and provided its only 1-10 for a few weeks…no issue.
but the more zones that are sharded and the longer sharding rears its ugly head in classic, the bigger the problem i will have.
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I agree the barrens will obviously be way more populated than other races 10-20ish zones but I honestly think at that point, it won’t be an issue.
The major problem isn’t really the amount of people at launch, its their location. I think the difference in skill/knowledge/seriousness of players that will be hitting classic is so drastic that the population of these player will be REALLY spread out by this time. Some people might hit the barrens two hours after they start playing, and some others might not even hit it after a couple days. Not to mention that the questing in these zones are fairly spread out. For example, if I am in Elywynn forest and I have a quest to get those bracers off of the gnolls, I am stuck in that one little patch of elwynn to get them. But in the barrens, when I have a quest to get the zebra hooves, I have ALLLLLL of barrens to get them from.
If they’re using high pop shards, hopefully that will be true. But the Barrens will be home to almost every single Horde player who makes it past 10, for at least the first two days.
They’re still the same zone though. Maybe sharding can be held at a higher rate in the Barrens, like 800 people max, because of its size, but that’s what they need to test in a stress test.
And you still won’t get them.
The Barren’s Pools quests tend to funnel players in a path though.
Exactly, so the 10,000 player queues is a problem for a limited time. It’s almost like doing nothing and just letting the problem solve itself as tourists lose interest and player queues inevitably decrease or disappear entirely is possible instead of destroying the integrity of Classic with one of the worst features of retail.
My home realm was Suramar, which I believe is still one of the most “dead” realms. I also played on Tichondrius for two expansion launches.
I’ve experienced 50k+ realm queues, and I’ve experienced fewer than 10 people showing up in /who.
That doesn’t at all affect my opinion on sharding in Classic. Sharding was not in vanilla, so it should not be in Classic.
No, we don’t all agree on that. I begrudgingly accept that as a negative worth tolerating to get to experience a vanilla through means other than private servers.
We will see. I hope you’re right, but I’m done saying “Blizzard knows this would piss everyone off; surely they won’t do it.” I’ve been burned by that sort of thinking too many times.
I’d rather set my expectations for Blizzard as low as possible to prepare myself for the inevitable blunders they make. Then I can never be disappointed by them, and can in fact be pleasantly surprised instead.
Be. Cuz. They. HAVE. TO. CONSIDER IT.
You glossed over this part:
Let me highlight:
They are sharding specifically so that they can UNDER PROVISION realms for launch knowing full well that populations will shrink once the shine of the first couple months wears off.
Servers crashes are one problem, but those are temporary. Dead realms, however, empty wastelands with nobody in the Barrens to tell you where Mankrik’s Wife is, those are forever. They are doing everything they can to prevent long term population collapse from affecting the game.
Because, do you know what they CAN’T do to encourage population?
They can’t CHANGE THE GAME. They can’t make WoW Classic any more appealing than it already is. Cuz Classic. Cuz static. Cuz stagnant. Cuz No Changes. Trying to imagine the howls, torches, and pitchforks if Blizz later decides that server merges are the best thing to do. Server Crashing < Realm Merges < Dead Realms.
There WILL be a mad rush of curiosity and opportunism in the beginning, but it will not last. Many will leave. Blizzard is doing their best to make the game as good as they can for those who stay.
If you want to be a long term Classic player, you should embrace and thank Blizzard for leveraging it to protect the world you want to spend time in.
I wonder if it’s possible to shard only sections of a zone, I.E. Valley of Trials, Northsire Abbey, etc. That would make it even better if it’s more limited to the 1-6 sections.
These threads have me convinced Blizzard is going to release the game without warning, just to say “you said you didn’t want sharding though”! ![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
That’s cute, you think the zhevras actually have hooves to drop! What’s next, plainstriders dropping beaks without killing 307 of them?
It a possibility! I think that there will be a massive amount of players that roll undead and choose to go to silverpine as well. Not to mention, I believe there are quests post 10 that bring orcs and such to silverpine and I know quite a few orcs/trolls/tauren that choose to go to silverpine first and then to barrens.
It’s not really the size of the zone that matters, it’s the area that the players are merging into. Think of alterac valley… if everyone plays AV like they are suppose to with everyone spread across the map, there will be 0 issues and no lag… but then if you take them all into the valley of strife and duke it out…there is going to be issues. That’s why I think the barrens won’t have many issues. The quests are so spread out accross all levels that the load on one specific area won’t be that bad. Theres early quests that take you the northern most part of barrens, ones the take you way west, ones that take you way east (like the northwatch), and ones that take you south. It’s not like the 5-10 zones where it’s like you get 2 quests and everyone goes into this ONE area.
Just my opinion though we will see what happens!
I’m not tooooo savy with horde quests but isn’t that the one where you just find the oasis? That won’t be much of an issue either imo because you just discover the place and then leave.
