Realms pop

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I wish blizz will say what they are doing with realms that go dead after the initial rush.
I worry about that as they will kill it for me personally. Not going to lvl a second toon on a better pop server 4 weeks in or so.
Almost makes me want to wait two months to see where is a good pop realm.
Has anyone heard how they are handling that?
If they give us free realm transfers with restrictions might not be so bad.
I want to put a good bit of time in this but not going to keep making new toons as realms die off especially in the short term.

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That is what Layering is designed to address from my understanding.

Rather than stand up discrete realms to handle demand, they have fewer realms and use layering technology to handle the concurrent users.

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Aside from layering, Ion said they would consider implementing free realm transfers off dead realms in extreme cases

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Server Transfers will be a thing to remedy this OP.

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Layering is the first thing to combat dead servers

server Xfers may be allowed for dead servers later on down the life of classic

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I am more interested in whether or not they plan on setting server caps after layering is removed, and if so what it will be. I feel like realms will end up with wildly different populations after the exodus. Some will be well below 2500, and others well above it. I really hope they put some form of cap, I don’t want to see megaservers like they have on pservers.

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They do, and they said they won’t tell us the caps, just like they’ve never told us the caps for any of the other servers.

They have stated in the past that they have the ability to adjust the caps as needed to account for latency.

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our first line of defense against dead servers will be the biggest cause of dead servers :confused:

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They are doing overflow layering/sharding, like other games do. Like current BFA WoW does.

People on your friends list/guilds/etc… will usually always be on the same “shard” you are on.

When a “layer” hits a cap, a new layer is created and people who are entering your server are dispersed there.

If a layer has nobody on it, or maybe only a handful of people, it closes and disperses it’s small # of players evenly into the available slots on other more populated layers.

It happens dynamically and automatically and you’ll probably never notice it unless you join a party or raid, for example, that’s on a different layer than the one you’re in currently. You’ll simply “zone-in” to that layer. Kinda like what happens in BFA WoW when you join a group with the Group Finder tool to kill a world boss - you see people you were with disappear and then you see everyone in your raid/group you just joined suddenly appear.

I’m not even sure it’s that dramatic on the Classic Server, because there are few instances of World events. There are no World Quests in Classic WoW, for example. In fact, without any group finder tool in Classic WoW, chances are you’ll only be joining groups with people you already see on your layer, unless you go into the General Chat to find groups manually, which I believe everyone on your server can see at the same time, regardless of what layer they are on.

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iirc, it was stated that in the past the community had found a way of figuring out where populations migrate to. I’ve already seen guild advertisements getting ready for Classic which is a good way to do it, that way when realms are listed it can be decided upon for the that guild.

He said that VAS will not be available right away but maybe a year from now or something they would look into it again.

Information was found in: Interview with Ion Hazzikostas

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I think they aren’t making many servers and we are going to have mega realms. Sad really. Otherwise why would the layer cap be 3k? They are going to combine layers at p2. That means massive population sizes.

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I think the stress test weekends will give Blizzard the information they need regarding realm pops and effectiveness of layering

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because they expect most of those to leave before phase 1 is over, OR if they don’t, then they’ll have a better idea of how many servers they actually need, and can start offering limited transfers from the most populated ones to the less populated ones and then if they still need more space they can add new servers.

Since Classic will NEVER have as many people playing as it will during it’s first few months. It will only drop from there, and while some will come back in later phases, this spreads the population out so even if the server ends up bigger than was natural in classic, it won’t feel as over-crowded since the population will be dispersed across 60 levels.

They’re basically just wanting to NOT repeat the original launch where they freaked out and made a freak ton of servers, that over the course of vanilla drained till some died.

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Tipsout has an interview video from when he went to blizz HQ where a developer confirmed they will offer realm transfers for this situation

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Some servers may be overpopulated and other underpopulated. Back in the day, they would offer free transfers away from overpopulated servers to prevent queuing, which in turn benefited the lower population servers the players would move to. No reason they can’t do the same in Classic.

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I highly doubt you’re going to have to worry about a realm pop die-off within a month.

It will be months out at the least, as the “layering” is specifically intended to address the risk of a sharp population decline at the onset.

I also kind of agree with the Dev who responded to the question about “months from now” and low population realms. “I think we’re going to be okay, and won’t be worrying about that.” :sunglasses:

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Sadly the layer does not put friends/guilds in the same layer. It is all random. Only when you join a party will your party members all be put in the same layer. Everything else you said is correct.

As for realm pops I think servers will have high realm pops and layering will take care of overflow. Blizz is thinking a large number of players will quit after the initial rush bringing realm pops down to a more normal size. This is just my thoughts.

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That’s all speculation. You have no way of knowing what it will be like after phase 1.

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Never say Never. I think even Blizzard itself is split on how the population side of things will play out.

The “conservative scenario” is that Classic WoW will play out much like any other retro-title offering did, a big spike in players at the start and then a precipitous drop after that.

Layering is their hedge against that happening. That prior experience indicates even Vanilla had high quit rates further cements the need for some active measures to counter-act a high /gamequit rate in the opening days.

But there is that whole other matter that Classic now is a very different game from BFA, and it has potential to do something unanticipated. Such as draw a much larger group of players than anticipated for launch, or continuing to add players to its playerbase well after the typical “retro-honeymoon” is over.

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I’m sorry, is this what we’re accepting as an official response now?

Some nobody said they heard from a dev?

I mean it makes sense to do this and seems reasonable they would. I also don’t know why that individual would lie, but stating this as if holds any value is bizarre to me.

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