Right click report will help with that.
Gold sellers are a concern I have as well. I’m going to trust in Blizz to make the right choices on how to deal with them. I also don’t want to spark another holy war here. ![:smiley:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
Optimizing is great. But there’s only so much optimizing that can be done if the entire server is in one zone.
Even when it worked, gameplay wasn’t fun with so many people in the same area. Trying to tag anything was almost impossible unless you were play a class with a fast ranged instant cast.
Back in Vanilla whenever the server went down or loot/combat lag made it unplayable there were thousands of complaints. These forums were completely filled with them.
Being unable to play the game the way it was intended due to server issues was not something Vanilla players were ever happy with.
… but at least players back then expected the occasional disruption. Not so today. Today’s WoW players are used to retail where the game almost never has any issues.
If Classic has as much downtime and server issues as Vanilla did, players are going to be absolutely shocked at how poor it plays.
1 Like
Surprisingly these are extremely popular with players. Often having insanely high participation numbers. Privates do proof that.
The Launch is also not authentic in the way the sheer masses are getting sharded, people, notes and whatnot will pop up and vanish all the time while the areas are more empty than they should be for a launch day. This alone will make some people quit or not even start in the first place. Important to note is that this loss of players will happen mostly within the core audience of Classic. By using sharding you risk all that for the convenience of tourists, which are expected to leave in droves anyway.
For the ques?
If they don’t want high ques they will need many servers, sharding or no sharding. Fact.
Sharding doesnt help with that, cause servers will have to have caps if Blizzard really wants to remove sharding after the beginning.
If a cap is high for vanilla standards (4,5k cap) you will have an average of ±750 people in each starting zone (± popularity and shared starting zones).
The sharding system will have to put people into relatively small sized shards if they want people to be able to quest more or less normally and not having amplified spawn rates.
When is that point given? 50 players per zone? Making it ~15 shards? How high do u think are the chances for people to notice sharding excessively with 15 shards and people grouping up, leaving groups etc. all the time?
What do you suggest? Shards with a 200 population as a bare minimum? 200 people in a starting area without increased respawn rates is still a “mess”. And if youre willing to take a “mess” anyway, let it be an authentic launch day “mess”.
Wait what?
Without sharding it WILL BE an authentic LAUNCH experience, which thanks to new hardware and 14 years of advancements shouldn’t lead to lags and server crashes as it did in 2004.
What you’re talking about is trying to imitate an authentic state of the game a few days/weeks AFTER launch, with the arbitrative difference that the original experience of that certain state in the game didn’t have sharding.
Starting areas…
So everything 'till the barrens is sharded? Thats what I happen to often read around here. And because sharding lets people advance trough that early content way more quickly and combined, as players wont get divided that much by dedication, knowledge and time investment as they usually would get without sharding, the barrens would most likely overflow with players. Instantly breaking their safe bubble and throwing them into a cold world of staying in line for certain items and mobs that wont respawn any quicker than they would with only 5 people in the zone.
Or do you shard that too?
And do you shard the first open PvP in Ashenvale and Stonetalons on PvP servers too?
How much do you think will that hurt the game?
The target audience?
The community?
The overall experience?
Sharding has a high price you seem to not acknowledge.
If you want a easy start, wait a few days and youre gucci – without sharding.
Or you would have to group up, snipe mobs, head out and grind higher lvl mobs if you really want progress a lot on the very first day.
I hope Blizzard clarifies this one before long.
2 Likes
Yes, right click report followed by frequent ban-waves of tens of thousands of accounts at a time did help slightly.
However, even with right-click report the spam continued at almost the same rate.
The addition of the WoW-token is what finally ended the spam. Once that system was added the spam disappeared almost overnight.
However, I am NOT advocating that Blizzard allow players to sell WoW tokens in Classic for in-game gold. I think that would definitely be too far from Vanilla.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. Private server launches are not something Blizzard should be aspiring to. Private servers are garbage.
1 Like
If blizz wants to add tokens, it’s up to them. There will be huge backlash if they talk about it before launch.
