Hello fellow Classic fans,
What we know so far about population caps :
- Blizzard saying that they could tweak the population cap and have it dynamic during Classic at the Developer Press Conference at Blizzcon 2018
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The original vanilla servers population caps were about 2.5k to 3k, I couldn’t find a source for this tho, you’re gonna have to believe me 
-
Mark Kern saying that the population cap was entirely driven by design during his interview with the ClassiCast
With all of that in mind :
The old vanilla server population cap wasn’t just a number they could tweak to their liking, obviously because their server technology was limited in the time, but most importantly because of the way vanilla was designed, the devs actually designed the game around that population cap ; the number of nodes they added in a given zone, the respawn time of a given mob, how much gold dropped from a certain boss, all of those design decisions were driven by the fact that the servers would be limited to a certain amount of players.
Example : If the server cap was 3000 for Tichondrius, and there were 20 nodes in Elwynn Forest, increasing the server cap would mean also increasing how many nodes would spawn at once in Elwynn. (Those numbers aren’t accurate at all, I chose them for the sake of argument).
Now, speaking about Classic, Blizzard could go on either of two routes :
- They could keep it exactly as it was in vanilla, 2.5 to 3k pop per server, no sharding, no cross-realm and risk having hour long queues, especially at the first weeks following launch.
- They could make the servers population dynamic, obviously without sharding (at least not in non starting zones…), and make the respawn timers of nodes and mobs dynamic and zone specific. The problem with this is that it’s a change from vanilla and it could easily be exploited by large guilds for example.
Example : If the population reaches 5k and Elwynn Forest has a big amount of players in it, instead of 20 nodes spawning in Elwynn, 40 would spawn, instead of 5 min for Hogger to respawn, make it 2 min.
Obviously both solutions have their downsides, one creates potential hour long queues, the other is a straight-up change from vanilla and could be easily exploited.
What do you guys think ? How would you like to see Blizzard handle the matter ? Is one solution better than the other ? Do you have a better solution to this problem ?
Keep it civil and let the discussion flow.
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The solution to a 5 hour queue is to play on a less populated server. If you’re already on that server then at least you wont have to worry about being on a dead server.
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I can only speak for myself here.
I’m not a 24-year old with a ton of time on my hands anymore. I have maybe 4-5 hours a week to give to WoW and a rare Sunday when the weather sucks and there’s no yard work to do. If I try to log into Classic and find myself sitting in an hours-long queue, I’m just going to find something else to do with my time -or- I’m going to play Retail.
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cap the servers around 3-4k. The game was designed around those numbers after all.
Put in cross realm battlegrounds so low pop realms can still pvp regularly.
I enjoyed that smaller community. That’s the wow i know and love. Not sure if I can get behind a 10k server pop.
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I really don’t want x realm bgs.
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Well low level battlegrounds will die without them and i want to twink at 49 soo…
also they were in 1.12 so they should be in! neener neener!
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Are you saying you won’t even play if the queues are so long ? Because I have the same feeling and that’s why I made the post originally, it’s a real concern of mine.
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Didn’t die on my server in vanilla…
I won’t wait in the queues, no. I’ll just go do something else. I’m sure the queues will dissipate with time because that’s how it always works in WoW…but until such a time as they do, I’ll just go do other stuff.
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Cross-realm BGs were actually a thing back in 1.12, but they were very different to how they are now. Instead of queuing you with the entire region, it would only queue you with your battle-group, which consisted of a limited amount of servers, it also tried to queue you with your server first before expanding to your battlegroup iirc.
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I made friends within my battlegroup after CRBGs were introduced. You couldn’t talk to them because the battle.net app wasn’t a thing, but you could get on Vent and queue together. If you bothered to make an effort, CRBGs could be great.
Completely against anything that requires dynamic spawning or the evil S word
I know they were. I quit pvp because of them.
This is above my pay grade. As long as we have ERP im ok
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back when the game was new and most people wanted to just explore it and enjoy yeah. The game is 15 years old and now people will mostly want to get to level cap and experience the raids etc to see what they missed before, or retail players who missed out entirely and want to do vanilla raids just to say they did.
There will be a few new players and a few who stop to smell the roses but it will be less than it used to.
I just don’t forsee this as a problem after the 3rd day of release. There’s no way I can accurately recall what it was like to login on Eonar back during release, but I really don’t recall anything over 40 minutes. Which was fairly rare. Maybe a few 10 minute queues more regularly, but that’s it.
There are some meme events during launch like 48k players in queue waiting 12 hours etc. That was just server issues though.
I just really don’t see this as an actual issue. Keep pops Vanilla like 3-4k whatever they were. No sharding and keep the queue. If it’s honestly so bad then low level players will reroll. It wasn’t uncommon to have a few alts across a few servers in case your particular server went down.
I hope you’re right and it won’t be an issue, I’m actually for having option 1 (as it was in vanilla).
I know it’s completely different but yesterday I tried to log into a GTA V RP server for the first time, the queues on most of the servers are ridiculous and the servers which didn’t have queues were all basically dead, I’m worried the same would happen on Classic where people, like myself, seeing this happen would just quit.
Again, I hope you’re right and it won’t be an actual issue to worry about.
I’m sorry, 4 or 5 hours? In wrath on Kel’thazod I maayyybe ever waited 1 hour, but usually it was like forty minutes at the most. So does anyone really actially remember waiting longer than 1hour?
I also agree that switching servers is such a simple, excellent solution. Especially because in Classic you could only roll one faction per server, if that is changed i’m going to be bummed about it, but I’ll still play. I think that caps should be low, no x realming, and only one faction per server. That way, when youre slammed by a que, hop over to the other faction and explore some new lore. There is the time argument about getting to 60 taking so long that it’s only worth playing on one server. If you feel that way… maybe straighten out your priorities? Maybe play retail?
At first I thought you were talking about server transfers, and now that I think about it, having them give free server transfers for the servers which are the most crowded is actually a good solution I haven’t spoke about in my original post.
Would like to have some opinions on it.
