Vanilla never had that kind of subscribership on launch, so I don’t know what is “Vanilla-like” about the experience we are describing.
Also, even if this lasts “a few days”, its still bad planning and foresight on Blizzard’s part to not try and mitigate this.
This man gets it. Every time I mention this people want to accuse me of being an elitist and deny others the ability to enjoy the game. These people don;t understand just how different Vanilla was from retail. There is nothing wrong with casuals, or even limited tourism that all MMOs have at launch. We wont have normal tourism, we will have permanent tourism in the form of retail players treating our game as nothing more than something to screw around in until the next content patch, or their dailies reset.
BFA players get free access to Classic without having to pay anything extra. Classic players on the other hand can only play BFA if they purchase the expansion.
I’m not even against keeping retail out of Classic, by all means, give them free access. I just want access to paid servers that wont be a dumpster fire.
Do nothing, let people wait for a boar. Those that truly want to keep playing will stay.
You solve it the way we solved it in the past. Sucking it up and keeping on trucking and if you can’t take it go to a lower pop server. Most of these people will play for 5 minutes and quit anyway.
Re-living Classic isn’t about taking out what you like and don’t like, it means taking it as it is.
If blizzard maintains the original server populations than sharding shouldnt be necessary… the only reason they would need sharding is if they had 10,000 people playing on the same server… which is non blizzlike anyway.
This is the problem with people who didn’t play in November 2004. The Vanilla launch was nothing like this. It wasn’t like the TBC launch. Or the Wrath Launch. Or the Cata launch. Hell, it wasn’t even like the buggy WoD launch.
Vanilla launch did not have crowded servers. It had other things to worry about like database concurrency, but the number of people in any zone was small compared to every other release, because only those of us who were diehard WC3 fans were really paying attention.
Very much this.
exactly this… private servers are not an accurate depiction of vanilla launch, in fact they are the opposite of it.
While I didn’t play in November of that year I remember my friends who did play at launch constantly complaining of how they had to wait for ques and that the servers frequently crashed. You also do not have to look far to find accounts of that online heck even blizzard admits they were not ready for the influx of players they received. These things would stand contrary to your statement.
Queues are misleading. There was a bug directing new players to the most populated servers, rather than the least populated.
By March, totally agree with you. But there was not a single queue in the first week. I was there. They only released 350,000 copies of the game, and it wasn’t until they started pumping out the second round keys that we saw queues, crashes, the db problems got even worse and so on. Sometime in March or April (can’t remember precisely), they took the game offline for a week to separate the database out so each server had its own dedicated one. After that things started getting better, then they started adding servers and so on. So yeah, by Jan/Feb, it was painful. But launch week wasn’t painful because of overcrowding.
I was responding to the post I quoted, the “2,000” number specifically, which is well within vanilla server ceilings. If you want to point directly at the insanity that blizzard has invited upon classic servers due to horrible decisions, we can discuss that.
It was bad planning and foresight for them to create this potential ![:poop:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/poop.png?v=6" ":poop:")
storm in the first place. I no longer trust their decision making, as people coming back just to play classic are the least thought of players in blizzard’s mind.
Blizzard didn’t create the insanity that will be week 1.
The massively popular game that at its height had 12 million players caused the insanity that will be week 1.
Even if they didn’t have conjoined subs, you’d still see 1-2 million people subbing it for a month just to relive the excitement. Yes, with the combined sub, there’s another million or so people who’ll jump over, but they still would have needed sharding with a separate sub. Especially starting with ‘lean’ numbers of realms.
Sharding still has nothing to do with total number of players, it only applies to specific realms. Even if they release a limited number of servers and we have hour long queues, sharding does nothing to fix that. The only thing sharding does as they have planned, is relieve congestion in the starting zone. ~3 hours after the game launches, those sticking with the game will be in the next zones, and those finally getting past the queue will go to the starting zones that are now mostly empty.
Now, if we are talking about pserver like server caps of 10k+ with plans that they will die down to ~2500 after the first week…You still have the problem that players leaving the starting zone are now all funneling together in an unsharded zone, creating more congestion than you would have had in a vanilla like capped starting zone. Of course this creates other problems, not all servers will decline evenly. Even if you start well above the original server cap, there are still going to be servers that die, and then you will also have the ones that people continue flooding to that stay well above the intended cap. Pserver fans might like it, but 10k is not vanilla.
Blizzard really needs to do a beta for testing. They should try sharding, and also create a test server without it. I’ve played during launch of pservers that ranged from 3k-10k. I think most of these people defending sharding are looking at the recent ~10k pserver launch that was cancer. 3k launch servers were not that bad, less than an hour and congestion is gone.
If they’re using sharding, they’ll have variable caps, such that the starting zones will have 15k people online, where the rest of the world won’t. They want 5k MAU on each server but even if 20% of the players are not tourists, that won’t hit the mark if they’re severely limiting access.
The expectation is that the vast majority of those players don’t make it out of the sharded areas. If they see more than the expect getting out, spin up a new server and mark this one as full, so that by the time the numbers settle down, there’s not too much overcrowding here.
Still assuming they keep the server caps reasonable (2000-3500) Your looking at what 300-400 players in each starting zone. Then you have those that will make a toon and immediately leave the starting zone to travel to play with friends that will drop that number down. Then you have those who will log in an not actually do anything just sit there doing the minimum to remain logged in till their friends arrive. Some will just spawn in and chat for hours. Others will spawn in and immediately disappear because they are just getting their character names reserved. At any given time the number of people actively trying to interact with the mobs is smaller than the number actually logged in… Also many of us having been through many an MMO launch (my preferred genre) we all know the insanity of how crowded it can be only stays really bad for the first few days a week at the absolute most…
I think a lot of blizzards want to shard has more to do with them having dropped their resources for servers down to a minimum and that the current resources allocated ot each server isn’t capable of handling that many people. In which case the answer is easy allocate more server resources instead of punishing the community with garbage like sharding.
With 30,000 person queues? This is what Blizzard said they want to avoid. Sharding with the expectation of a small fraction leaving the sharded areas, allows them to have far more people in those areas without queues, so that there’s a good chance the server will have a decent population at the end.
If they’re using some sort of dynamically scaling hardware architecture, can they not just allow more resources to be allocated for increased user loads? I suspect they’re not doing it now because it’s probably much more cost effective to split people up.
See this I am totally against. Servers caps need to be an absolute hard limit from day one. If you or I am stuck in a 30k 9 HR que then so be it. You can always watch a movie, sleep, play another game while you have wow up on another screen waiting on your que. Heck if it’s that long que up before you go to work and you will likely still be in que when you get off.
If you can guarantee me that sharding will be only levels 1 to 10, for a few weeks at most, and then gone forever, i will happily shut up about it.
extremely unlikely.
Sharding is such a massive quality of life blizz would be stupid to limit itself to the starting zone and the first week.
With sharding, underpopulated realms can share zone meaning there’s not mass exodus from low-pop realm / forced queue on high pop realm / place that feel void of life.
sharding will hopefully happen around TS mats spot, like badland /arathi earth elementals… cause nothing is more fun than a bunch of 60s sniping eachother lvl 30-something elemental for some TS mats… especially if you are an appropriate-level person trying to quest there.
it’s almost a certainty that people will call for more sharding as soon as the overpopulation / underpopulation issues arises… and the voice of the handfull of masochist who somehow enjoy watching 30 people compete for the same 5 spawns won’t be heard.