Just want to pick this out because there’s a massive fallacy in reason going on (Blizzard, not Enhancelord).
Adding sharding and letting more people flood starting zones on Day 1 has almost nothing to do with how many of those people will stick around and how many will leave. The real issue is how each individual realm plays out.
Each individual realm will see people join for a variety of reasons - some actually choosing a realm just because it says “High” under the population column, some because it says “Low” (there are benefits to both). In fact, we saw that to some degree during the BlizzCon demo. The first two or three realms, since they had them numbered and there was no PvP/PvE, or even RP/non-RP distinction, had “High” populations and more and more people were drawn to the first, while a small number deliberately chose random realm numbers further down that said “Low” because they wanted a quieter experience. Similarly, we see threads by people who want to avoid social media streamers. There will be people avoiding those realms, and people looking for those realms.
Then, once some time has passed (and allegedly there is no more sharding), each individual realm will have more or less people stick around. Each individual realm will have more or less “tourists” leave at whatever point they’ve seen what they wanted. For all anyone knows, a realm that starts off with one of the highest populations could also have the highest number of defectors, leaving it struggling with a small population … the opposite of what the people who rolled there expected. Meanwhile, a seemingly quiet realm that starts off with a lower population could have the most people stick around, and more people reroll seeking that stable population, building it up to a point where volume in areas like capital cities makes the servers struggle.
The actual problem - the end result of realm populations over time - is not fixed in any way by sharding.
You’re kidding right? if the launch is plagued by server problems like we have had in the past even without sharding that would be very bad. LOl again you try and paint the problem as only being Bfa players, you really need to let that go, they will be by far the SMALLEST playersource and along with everyone who pays for a sub get to play Classic.
lol , i will just copy paste what I said above, which include the network tech head guy in that video talking about how bad the AQ event was., I’d expect you to also consider what people who played through those times actually experienced. I take 90% of the Kern says with a grain of salt.
I disagree I think it is fixed by sharding in a way. You can’t take the demo into consideration for any of this considering it was vastly different, limited amount of time, and had major restrictions.
But with that said, blizzard can in fact still create que times, we don’t know if they will but they can. The thing that sharding allows you to do is create less servers. For arguments sake if you are creating server to support 1 million people you would need 400 servers lets say at a 2.5k cap. Now if you were to have lets say a 10k cap specifically for launch you can have 100 servers. If a server is being flooded with people you can still cap it so the other servers can grab some of those players and spread out the population. Then when the tourists leave they will all be at healthy populations for the most part. Of course some will lose more players than others but the outcome is much better than 400 dead servers.
You continue to operate by the fallacy that sharding solves server problems…which may or may not even exist. Mark Kern said servers weren’t the problem. Ion didn’t say that’s why they’re considering sharding. Yet you continue down this train of thought…for no reason.
In any event, players will deal with things, same as we did 15 years ago. Vanilla grew to 8 million players. Players will deal with a lot when the game is fun, engaging, and community driven (especially for an mmo). You sacrifice that third aspect all in the name of ‘convenience’…where does that get you? Take a glance at BfA. How’s that doing?
You wont have anyone to play with when you’re stuck in a queue for >2 hours. I’m not convinced any of you in the classic police squad played during the first month of launch back in 04. Thats burned into my mind like a brand on a steer. You say you don’t mind waiting but I think you will when you only have 2 hours to play and cant even get in the game. Remember, the MAJORITY of those who played Vanilla wow are now in their mid 30’s and can’t drop tons of hours into this game like they did back in 04.
Didn’t they also say that we’re not getting Vanilla WoW server architecture but rather the more-modern cloud-based BfA server structures? It may be that the servers weren’t the problem back then, but today I think they may be.
Or is the single-server-per-machine approach still on the table and an option for Classic? I thought they had already made the decision to launch Classic on the same server structure that BfA uses.
Lol no, i said once that it has helped, not that it solves all the problems, there are limits to what good it can do.
lol , he also says they do not want to repeat the launch of Vanilla, they are considering sharding to help with server problems due to overcrowding, something that melted the servers during the AQ event that Korn said werent a problem,lol.
Can;t have a community if you are stuck in massive queues all the time, or if the servers crash like they did during the AQ event either, I would rather they find solutions over just resorting to queues or opening tons and tons of servers. I just hope that if they went with no sharding and the worst happened that Classic would do more than barely survive, they would get raked across the coals for having a bad launch soooo hard.
Bfa is a 15 year old game, sorry no version of WoW was ever going to maintain the sub heights they reached, in todays marketplace nothing is going to explode like that again until the next revolutionary step in gaming,.