The quests I can see having the biggest issues for people gathering in one spot is the Korlack (?) leaders or whatever they are called. Spawn rates were bad on them and people would just sit there waiting for them to come up.
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Its a problem for exactly the period that Blizzard most wants it to not be a problem. It won’t only be the tourists impacted by queues, it’ll be the diehard fans who will get frustrated with a 4 day queue, because they can’t get ahead of the pack to avoid the density.
It should.
None of us wants sharding. None of us is eager for sharding. However, the other impacts are far worse for the long term viability of Classic so we ‘begrudgingly accept it’.
I would be all for a solution that didn’t have long queues or dead servers, without sharding, but in the last two years, no-one has come up with one. Its a two axis problem, and both extremes are bad. Sharding provides a temporary third access to ensure that the final result is good.
I accept your opinion of Retail WoW. Everything the Classic team, that I’ve seen, says they are far more in touch with their playerbase, and less willing to compromise for convenience.
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A few weeks is completely unnecessary. A few days at most.
Its pointless if it doesn’t go beyond the first weekend. There will be 2 bulges. Tuesday and the weekend.
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I mean we don’t really know if it is weeks or days… we need to know how many people come funneling in first. Maybe after the first day or two, people start getting more eyes on classic and another huge wave comes in. This could 100% happen considering almost every top streamer I can think of said they will be playing classic.
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Another thing to consider that would affect the time frame is that BfA’s 8.2 is slated to be coming in the somewhat near future. If that releases around (or even on) the same date as Classic, I could see that sharding would be less necessary, as those big into retail WoW will be quite occupied checking out all the new stuff that the patch entails.
I disagree in that it really depends on the steady influx of people. When that finally declines, then the sharding should and will disappear, but not until then. We don’t want Blizz adding servers that then become dead because everyone cried about sharding too hard before the game was even released.
I would also expect Blizzard (at least internally) to have a ‘max limit’ and a ‘soft limit’ at which point sharding is switched off for a server.
For example:
- Max Limit: 1 month
- Soft Limit: Start zones are not exceeding 500 population for the entirety of a 24hr hour window.
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Why? It wasn’t in vanilla, so it shouldn’t be in Classic. It’s really that simple.
The solution to whatever problems they’re anticipating should be solved in a way that doesn’t ruin the “experience” for lack of a better word.
Glossed over it, yet quoted it verbatim?
So are queues.
No, they aren’t. Server merges are a thing.
They can, actually. That’s sort of the worry a lot of have, especially when they’ve openly stated they’re considering doing so in a rather drastic and noticeable way via sharding.
I don’t understand why anyone would be upset about server merges, aside from liking the name of the server they play on if it gets merged into a different name. Those people’s concerns about realm names are meaningless compared to concerns about actual gameplay.
Exactly why it’s not necessary to ruin Classic for people who don’t even intend to stay.
Sharding isn’t protecting the world I want to spend time in; it’s ruining it.
And if it’s limited to starting zones, it’s not even a part of the world I’ll be spending much time in anyway. That’s why I’d love for Blizzard to give us a clear plan regarding sharding already, so I can know if I should waste my time and money leveling to discover there’s sharding in Stormwind.
It’s not like retail where world first max level is over in a few hours. They’ll have literal days of played time before getting it. They can get over having to wait a little bit to play, or they can play on a less populated realm.
If they’re all queued up (quite possible), then Blizzard can make more realms. “Yes, but then those realms lose their population after the tourists leave, so sharding is necessary to prevent th–” No. No sharding. Just merge the realms.
Yeah, well… that’s like… your opinion, man.
Some folks do. Knowing Blizzard, it’s that tiny group of people they’ll listen to and not the vast majority who oppose sharding.
But we’ll see what happens.
True. I can at least admit that much, but they’re still Blizzard employees, and subsequently beholden to whatever entities are responsible for retail’s destruction.
This is the result of one of the axis failing. And its not a good solution. That’s why they implemented CRZ?
Do you want CRZ? Because that’s how you get CRZ.
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It’s a better solution than sharding, though. Alternatively they could just do nothing and let the queues exist, which I’m also happy to accept.
CRZ is a result of not merging realms but still wanting the realms to feel populated.
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50-75 players is more players than I saw in any one place for most of Vanilla. The only exceptions were Alterac Valley, occasional raids on horde cities, and Silithus just before AQ opened up. On those rare occasions there were maybe 100-150 players at most, framerates were down to low single digits and server crashes and loot lag were constant.
Most of the rest of the time each zone had maybe 10 players in it. Or less.
Vanilla never had a world “teeming with players”. If you want a world like that with hundreds of players on the screen at a time, you don’t want “the Vanilla Experience”. You should go play on a pirate server for an artificial fake recreation of a Vanilla that never was.
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