It isn’t? O my.
because people don’t want to sit at one spawn for minutes doing nothing means that we want to play a single player mode…![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
I’m not sure what can be done to address playability at launch at this point without redesigning their layering system from the ground up. Any system to prevent overcrowding from tourists would really necessitate eliminating tourists, but Blizzard wants tourists. Because if 25% of retail players try classic instead of cancelling until the next retail content drop, that’s $7.5 million bucks that they’d have otherwise lost, and the only ones suffering for it is the classic crowd.
I think the root of the problem was that when it was announced that sharding would be used in newbie zones, people divided into two camps.
#nochanges, it’s a slippery slope, gridlock at launch is authentic, etc
and
“It’s not ideal, but it’s better than 1000 people fighting over 10 boar spawns in Durotar”
Then layering was announced people took it as some kind of magic bullet compromise, as if it was something new and fancy and special that would solve the problems that both groups had with sharding.
The problem is, we all thought that sharding was proposed to deal with overcrowding at launch, just like we all thought that loot trading was to deal with long ticket turnaround time.
In both cases, we were wrong.
I think it’s obvious at this point that the problems layering solves are the problems that sharding was intended to solve. We assumed sharding was for our benefit, and the argument among players was “Is the benefit of sharding on launch worth what we lose in authenticity.”
The overcrowding problem remains, either they don’t see it as a problem, or think it’s going to be less of a PR nightmare than having sharding would be.
If I was Blizzard, tasked with coming up with a solution to this, I would scrap the whole system and build a new one from the ground up instead of trying to adapt sharding to work.
- Make the layers discrete like they are in EQ or SWTOR.
- Require people be out of combat, with a 20 second interruptable timer to switch (Just like camping out).
- Limit switching to a ~10 minute timer, unless inside an Inn to prevent abuse.
- Use dynamic layer caps that change based on the population density, rather than the population total.
- Allow people to switch at will between Kalimdor 1, Kalimdor 2, Kalimdor 3, etc but ONLY with the above restrictions.
As long as people can be forced from one layer to another, instantly, in combat, they’re going to call it sharding.
As long as people can manipulate the system to change at will whenever they want, it’s going to be exploited.
With all the hub bub about layering, did it escape anyone that they never actually said that sharding was off the table?
It doesn’t need to be “addressed”.
Deal With It.
Why would you sit there? Minutes? Seriously dude? Minutes will ruin it for you? Are you incapable of maybe, I dunno, conversing with other players, or getting XP in a number of other ways?
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yup, the perfect solution for all the nochanges people out there
Quadruple the layering for the first 24 hours!
They were testing layering. Once you are on an established layer, you won’t phase.
Aint Vanilla grand? You will survive and it will be worth it.
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The poofing will still happen though even in it’s 100% correctly working state, when a player visible to you will get an invite from a player that’s on another layer. They’re gonna poof. You’re gonna poof for people around you if you get an invite from another player on a different layer.
Something as simple as 2 people being at a small town trying to trade after one of them announced “Enchanter LFW, can enchant +2 health on bracers” will require grouping if they are seperated by layers, even though they are technically in the same town. Poof! ![:dizzy:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/dizzy.png?v=6" ":dizzy:")
And that’s for something as simple as that.
It’s gonna get really awkward when you see an army running past you as they search for their horde counterpart army, but they end up having to switch layers cause the horde isn’t on the same one as them. Whole army, poof. Yikes. And that one in particular is even confirmed to be possible by the devs themselves.
It’s just a bummer, I was hoping to get away from all the phasing and such. It’s really one of the main things I hate about current wow. Phasing/crz/sharding/LFR/lfd. All of it kills community and emersion of a seem less world…of warcraft.
They say it’ll be gone by phase two. What if they move the goal posts again like they keep doing?
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They can’t keep it past phase 1 because of world bosses. It has to be gone before they can be spawned.
The level 1-5 bottle neck actually seperates good players from bad players. Good players will find stuff to do in this time. For example good players will likely get a group of 3 and go kill mobs outside the 1-5 zone. Bad players sit and wait hoping to tag mobs.
Good players will take this time to grab flight paths. Professions (takes about 2 kills worth of drops to get enough for herbalism/mining/skinning), get the explore exp, move to better questing zones, and many more things. I for one embrace the bottle neck
I’m very aware of that.
I want to see what they do then. Take the total from combined layers and keep them on one server or force people into a new server.
You are dead wrong, you can use all the logic you wish. There were absolutely not that many people in original vanilla launch as there were in stress test. You can’t use game copies sold as a number of people present at the launch. not everyone was. People bought the game but not everyone logged on right at launch. Some people were at work, many were at school. You can take the total number of people and assume that some of them were there at launch, but def not all. So you have to further reduce your total number of copies sold because all of those accounts weren’t spamming logon the second it happened. That happened over days.
The vanilla launch was crowded on some servers, not very crowded on other servers, but never as crowded as the stress test or classic will be.
I am concerned this is not sounding enough like Vanilla. We need at least half of the population not being able to login and/or crashing on a regular basis for at least the first month. What the OP describes is a minor annoyance, not the calamity that was vanilla launch.
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Did you actually read the post? If they’re using 3k layers, and one 3k layer is per continent, there are 6k players.
i.e. The stress test had twice as many people as it should.
The vast majority did, and 89 x 3000 = 267,000, which means even if 23% of the people who bought copies didn’t log in immediately (and that seems super high for such a popular game) it would still result in every server being full.
And the servers launched around 3pm PT if I remember correctly, so within a few hours they were all there, so a high percentage of them were there.
Oh don’t worry if you want a calamity just come round here next stress test.
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Both good points. Can’t compare old launch to new launch. A lot of those people weren’t there right at login, but played within the first day or few days. For this, There will prob be less servers and far more people, even if you counter a layer as a new server.
I wasn’t able to show up last week for the stress test until the evening but it was still really crowded. I got my undead to level 10 and switched to a Troll and encountered the constant disconnects. Funny thing though, the disconnects seemed to really discourage people and suddenly I found myself able to get a lot more done in the game even with having to log back in to ‘world server down’ messages after every 2 or 3 kills in the game. I was actually having more fun not having to compete with a ton of people and just grouping for the super bottleneck type quests (named mob kill). I’m kind of hoping that there are more of those kinds of issues to make a lot of people decide to wait until the next day.
I just sharded in my pants. I blame it on old age.