It is. But the significant point here is that even if the number drops to 2 million, the 200 person shard is still needed for the initial wave, though it might only require 2 or 3 of them. Below 2 million it starts to be a question of whether to reduce the server counts, and how many people will really hang around.
If people truly believe only about 300,000 people will play at launch, then all of these systems would literally disable themselves. Shards would not be created because they would never hit the 400 mark, and we’d never need them to exist, plus they would go away pretty quickly.
Which means that if the pessimists are right this system still satisfies their need. The key is the high shard population vs the current 20 or 30 player shards that Retail has. That difference and the belief that the technological capability exists, is what most of this relies on.
If the shards never kick in, but we still have enough players to keep the game viable for years to come, I will be a happy purist. I’m just more of a buy-in optimist.
While I can’t speak to the 4.5 million, seems low even in the current state, I mean… I don’t play, but I am technically paying…
Sorry… on track. You bring up a good point, at least it led me to think upon it. Perhaps not all current subs rush over on launch. We will surely see a spike, hence all these discussion. But putting a time limit. . well that might get tricky.
So here is what I am thinking. Let’s say the next raid tear for live comes out and its either a dud, or great. . but never the less its going to keep a lot of people occupied. Then as the lul sets in, and it ALWAYS sets in, then we see a huge influx as people want to try it.
At that point, we may be 2 to 3 months out, but suddenly Northshire is flooded with people and causing a bad log in experience.
Its not an assumption, its an arbitrary definition between tourist and non-tourist. The average player who gets past L20 is far more likely to keep playing for a longer time, than dying out a few levels later.
Conceptually, these systems could be reenabled, though I think if there’s really a lull from Retail, it’ll be far slower and spread out, as teams hit their maximum raiding potential at different stages.
I think a better option is an open beta. The tourists could get it out of their system while blizzard simultaneously got to stress test the servers. The only thing worse than sharding, is sharding that wouldn’t solve the problem. 400 per zone is about 4x an unplayable number.
need to put that right next to where you said it. if you put in the body of your post, some are not going to read that far and you’ll spend most of your posts having to tell them to learn to read. bullet pts are easy on the eyes.
The numbers can be tweaked to use more shards, but part of the authentic Vanilla experience was competing for mobs in those early days, forcing people to team up to tag mobs.
Blizzard is going to be the final decider, but all the existing posts seem to be “NO SHARDS, LOTS OF SERVERS” or “SHARDS LIKE RETAIL!”. I’m trying to post a middle ground.
Blizzard wants to smooth the launch. The real launch wasn’t smooth.
The only Authentic way of launching classic is with a server queue and a slowly increasing realm population. Sharding isn’t authentic and it will need to be heavily used to actually make the launch smooth.
If all the estimates are high, it will naturally kick itself out of existence far before that.
Are you also going to restrict who has an account to the same speed of growth from 1.5 million at launch, to 7 million in late Vanilla? How do you decide who isn’t allowed to have an account?
There were 89 US servers at launch, and no EU servers. At EU Launch there were 36 English language servers, and I’m not sure how many other EU language servers. Rounding out to roughly 100 US and 100 EU was an assumption.
Currently there are 247 US servers and 267 EU servers, which is 514 servers, not including Korea, South America, or China.
Even if they halve that number of servers down to 100, they’re going to be so overloaded that some sort of sharding will be need. The proposed method will only fail if people don’t quit before 20, in which case we have a runaway success and we have to get more servers rapidly added with bulk transfers off the high pop servers.
Since you’re proposing that its super niche, that’s not going to happen.