indie company”, but Blizzard is actually quite large with a very sophisticated IT department.
It’s all according to plan. When you’re launching a new service, you might throw hardware at it (layering) in the first phase to ensure as clean a launch as possible, BUT permanent hardware decisions aren’t made around temporary conditions.
It’s likely the “servers” aren’t even physical, and the “realms” actually migrate around inside of some kind of Virtual Machine cluster (I’m not sure what tech they use). Adding more now would just thin out the population in the months to come.
They did add a new service (Realm) meaning that they must have hit a threshold that made the decision for them, but I guarantee they had a plan and that plan has contingencies for that realm and for the next several realms, too, should interest continue to spike.
Long post, but I get kind of upset at the naivety of thinking a huge, sophisticated IT department is somehow surprised by a development that some random forumgoer KNEW was gonna happen.
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Except blizzard is the one providing the servers, has the money, has data on how much people prefer classic to retail with social medias.
When the launch is a disaster, it ll be because Blizzard went full blown penny saving and cost cutting to provide a half assed service
Let me explain further, so you know more details to what I’m talking about. It may or may not make a difference in your thoughts, but at least you will know more of where I’m coming from. For easter PVP servers, there were 3: Herod/Faerlina/Thalnos. Faerlina=Streamers, Thalnos=Brazilians, Herod=Catch all for everything else. Blizzard knew of these things. Which bucket do you think would be significantly higher than the others? Now Blizzard could have set the servers prior to this knowledge, but they should have acted quicker in making the new server prior to it getting to “FULL” status. And yes, I have a problem with that. I think it could have been better. If you’re okay with that, that’s you, but I’m not.
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The reality is 20-30% of players that play at launch won’t be playing a month later. Classic isn’t retail. It’s Grindy and time consuming. There is no instant gratification. All classes are not equal. Content isn’t a cake wall like people seem to think it is. The PvP grind it a hardcore commitment.
Don’t judge the game based on Day 1 launch. I guarantee by October 1st the populations will have thinned out and the problem mostly resolved.
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Honestly, blizzard needs to implement a worldpass/temporary server lock system like FFXIV uses. Its the only realistic solution to these problems barring improvements in server technology.
Essentially, during periods of heavy population (long queues, servers listing as ‘full’ or ‘high’) the servers are locked to new character creation unless you already have existing characters on said server.
They can unlock during off-peak hours (this encourages a healthy playerbase in various time zones), and existing players can allow their friends to bypass the server lock and play with them by purchasing a world pass for them. World passes are one time use and sold by in-game NPCS and cost varying amounts of gold depending on server population. More crowded server = more expensive world pass.
I suppose this hasnt been a real issue for WoW for quite some time, but its definitely time some solutions be implemented.
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I’m just saying, back in 2004 release i ended up on a server where i made an orc Hunter and that server shut down. It was down for about 2 weeks and so i switched to Azgalor and made Paladin and Eventually a NE Rogue which become a great server and I had made a lot of friends.
I was disappointed i couldn’t play my hunter and so i tried something different while the server was down and found a whole different server and faction. Merely saying that sometimes bad things or whatever aren’t really bad. They are just a redirection to something even greater.
Challenging Blizzard to a good launch all good and well. Everyone wants things to be smooth but with out the bumps there is no ride.
Iron Maiden: Fear of the Dark!
cheers!
And good points there!
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Wow. You just completely glazed over what I wrote. I could easily respond by just quoting myself, which I did. Then you can respond by quoting yourself. Then we could go round and round.
That’s another big uncertainty isn’t it. The falloff after launch. But didn’t Vanilla show that the player base actually grew and people fell in love with investing in characters. Classic is not an instant gratification game and it might be exactly what the current gaming player base needs. We shall see.
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If that is the case and they “blow launch” by not knowing exactly what the finicky player base will do, they will correct it. Will it happen as quickly as everyone demands? Probably not. I picture gamer’s at times as a squalling baby. They are angry, crying, and absolutely freaking out in an attempt to communicate that they want or need something. When they finally get it, they’re fine as if nothing ever happened.
Because so many people are attempting to prove a point, or “save a penny” as Blizzard is accused of doing and waiting til the last minute to subscribe, Blizzard has to “guess” at how many players there will be. We are likely to see a TON of complaining the first week, but it should reduce once everyone has their bottle or pacifier and settles in for a nice nap (playing World of Warcraft Classic).
Also, blizzard could have tested this. They could have grabbed new gamers to see their response to Classic and if they wanted to play or if they didnt. But they didn’t open Beta up until recently? They offered closed betas. They missed a golden opportunity to identify the current gaming population’s desire to play Classic.
I’m saying bringing up a company’s total value has little to do with how well they are able to handle a problem. Your argument perpetuates the misnomer that throwing money at a problem will fix it.
I’m not defending Blizzard, I’m just saying this type of argument doesn’t help.
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I am the last person to defend modern Blizzard (i will never forgive them for Pathfinder) but you sound like an entitled prat. If you didn’t expect there to be queues like EVERY MMO launch in history has experienced than you are living in a fantasy world other than Azeroth.
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Not at all, conservative estimates on this forum have ben 100k concurrent users upto 30 million.
ofcourse, But they’ve rarely given details that might hurt their earning calls.
Took me 40 mins to get my name, still better than tryign to log into wow during the TBC and wrath launch events.
“going to be issues”
maybe… just maybe… stagger your name allocation… oceaninic… X time… europe… Y time… NA… z time…
A company with Blizz’s money can darn well put their money and efforts into ensuring a smooth launch.
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It isn’t a new game though. The many conditions of 2004 (including it being a new game, the demographics of the playerbase, people coming from other super grindy MMOs, etc.) no longer exist. Can’t really use trends in 2004 to describe how Classic will do.
This is NOT the purpose of layering. The que system and the layering system are 2 independent systems and can be active at the same time.
Layering is to mitigate the population decline.
Ques are for capping populations.
A que on a realm says 1 thing. Blizzard is above the soft cap for that realm. They are not adding more layers. The que is to motivate people to seek a different realm.
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I hope your right.
It’s actually less grind than retail.
Retail seems like less but actually it’s more.
Let say in Classic you get Tier 2 it takes a year. You are ok with stay T2 because it’s really good gear.
Ppl in retail killed 2nd Tier boss on heroic it took 12 months get BiS with TF. Well come next patch your gear is worth as much as a WQ. Your gear devalues. If classic releases t3 the T2 is still Tier 2 (still valuable gear not BiS but not far off).
Only way ppl will get better gear is in Naxx40 and very few will even go into Naxx.
Whatever you grind will hold its value.
Everything you do in retail devalues every few months. It’s so bad as like a green.
On top of that ilvl scaling. So, gear you did get is same as what ilvl you scale to in PvP. Only hold that ilvl in PVE.
If you believe retail is less grinding, you really need to dig deeper. /shrug
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