Classic should have it, but in very limited amounts:
Starting level 1-10 zones during release week - YES, if server stability becomes an issue. The cap before sharding should be kept as high as possible, so that it doesn’t happen except as a last resort. Definitely not like in Retail where sharding is very heavy handed.
After that - No sharding except as an absolute last resort to preserve server stability. I expect sharding should not be necessary after the starting zones except in very rare cases like the release of the Silithus quest hub and the AQ launch event. After the early levels, the player base will naturally spread out to different zones since players will level at different rates.
Personally, I’d rather the sharding system were automated with a very high threshold before it activates.
Sharding is better than having the game crash and be unplayble. But it still isn’t the desired solution.
That totally depends on the demand. They can run up a new server in half an hour if they want. All they have to do is image it and change the name and a few other settings which are scripted.
All these people demanding extra servers from launch… prove that people will last past what Blizzard expects. The vast majority being tourists who poke their head in for a while and come back from time to time. You can have 15000 accounts on a server, if 90% of them only play 1% of the time.
They’re most likely a wall of no poster that never wanted Classic. Now that Retail is literal trash even for retail player standards they’re trying to change Classic when it wasn’t targeted towards them to begin with
One of the nice things about Vanilla was you could gain local fame on your server. Plus you’d make friends. The server was your home. You were familiar with the players there, many of whom you recognized. And you were familiar with the guilds.
Tossing all that out the window to jump to a new server with completely new players, guilds and culture is a pretty glaring break from reality.
It’s like your character has permanently jumped to an alternate parallel world. Yuck!
I only server-transferred once in the last 13 years. And even then it was only because my previous server had become a ghost-town with tiny population and all my friends had already left.
Vanilla also had dead and dying servers, but that’s a side point.
You’re saying 8 million active players. Which given 2 peaks (EU and US), splitting the average 40% online peak, that’s roughly 1.6 million players at either the US or EU peak.
So that would require on the US servers, 2000 servers to satisfy just 20% of that 8 million playing at the same time.
While I agree that WoW Classic is going to be popular, 3 months after release, I think that number is going to be down around the 500k mark. Not because Classic WoW is not a masterpiece, but because the immediate gratification millenials and sub-millenials aren’t going to be as tolerant of a tough but quality experience where you have to work for your rewards, as Gen X was in its 20s.
The world has moved on, and BfA is meeting the demands of the new generation, if they’re on a PC at all. Games like Pokemon Go have captured the attention of the people who 15 years ago would have been starting WoW.
So if you put your 2000 servers in at launch, and drop down to 500,000 people, with a split 40% peak between US and EU, that’s 66 servers.
Or conversely, an average of 100 people on those 2000 servers you spun up because you over estimated the population.
I disagree with OP. Personally, I think a minimal amount of sharding to preserve server stability puts gameplay FIRST, but authenticity SECOND.
My recollection from Vanilla was that NOBODY liked server crashes and instability issues that made it impossible to play. These forums were absolutely filled with complaints whenever it happened.
The vast majority of Vanilla players would have killed to have sharding technology in the game if that’s what it took so they could actually play.
I’m not saying that. I said that Vanilla had 8 million players and rising.
Dont put words in my mouth.
Cool. I dont guess numbers usually as I dont know how many people will play or not. And as proven often in the past, Blizzard happens to often not know either. But good that you can guess to get some statistics out of nobody cares for.
What im saying is that sharding has the most destructive worst case.
Id rather see them offering more servers than needed, let the launch period play out without sharding, merge the low pop ones relatively quickly. Avoid all the other stuff that comes with sharding.
Not a good option, but overall better than sharding still.
I expect Classic to have maybe 500K players max. Most of those will probably be tourists from Retail. Very few of them will choose to swap to Classic and actually play progression there instead of Retail. My guess is maybe 25-50K.
Vanilla was a great game for its time. But a lot of features simply haven’t aged well in comparison to modern Retail WoW or other games. For example:
Graphics - 14 years of graphics updates is very noticeable.
Gameplay - Retail WoW has fairly complex gameplay for every class. No one-button rotations. Not so for Classic.
Class Balance - classes in Vanilla were notoriously unbalanced by today’s standards.
Choice - despite having what looks like more options in the talent trees, players in Vanilla actually had less choice than today. For example: every mage in Molten Core or BWL in Vanilla was a frost mage. Just about every raiding paladin and druid was a healer, etc.
Limited Endgame content - Vanilla really didn’t have much to do at max level. You could PVP or raid. That was pretty much it. Far less endgame content than Retail.
Less content - Retail WoW with all its expansions has probably 10x the land area and 10x the number of quests. Vanilla had a tiny fraction of the content available in Retail today.
Vanilla was unique for its time:
When Vanilla came out it was enormously more advanced and polished than competing contemporary MMOs.
The standard model for contemporary MMOs 14 years ago was to have a few different terrain types and then lots of terrain each using one of these types. WoW was a quantum leap ahead since every zone looked and felt absolutely unique. Pick any two forest zones in Vanilla WoW and they looked and felt quite different from each other. Not so for other MMOs of the time.
14 years ago many MMOs had a canned set of abilities that were largely shared between classes. Each class might have only a few unique abilities setting it apart from the next class. In contrast, each of the classes in WoW played completely differently from each other. They all felt unique. Basically, WoW did for MMOs what Starcraft did for RTS.
WoW’s graphic engine played quite smoothly and looked great 13 years ago.
Playing WoW for the first time felt incredibly special and magical. There was a sense of childlike wonder as you explored the world for the first time. Unfortunately, that sense of wonder is gone and can never be reclaimed. Everyone playing Classic will have already played WoW or its expansions so the sense of discovery is gone.
When I asked how many you thought, you said 8 million. If that’s not your estimate, then maybe answer the question.
Then is your argument that sharding is bad because it wasn’t in Vanilla, but you don’t care about the difference in the world in 15 years, you just want to crash the system authentically?
Phasing is a different statement to sharding. Phasing was used by the game designers to enhance storytelling.
If you’re talking about players randomly disappearing, you really need to read the alternatives being proposed. 200-500 people in a zone, you’re rarely going to notice if one disappears. There will be a sudden point in Durotar where a lot of people disappear because they had to make a new shard, but that’ll probably come as a relief to most because now they only have to compete with 3 people for that single Kul Tiran Marine, instead 7.
If you’re right that WoW is a smashing success at launch, they need to put up thousands of servers. We know they won’t be doing that, because while they think lots of people will play, they don’t think lots of people will last.
So given that they will be having a “limited” number of servers, are you expecting them to have 10,000 person queues?
You didnt ask me how many people I think would play. Are you really trying to lie now?
I give you the benefit of the doubt.
I ment sharding ofc. I edited my post.
Why would I randomly change the statement 've done multiple times in this thread already?
Then they can pump out all those new servers you talked about. You know, these here:
So yes, you may have a que for he first half hour. If your own statement is to be believed.
So why do we need sharding again?
It can work without it quite nicely.
And the worst case of not having sharding is still leagues better than the worst case you could have with sharding.
Apologies. This same debate is going back and forth in 4 different threads right now. If people would stop creating new “Rage about shards” threads it might be easier to keep it all together.