I know how they do it, and it’s truly and unfortunate situation.
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Or they just shard around the bosses.
Or give us some BS like - we have layers, but only one world boss is present on all of them and you can join that layer if you want to hunt it down with your guild.
How are they going to handle the gates of AQ without layering?
How about large raids on the capital city?
How are they going to handle the most popular servers with populations of 20K+ trying to log in?
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And it’s gonna bite them in the butt hard if this thing makes it into live, and people will see it in action and get to understand how it works in the worst possible way… when it’s too late, aka when it’s in the game itself on release.
Their fans are gonna start wondering how their favorite streamers let that stuff into Classic without putting up a proper fight, because they are gonna play it for the next weeks or months, if even.
Those who wanted the actual game are gonna drive off to more authentic servers anyway, because chances are, that Blizzard might still cave in to use layering again when AQ opens the gates. And then again maybe for some high traffic situations. Yikes. Why play Classic if you’re gonna compromise on the community aspect of it. It’s not worth it.
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Who is Ian?
The old servers could not handle the load, and that was truly a problem of the tech of the era.
Modern servers can indeed handle the load of Classic WoW; more than likely 10X over with out seeing any kind of lag because they can scale up the resources to the moon.
Classic WoW spells are so much more basic and the frequency of them is also lower so the whole problem of spells eating the server alive is not an issue like it is in Modern WoW.
These two games are so different that the worry over lag created by many players and multiple spells going off is almost a non-factor.
AQ = no problem
Capital cities = no problem
20K players will not be on the same server because they will have divided the server before that can take place.
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There’s also a reason why devs in the industry like to say they’re gonna “massage” the players into liking certain stuff they know will be a hard sell. Influencers are perfect to do this, and jesus christ is it working.
The mob mentality is a strong one, and they are coming for ya if you don’t agree with their favorite person on the internet, no matter your reasoning.
People then get worried about bringing up issues cause of the backlash of that mob…and others pretend to like it for the same reasons. And then there’s those who actually like layering, and prefer this “convenience” over an actual quality rerelease of Vanilla as Classic cause it benefits their personal, modern preferences. What a mess.
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Ok - so why are they layering in the first place?
Just shard the first few zones so people can quest up to 30, and be done with it.
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The thing is the people that didn’t play vanilla won’t know what they are missing. That is what is sad.
Because they are afraid that after 6 months the game’s population will tide a bit and they want to avoid dead servers.
Layering makes this possible, because when you start out with 12K population mega servers that have 4 virtual servers within it (layers) all drawing form that 12k pool… It’s much easier to keep a healthy server population a long way down the road even if you shed 75% of the player base.
That’s the theory.
My concern is ironically the opposite; I predict the game will grow wildly and they will have created a new problem with these mega servers and will be forced to split them…
(not technically a bad problem to have)
Which is why I question Blizzard when their rationale is “we want a smooth launch so we are using layering.” If it is about having a smooth launch, shard the starting zones until the player base disperses and you don’t have 150 people trying to kill a boar in Elwynne.
If it is about dead servers and using layering to consolidate the player base then that strikes me as an accounting decision rather than keeping the customer happy. I was on a server that died and I got a free server transfer to a more populated server which I did and I was fine. In my opinion, Blizzard simply doesn’t want to deal with these issues because it requires increased variable and fixed costs. What troubles me is they’re going to neuter a CORE part of the classic experience all for better numbers on the next 10-Q. I’m not going blame the Classic team for this as they likely can only do what they’re told by higher up suits.
I imagine that their influencer sponsor package probably included a disparagement clause.
As for layering.
Layering is not sharding 2.0. Sharding would have helped with overcrowding.
Layering does nothing to help with overcrowding.
Layering paints over the cracks in Blizzard’s launch strategy and nothing more.
Blizzard gave themselves no metric by which to gauge interest in Classic, and purposely invited the 2 million retail players to visit it at launch with absolutely no cost of entry.
This means that they have no idea how many servers they’re going to need at launch. This also means that they have no idea how many servers they’re going to do need a month after launch.
Layering lets them avoid the negative press that would accompany any talk of server mergers that would come about as a direct result of their poor planning. It also has the hidden bonus of letting them score a huge coup in the press when they have to announce at the end of phase 1 that they’re launching new servers, because Classic’s popularity was “greater than we anticipated”.
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You nailed it!
I doubt that - but they aren’t stupid. You are not getting invited back if you take a dump on the project.
Very true. That’s also something i noticed in the people who support this literal “modern” solution. It’s the modern audience.
I’m very sure most of them have never experienced the magic of the old WoW server communities.
They want to play “the game” at all costs, and forget that Classic, without the community being able to properly grow in the right conditions (a normal realm), is not a game worth playing.
It’s all about the long run in old WoW, and a proper Community makes you go the extra step, and play every extra hour everytime. Not the amazing gameplay of killing a boar 30 times. If i can’t establish a reputation and connection properly on my server as i journey through the world, what’s the point playing. There is none.
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I don’t disagree that the layering is potential problem, but I don’t see how the technology can be updated in time to avoid it.
Let me conjecture that the back-end is dependent on a (single?) SQL database, the seamless zone transfers are memory hungry and all that attended code-base won’t scale to very large numbers.
I would think all technology choices for the last few years have been made to whittle down the number of players per active area, to essentially sub-divide and be “efficient”.
So now they lack the tech to change this to the diametrically opposite design choice. I would go so far as to say that their current “network code” (position of players, actions, etc), forces certain expectations on their server back-end behaviour.
Would it be cool if they de-constructed the old legacy code into say micro-services ? Yes. Will they have the time ? No.
I am not a tech-guy, but I find it hard to belief they can’t use modern servers to mimic something very close to the original experience.
This is basically it right here.
There isn’t time for a better solution.
As much as I hate layering, and hate the ludicrous spin they insist on putting on every change they make to save money (Can’t really blame them, I mean, if a large portion of my customers believed the spin every time, I’d keep spinning too.), I can’t think of a better solution that doesn’t require a time machine so they can do market research or separate subs.
Shard 1-30? The sharding tech at least works.
The layering stuff looks like a buggy mess that is going to be exploited in the higher level zones.
The problem there is that they haven’t done the market research for how many servers they’ll need. Sharding low levels helps with the tourists and the initial crowding, but doesn’t tell them if they’re going need 10 servers or 100.
They’d still be left making a more or less blind guess on server numbers, and the last thing they want is to guess wrong. Too many and it looks like a failed game, not enough, and it’s a replay of the original launch, and once a fraction of the server gets out of sharding range it’s [idiom meaning severe overcrowding]
I simply cannot stand this. Layering is vital to the survival of classic? I don’t know if you’re trolling for the sake of trolling or you actually believe this. If it’s the latter I feel very sorry for you because you clearly never experienced vanilla.
They will be able to pack more players in a server? Just incur more expenditures and create more servers. If some die, some die and players can transfer to more populated servers once the population consolidates to a core group of servers. Not ideal but at least the classic experience remains intact. LAYERING IS NOT CLASSIC. It is tech developed to reduced fixed and variable costs long term to administer the game.