Oh Mogar, my dear dear Mogar, the same old worn drum
Classic =/= Vanilla.
And the point of layering is to try and preserve the community in the long run. It’s not about convenience. Efficiency, possibly, and that is not bad. But it’s not to destroy communities. That’s what empty servers do and there is history to point to that.
I know you love beating the nochanges drum, and it’s cool, but you need to realize the health of the game will be better when community on a server is able to be preserved and still have a healthy population instead of many small empty servers.
It won’t work, and I don’t care what Ion claimed. You will never see 500 or more people in an area with sharting/layering. As long as retail has been out, I have never seen it, so I have no reason to believe it . I have seen raids combined raids sharted away from major cities though, because “It disrupted the server stability”.
The point is they’re NOT letting the chips fall where they may, because that might lead to a miserable experience. They’re capping layers for player convenience. And Ion discounting the Vanilla experience is nothing new. It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t know good mmorpg design.
At 3000 per server, because they know 1000 of them won’t run to Elwynn because it would be painful for them while leaving all the other leveling zones open…
You’re basing all this off what I consider a flawed expectation that there’s going to be a mass exodus of players. I don’t think that’s going to happen. So what happens? The conditions to remove Layering never come about. But Ion has already promised to get rid of it within a few weeks. So say they do that. What now? Now you have servers with MASSIVE populations, huge server queues, and overcrowded zones. They’ve created the very situation they’re trying to address by not having enough servers.
And now players have their servers, they’ve committed time to their characters. They’re not going to just uproot and leave or start over. Layering causes more problems than it solves unless miraculously there’s this crazy drop in player population.
By the way, layering IS being done for player convenience. To some extent, anyway.
The fact that you think its flawed doesn’t mean Blizzard should throw out all their planning, because they don’t think its flawed and neither do the rest of us. Why? Because that’s what historically happened for every other expansion. People came back to the game, got bored, and left. Including TBC and Wrath where it was supposedly still the golden age.
Couple that with the shared sub, and you have a ready pool of people who will play long enough to convince themselves its bad, then leave.
What you’re saying is factually incorrect. The first expansion that had a net drop was Cataclysm. Vanilla grew the playerbase 8 million. TBC added like another 3 million. Wrath added another million.
Yes, players join and players leave. But as long as the population goes up, then the playerbase grows.
What you’re forgetting is how many accounts were made compared to how many accounts stayed. If you have 100 million total accounts made in a given time period but 12 million was the peak (and that obviously doesnt even take into account that say the 11 million in subs were the same people). Those 3 iterations of the game certainly either lost a lot of people or failed to entice lots of people to play them. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good game, but dont prop it up to be something its not.
I wasn’t aware stating factual numbers was propping up something. Were those numbers inaccurate? Did Vanilla not grow to 7-8 million subs? Did TBC not raise it to 11 million subs? Did it not get to 12 million subs in Wrath? Was Cataclysm not the first expansion that ended with less active subs than it began with?
Another factual number is that 80 million+ left the game when it was new or in its prime. Meaning more people thought it sucked (even in vanilla) than thought it was good. This will likely be the same exact thing that happens in classic, you’re gonna have a huge launch and then people are gonna realize its an acquired playstyle and most will think it sucks, cause a lot of it does.
It’s irrelevant how many leave. As long as the number of those who stay + new players is greater than those who left something amazing happens: the playerbase goes up. And that’s exactly what happened.
And if ‘the exact same thing happens in Classic’ as you say, then thanks for agreeing with me. The playerbase will continue to rise and layering will have caused more harm than good.
I didn’t say a net drop. I said that every expansion including TBC and Wrath had a peak right after launch, followed by a sharp drop. Even TBC in the midst of the climb had a burst of numbers right after launch that fell back again as people who had left WoW came back to check out the new Expansion.
And I wish I didn’t have to explain yet again that I agree this will happen. AFTER we have dropped back to about 500k from the 2-3 million. It will continue to grow slowly from a base of 500k. It will not burst to 2-3 million and hold that onwards. That’s ridiculous.
Perhaps it’s the fact Classic is crushing BfA in Google trends. A 15 year old game has far more interest than the Current game. The day 8.2 dropped Classic held like the top 3 or 4 Twitch WoW streams (despite having so few people in the Beta).
If you don’t see how much interest there is in Classic you’re being deliberately obtuse. But don’t feel bad, because Blizz is also still operating by this assumption of ‘you think you do, but you don’t.’ And they’re in for a surprise.
I knew I shoulda mentioned the 100k viewership on twitch streams… As if thats an indication of anything.
Lets say you have a pool of 6 million players. You take away the pserver players who only play cause its free. You take away the hardcore nochangers that see theres been some changes and refuse to play it cause its not a 1:1 version of vanilla, you take away retail tourists, you take away the people who came for the nostalgia and realized its not as fun as it was 15 years ago, you take away the new generation of gamers who dont have the patience for a game that is a slog, there is going to be a huge drop off, its you that is in for a surprise.