Thank you for explaining this, much better than I can. I’ve been thinking about this totally phony connection for a while.
Also, anyone advocating “balanced servers” is trying to hurt Blizzard. Anything Blizzard could do involves FORCING hundreds of thousands of players to do things the players don’t WANT to do, and chose NOT to do. That harms Blizzard, while it helps nobody (as you explain).
We, the sane, repeat…you’re conflating the real argument with your own. It’s population, not the balance. Overpopulation and imbalance have a synergistic effect…every FP, instance, grind spot, etc., can be cut off and camped by the dominating faction. This kills the game, as it kills play for one side of a pvp server.
If populations were in line with Vanilla, the game we kind of wanted, this imbalance wouldn’t have such a far reaching impact. Sure, it would still be dangerous out in the world, gankers gotta ganker, but you would be able to find places to get some actual work done. This is not the case now…you can’t farm a spot for 2 minutes as alliance without getting rolled and camped by multiple squads.
People are complaining because they get gank one or twice every hour, totally not because you need to die 15 times to get to any dungeon, and it’s literally impossible to level beyond 48 on an unbalanced server.
It is for the players on the smaller faction, especially if it’s a significant imbalance.
Are they? Have you actually checked? On your server is EVERY flight path, EVERY instance, and EVERY grind spot occupied 24/7 by Horde gank groups of 30+?
I don’t think so. I don’t think you have actually checked 100 different places. I think you are ASSUMING what you want to think.
How many Horde does it require, to put a gank squad of 30 level 60s at the 10 most likely places for Alliance players to go? 300 level 60s. Not 20,000 Horde of every level. Not 9,000 more Horde than Alliance.
I see no evidence that they are not. Yes, there is a player rumor that Classic realms have 800 zillion times as many players as Vanilla, but I’ve seen zero data to confirm this. I think it’s just a rumor.
Also, are you comparing the last 4 weeks in Classic (right after Honor went live) ONLY to the same 4 weeks in Vanilla (right after honor went live)? Any other comparison is completely phony, and will be rejected by any game designer (or any player that thinks clearly). After all, the last 4 weeks was very different than last month, right?
I don’t care about 24/7, I care about ‘normal’ prime play time. You know, when normal people with jobs and families can actually sit down to play. You may be a basement dwelling 24/7 player, I am not. When I play, yes, you cannot fly anywhere contested without being killed and camped.
How you can argue against the fact that servers are now more populated after Blizzard stated as much…I can’t help you accept reality, sorry, not licensed in psych med.
This is from Aug 27th.
Medium indicates WELL IN EXCESS OF WHAT WE CONSIDERED FULL IN 2006!! That alone should do it, but I’m not dealing with a reasonable person here I see, so the next day, Blue says…
How can you now tell me or anyone else that current populations are not higher than vanilla?
Edit: I feel I need to explain to you that medium exists below both high and full…so imagine what a full server pop today is compared to ‘full’ in 2006.
Dude lol that post is right when the game launched…
We don’t have layers anymore. What they meant by
we are substantially increasing the number of players that can be simultaneously logged in and playing
Is that they were adding layers. This was on August 28th, the game was launched Aug 27.
I don’t care when they posted it, it hasn’t changed. Medium now = full in 2006, you’re another one I can’t help if you can’t understand that.
“Now” is December, not August 27. It’s a lie to claim pops are the same.
Aug 27th we had “layers”. Yes, an entire server had much more than Vanilla, but each “layer” matched the realm cap in Vanilla, so you did not see more players (than Vanilla) when you played. The number of layers per realm ranged up to 9, with most realms never getting more than 4 layers.
By November, the number of “layers” on each realm decreased (due to server pop decreases) until it was 1 on most realms. That meant that (in Nov and Dec) most realms had NO more players than in Vanilla. This happened before honor was turned on.
That’s how I can argue: week 12 problems and week 12 populations. Not week 12 problems and week 1 populations, which is a lie.
Well, yeah. You nailed down why OP wrote this post.
When you log in, does your server still show ‘high’ or ‘full’? Mine does, and as far as I know, the statement from Blizzard is still accurate. Medium now equates to full then, by reason, full now is much higher than full then.
And guess what? Even on a balanced server, this happens as well. That’s just pvp servers for ya.
The people trying to say that pop caps are currently what they were in Vanilla quite obviously never played on a High pop server in Vanilla. The number of players isn’t even comparable in the slightest- aside from Blizzard’s statements, there is such a blatantly higher population density in Classic that it’s mind boggling to see people suggest that the servers have the same cap.
When Blizzard dropped the “layering”, suddenly some realms had queues.
Why were there queues? We know those realms could handle that many players, and more players. They did that for weeks. There weren’t any queus the week before that.
In my opinion, the purpose of “queues” was to limit the number of players in the game to the Vanila cap. When we had layers that was done using multiple layers, with each layer allowed the Vanilla cap. Without layers queues caused the same restriction.
Can you think of ANY other reason that queue’s suddenly started when layering was turned off? I can’t. That’s why I think this.
Really, what needs to happen more then anything else for underdog factions is for people to get organized, sack up and fight if what they want is for things to get better, since until people believe they can win nothing can be done to resolve the issue.
Is this easy to do? Obviously not otherwise people would have done it by now. But it is the path forward if people want to resolve the situation as opposed to throwing e-tantrums on the forums that accomplish nothing.
They had to limit the population somewhat when they collapsed the layers, maybe that’s why. Just because the game environment can support three layers of 20k doesn’t mean the game can support one layer of 60k. The server hardware might be able to handle it, but game play cannot…so they would cap the server at 40k and now you have queue’d players again. Yes, I’m just spitballing numbers as an example, I don’t know what the real population is, unfortunately.
Edit: While I don’t have the numbers, I do know this for sure…I played Vanilla, and this ain’t it…
Like you say, Blizzard might have decided on a cap (for one game, no layers) that is higher than the Vanilla cap, but low enough to still have queues on a few servers.
I was assuming they used the Vanilla cap, but I have no evidence to back up that assumption. They could have picked whatever Cap they thought was “good game design for today’s Classic players”.
They don’t tell us any numbers. That’s very frustrating. That means that (in my opinion) all the player problem thinking, and all the player solution thinking, includes some assumptions.
That doesn’t stop any of us from thinking about problems, but it does result in very different opinions.
What about the first 3-4 weeks, back in Vanilla, when Honor entered the game. Did you play then? Can you remember that time? Didn’t turning on Honor (months before battlegrounds) have an impact on the game, back in Vanilla?
I ask because the current “problem” didn’t exist 4 weeks ago. It is clearly a response to adding Honor to the game.
I can’t predict the future, but it is unreasonable to imagine that the last 4 weeks is “how it will be forever”.
It wasn’t pretty then, but it was nothing like this…you didn’t have the player knowledge and theory craft info, the population (you’ll have to accept my assertion they are higher in this iteration), nor the immediate chase for R14 at the time. The game was still ‘new’ and so the release of honor didn’t create the $#^@storm it did this time. People weren’t bored yet, so there was more to do than just camp flight paths and such. Yeah yeah, I know, you’ll never go back, but Blizzard should have had the foresight to realize this much, and it’s one of my biggest gripes with not releasing BG’s simultaneously with honor rank. The been there done that factor needs to be taken into account for certain elements of the game, pvp being one of them imo.
Because blizzard isn’t a smart company.
-Undead Rogue.