The only queues I had in Vanilla were when I was on a trial account, because you went to the back of the line vs. people paying a sub. Obviously that varied server to server.
And sharding doesn’t address this anyway. You’re still on the server, so the server cap is what it is no matter how many shards there are.
You want a real solution? Offer a Classic Collector’s Edition. Throw some pets in there. And put a 3 day head start. The people truly passionate about the game will buy it, the starting areas will naturally have less players as time goes by. No sharding necessary. Everyone happy.
I hoped it was clear in my first paragraph that I think this is BLIZZARD’s fallacious thinking, not yours. What I quoted of your words was just a good intro to my point.
The faulty assumption is that all those people divide themselves nice and even. Humans don’t. Some won’t join a server unless they already think it is high population. (My demo reference was more about how people divided themselves, with a lion’s share picking the first couple realms in the list. A more Retail reference is what Blizzard has done to Dalaran by constantly having it listed at the top of the “recommended for new users” list - though CRZ sort of diffuses that.)
And that’s the flaw in thinking I’m trying to highlight. They won’t all start with the cap or close to. Even in vanilla, people would dogpile on the highest population servers to the point that server queues weren’t enough to send them to other realms (the horrors of losing one’s place in the queue!) They won’t all have an approximately even number of people leave.
No one knows if there will be a healthy populations at the end of all that. The historical precedent is that some will remain overfull and others will die off. Mob mentality, in fact, will have certain groups jumping ship and rerolling if they even get a whiff of the idea their server isn’t high population like they want. (And we still have no outright confirmation of whether Realm Transfers will be available - at start or later - but if ever leveling 1-60 on a preferred realm isn’t necessary, it will happen.)
I understand what you’re saying and I do agree with you to the point where I know people do this. This is inevitable no matter what you try to do. I am just saying that this helps.
to speak to this point, there were queues in Vanilla, BC, Wrath, well all really, so no sharding would not eliminate that completely.
As I’ve said in the past not opposed to this idea at all, though it seemed to bother people when I pointed out that a CE edition would likely contain items for all their games too.
You make a good point. Blizzard really has no way of knowing which servers will have the highest pops or lowest pops, and more importantly which servers will have higher or lower retention. So to put a blanket ‘fix’ to all servers really serves no purpose.
I think you are getting it mixed up. Here’s how it went down for many of us. The first few weeks of launch back in 04 there were numerous crashes, lag outs, glitches, etc. There were also server login queues. So what happened was when you tried to log in to the server that you chose you would wait in a line and it would give you your spot in line with an estimated time. For the first few weeks there were server queues around the clock with peak times reaching HOURS to just actually log onto your character and run around. I’m not making this up, this is a well documented event.
Sharding steps around this. It allows everyone to actually log onto the server because the server doesnt have a hard cap, it has a soft cap that allows anyone over a certain amount of people to log onto the SAME SERVER but on a different shard on that server. Sharding will allow you to ACTUALLY PLAY the game you have waited so long for the minute the servers go live. You also get to play with everyone who might stay on that server. Sure you might be on a separate shard for a few levels but as people log off and on it will mix and match itself and when it finally goes away, you’ll have your group of people anyway.
I can understand why you want static servers but unless you want dead servers and server merging it just wont work (we have done this already!). I want a cohesive community too. I’m really in the same camp as mostly everyone who wants an authentic experience but you have to look at the hand you are dealt and you also have to look at the disastrous history that was the vanilla launch. Blizzard is just trying to find middle ground here to allow everyone to play the game. You can’t be a part of the community if you can’t log in because you’re now 994 in line after being > 1k for the past hour.
And you miss the point it wasn’t a server problem, it was a back-end problem, as per Mark Kern.
I do understand Ion’s reasoning about a lot of people trying the game out, and then leaving leading to dead servers. But sharding on the grand scale doesn’t address this. That’s a server by server problem. You want a natural way to disperse the playerbase? Throw an early start option. Put it in a CE.
Exactly. If people aren’t having fun with sharding in the initial zones and just being in Classic, they weren’t interested in the first place. I’m glad we agree sharding at launch is a good thing.
I really wanted to go to the park and play basketball. I got there and these kids were using a tennis ball instead, so I left. Guess that means I didn’t want to play basketball.
How is it not a server problem? Define back-end in this instance because I was under the assumption a back end problem was a server issue. A front end issue would be having an in game issue playing wow, a back end problem would be server failure not allowing you to play wow.
It was a server problem. It was a server problem from day 1. It’s not rocket science, its obvious. If I cant log onto the server how is it not a server problem? Because the cap was too low? Also server problem.