If gold farmers are a plague and ruining server experience, I think people might be more open to the idea.
Who knows, maybe gold farmers won’t spam at all and blizz has found new ways to stop them. shrug .
Either way, this is a subject for blizz to touch.
Which makes it even more interesting for Blizzard to take notice of it. Even with crap servers, bad scripting and 14k people NOT sharded, its extremely popular.
How well will a good scripted, lower capped, authentic and original high quality Blizzard classic Server received by players, when they happen to already like the above?
1 Like
The thing is that if the server is as bad in 2019 as it was in 2004, then Blizzard honestly has very little business running a Classic WoW server.
The point of optimizing it is to ensure that outside of special circumstances like the AQ gates, the server wont crash or massively lag just because a higher than normal number of players are in one area.
and competing with other people for resources and mobs in an area is just a part of the Vanilla experience. You can always group up with other players to share tags. Even if you need more drops, you can get more kills faster.
3 Likes
Yeah sharding outside of the launch window and outside of low level zones is not going to go over well.
1 Like
This is dependent on the size of the shard. A 200-500 player shard is an authentic level of overcrowded zone, even if there are 3000 people in the zone.
Caps are and always have been variable. With modern tech, they can have 12000 people on the server during launch then bring that down to 3000 after the initial wave.
That’s more authentic because the queues didn’t really kick in until a week or two after launch. 20mins isn’t really a queue, 4hrs is.
1 Like
Shard 1 to 10 for a month tops.
No sharding after that. Period. For any reason.
/thread
That’s also an extremely dangerous thing to do.
Because what do you do if players don’t leave and you have a 15k server?
Tell me about all the great things Blizzard can do then.
#NoSharding
1 Like
Players on private servers are playing for free on what they know to be extremely old pirated software. As such, their expectations for quality and server stability are extremely low.
That is not going to be the case for Classic. Classic is an official Blizzard product that you have to pay for. Players of Classic will expect a stable high-quality experience with server stability similar to that of Retail.
2 Likes
I’ve never played on a private server and if they shard beyond launch I’ll find it to be a huge breach of trust.
1 Like
Same thing they did on Live. Offer new servers and free transfers off high population servers. Vanilla style.
1 Like
Actually better than retail. Cause retail shards any group larger than (exaggeration) 25 players.
Its not about their expectations here. Its about the fact that people flock onto servers on their launch day KNOWING that it will be an absolute mess, while they could easily wait it out and participate a few weeks or days later as they, as you figured out, do not pay for it.
They choose to be there for the once in a time launch experience. An experience you are willing to sacrifice in the name of convenience. Willingly taking in a multitude of risks that are directly or indirectly connected to sharding, risks that have worst case scenario outcomes so much worse than having an authentic launch day.
You are aware of that are you?
Just think it through once, from all angles.
It can’t be that difficult to see.
1 Like
This reminds me of another post someone made a week ago describing Classic’s upcoming launch:
Your position in queue: 8,945,321
Average wait time: 300 years
Well if that is what you are expecting from Classic that’s fine for you. But frankly, I’d like to actually be able to play the game not just watch a loading screen, or have an unplayable experience due to server crashes.
Having played Retail non-stop since early Vanilla, I now have much higher expectations today than I did back then. I now expect to be able to play the game without major issues even on launch day. Just like in Retail.
2 Likes
How long is the high pop server sharded until that happens? How long will they wait until they think: “ok, they wont leave, lets offer transfers to lower pop servers.”?
When players are around lvl 30? 40?
Youre willing to take in all those risks, doesn’t matter if they’re likely or not, just because of something you (and some other people) feel is a “smoother” launch.
But what is the bigger evil in the long run? What has the most destructive potential?
If you ask yourself that question the answer happens to be sharding.
Blizzard should just make a mega sharded trash server for people who want sharding. The rest of the servers have them nice queues ![:sweat_drops:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/sweat_drops.png?v=6" ":sweat_drops:")
1 Like