… maybe you should try arguing with someone else then.
That’s how its gonna be when it launches. There are other options that don’t involve doing the starting quests… you could always go kill mobs and grind out those first few levels.
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This may be an insane thought, but if the tedium of trying to level is too much, you could just chill and chat with folks instead of trying to kill anything. Or you could wait a week to logon. Your choice?
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You just have to play through till things thin out. I just killed mobs until the quests became possible. Just relax into it man - this game is a long road,
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you got to be smart about how you are getting your questing done. any quests that require mobs to drop questing items should be skipped. this slows down leveling a little, but it is not too bad.
Also be smart about how you do the quests you do. In elwyn forest last night I needed to get the gold dust from the kobals. you would think this would be inposible with so many players, but all of the players are running back and forth inside of the caves. there were quite a few kobals that spawn outside of one of the caves. I had the quest done in 5 minutes once I figured that out. I was chain pulling, and multipulling even.
I got a break there, but I would skip gathering quests if the area is over crowed.
You got super lucky then sir!
I tagged I think max 4 Kobolds the 30 mins I was there.
There were at least 5 people in any 20 yard direction when I was trying. Inside AND outside the cave.
I guess grinding on mobs is going to be the best course of action on release day. I do have time off work for that, so I can’t really wait a week to start.
And just for the record, I’ve never been against sharding/layering. If it helps with the influx, have at it.
A lot of people are assuming due to the population of the server many quests will take 30-45 to complete. This may be true for the starting zones and into the early 10 level range, however, it will gradually slow down after a few hours of play as people will log off and take different routes. Even during the stress test yesterday and last week the starting zone was full but once you moved to razor hill and org the quest were much easier to complete.
Group up and you can get through it. It will be hard the first day, but that is part of the experience. After that everyone will be staggered out.
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Your edit is correct. Layering wasn’t intended to help with congestion in that it’s design was to resolve an issue with sharding, which itself was a solution to low pop servers over time. That is, it’s solving a problem of a different nature–how to fill servers up rather than spread population around.
The practical implication is that it won’t address a problem of too high population (only in the sense that it’s supposed to spread players over various layers until the population stabalizes and then those layers will contract back down) experiencing difficulty questing. For that, the devs will need something like dynamic spawning or no solution at all, which is fine by many playing Classic since it closely aligns with the vanilla experience.
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I timed the Ice Claw Bear respawn in Dun Morogh, it was around 20-25 minutes! The boars respawn every 5 minutes but the bears would hardly respawn at all. I had the quest from level 6 to level 9 before I finished it. When you have 300 people in one zone and a mob like a bear takes 25 minutes to respawn, it could take a day to do some of these low level starting quests unless you just skip them and grind it out instead.
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It is a stress test. The purpose of a stress test is to push the limits of their system to see if it works. They most likely planned to ‘break’ it, so they can make practical contingencies for crowded situations. It’s not impossible for them to roll out sharding, but they are hopefully exploring better options.
It was very rough as a Paladin. I grinded mobs till lvl 7 then gave up and logged out. I couldn’t do the quests, too painful.
I plan to skip the bottle neck and explore to lvl 4 or 5, grabbing flight paths that will save time. Its guaranteed experience. Then I’ll grind mobs at the least crowded starting area. I don’t expect to do any quest till at least lvl 9 or 10.
Assume this forum is ONLY for those invited to the Stress test that have played outside of the test hours (just about no actual play occurred during those hours, after the first one, it only opened for a good part of the day the next day). No, I never played Vanilla, started in late Cata. AND so far it seems the "stress"has nothing whatsoever with gameplay, it’s all about GETTING to play. Would have been nice to be TOLD this upfront… my bet it was “if we told them, they’d never help, so let’s keep it secret.” For me, if I KNEW it was just logging in, I would have taken the few minutes to give them data they need.
So I knew there were going to be a bunch of QoL things I got used to in later stages of the game that were not in there. Leaving them out MAY closer approximate the Vanilla Experience (VE) but they kinda make for a whole lot of frustration. First thing I noticed is “only first tag.” Not normally thought of as a QoL, but I was only barely able to get to lvl 4 in about 50 mins of play… indeed the density of players out there was massive and I could only get a quest item if the mob materialized right next to me. AND even then, I lost half of them because I am a caster, so even after I cast, many times someone seemed to get the tag over me.
Wait a few hours to play then?
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Think I said it was the next day…
The different Alliance starting areas had different population levels in the 24 hours after the first stress test (human >>> dwarf/gnome > night elf). Today I mostly just played the night elf from 5 to 10.
I was in the dwarf area last night just after the monitored stress test, but there was a streamer in the area with groupies being insufferable. I went with the night elf peaceful after that.
you have to compete for mobs in vanilla. Keeps money and drops valuable.
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Sounds like vanilla to me.
Might as well do away with layering all together!
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They can easily split into dozens of layers with the same overall population cap on day 1 and then reduce the number of layers while having the same overall population cap as time goes on.
It’s important to note though, that even if there were only say 20 people per layer on day 1 for the starting areas, it would still take many times longer to complete the starting area quests than it will later on when there are 5-10 people or less in the area.
When I made my undead priest alt yesterday for example, the undead starting area had only a few other people around anywhere I was questing compared to the insane number of people when I made my first beta character the first week of beta. It was a much better experience without all those extra people. Say what you want about the M in MMO, but vanilla with static respawns never felt good with tons of other people around when you were questing. Waiting around for spawns is not a fun experience and we often didn’t have nearly that many people around in actual vanilla.
Static respawns mean that even when only 1-2 extra people are questing in the same spot as you, your quest completion time will drastically increase if there are not enough enemies around to support multiple people doing the same quest at the same time.
Grouping can help if the quest is just to kill X, but if it’s to gather Y, even grouping doesn’t help in vanilla since you don’t share quest pickups.
Personally, I think that on top of layering, they should reduce the spawn timers on the starting area neutral mobs to like 15-30 seconds. That will help get people out of the starter areas faster on day 1. They could do it with all the mobs in the starting area if they want, at least until there are fewer people around. It will have no meaningful economic impact since we’re talking about the 1-6 areas.
No, people just farmed in dungeons where there was no competition for the mobs. Except on private servers where they intentionally nerfed drops in dungeons.
It’s also not really an important point for starter zones or starter zone quest completion. You’re not exactly making a fortune off zombies and boars in the starter areas.
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