People sign contracts all the time without reading them. That does not negate that contract or put any additional responsibility on party A, regardless of what party B thinks he is entitled to get.
Given that its accepted practice to just hit Accept on TOS and EULAs, many judiciaries consider them non-binding. Its an issue of informed consent not being given.
I see. You said it was Pre-Cata. Keep in mind the Vanilla leveling experience was heavily nerfed in TBC. So questing in Azeroth in latter TBC and Wrath is not indicative of the Vanilla experience. It has already been nerfed. But probably not the starting areas. I think the nerfs started at level 20. But anyway, just in general people who leveled to 60 after 2.3 but pre-Cata are in for a surprise.
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Took me about 3 months (real time) the first time around. I don’t remember any other toon in Vanilla (I had 5 at 60) taking that long.
It is not the fault of Blizzard that Johnny REFUSED to actually read the contract to which he was agreeing.
Blizzard is under NO legal obligation to provide anything other than that which is covered in the terms to which Johnny agreed, whether or not Johnny read those terms before agreeing to them.
We get it. There are a plethora of retail players that apparently believe that they are entitled to whatever they want, including the most convenient version of Classic.
Let’s say it takes you 3 hours in Northshire Valley. So what? I understand some people just want to rush through the content, and ignore the mmorpg elements of grouping up, socializing, exploring, etc. But should game design cater to that mentality? Is 3 hours in the starting area that big a deal in the grand scheme of things?
Obviously that’s true only to a point. You can’t have limitless players or 3 hours turns into 3 days or longer. But whatever player amount in the starting zones equates to 3 hours seems perfectly acceptable to me. ‘Rush rush rush’ is the precise gameplay mentality that the devs should be striving to not foster.
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Convenience Police out in force today. If only there were a point.
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Eh, I think the legal issues with electronic EULAs has more to do with the fact that the consumer never gets to even see them until after already having paid for the product. So it’s a case of companies getting the money and then holding the product hostage unless the consumer agrees to their terms.
Are those same terms not also listed among terms to which one must agree when installing the game?
Is it not possible to view those terms via an internet search prior to purchasing the game?
That’s another of the arguments of informed consent.
there’s nothing to fix. no changes. no sharding
This made no sense. Even IF everyone formed groups of 5 in starting zones (news flash: LH Private server had people doing this, for example), literally standing around mob spawn zones in circles, just to tag mobs as they respawned… and it still took HOURS to get thru the 1-5 level stuff. Hours. And that was WITH dynamic respawn (which, Blizz has not confirmed they would even implement)… so WITHOUT it, depending on the population size on given servers at launch… would be disastrous. The only real solutions people have given are:
- Launch Blizz’s next major patch on the same day as Classic (not practical for both game’s development teams)
- Who Cares, implement queues to siphon the number of people in at a time (yea… because we want to start at queue screens like its 2004)
- “Group Up” – ok, this isn’t retail, so welcome back to Vanilla mob tagging where even in a group, competing with numerous other groups, you will still be waiting around forever to kill boars in a zone flooded with new chars
Yea – none of these solutions come close to being nearly as effective as sharding. Even if they made the sharding cap something like “every 200 chars in a zone/radius prompts a new shard”, people just stamp their feet and demand that it takes 5 hours to get out of Northshire Abbey just so they can get their “Vanilla experience” – which, by the way, is inaccurate, because Vanilla never had the population on launch to suffer these kinds of mob resource issues.
You know what has? Private servers – and even they employed modified means of mitigating this, even though it still meant you were literally swarmed with new players in starting zones fighting for mobs on accelerated respawn timers.
#ShardingForDENSELYPopulatedZones
Sharding will be fine and you will not even notice it likely unless you are trying to notice it.
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nobody’s forcing you to stay and zerg in those 1-5 starting zones, there’s plenty of documentation on the web of travel routes that can get you to lvl 10-12 off of exploration alone. smart players don’t need sharding
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^ this guy gets it, “smart players don’t need sharding.”
Well Gloryholadin isn’t smart so he probably needs it.
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I don’t think it would be a bad idea to have a small number of normal servers that have starting zone sharding only or no sharding at all and let the server purists wait in queues and figure that out and then have say one megaserver for each server type that would have sharding everywhere, but do it differently than retail. I imagine there would at least be thousands of people that want to play classic but aren’t that uptight about sharding that would happily play on a megaserver that never has queues, has a larger economy and a much easier time finding pugs. That would take weight off the “normal” servers without having to create dozens of servers and then deal with population nightmares a month later.
The differences to how sharding could work on the megaservers compared to xserver sharding on retail would be:
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Sharding should be per continent, not per zone. IE: there’s a Kalimdor 1,2,3 and if you see someone walking over the line from one zone into the other, they’re still in the same shard and you never see them vanish.
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Automatic shifting from one shard to another never happens. When you log in, it picks a shard, it never automatically moves you around. When you move from one continent to the other, it selects a shard for you as you zone into the other continent. Nobody will vanish in front of you because they joined a group in another shard (though they might still vanish if they joined a BG or got summoned, but that’s going to happen on any server).
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In order to change a shard, even if you join a group where the people are in another shard, you have to go to a rested area in the zone. While in a rested area you’d be able to bring up the shard menu and pick which shard you want to phase into. It would say which shard you’re on on the map or somewhere so you always know and can easily communicate that to other people. If in a group with people in different shards, the shard menu could show an icon next to the shards they’re in when you open it.
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The shard cap for each shard would be fairly high (like the population you’d expect on that continent on an entire normal server per shard) and new shards would only open up to deal with all the existing shards being full or nearly full. During the early days of launch, the number of shards would start out much higher since everyone would be concentrated into a smaller number of locations. The shard menu could even show each shard and how many players there are out of the total cap for that shard. If you want to get into a currently full shard for whatever reason, they could have a queue to get into it, but you’d have to remain in a rested area to enter that shard once you got through the queue.
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If a specific zone is overcrowded (meaning even though the overall continent shard isn’t overpopulated, there may be hundreds of people congregating in one area on that specific shard), it could send a message to the chat of all the people in that zone asking for volunteers to move to another shard. Or possibly show an icon on the minimap indicating that volunteers are being requested to leave the shard to help deal with the population. When accepting that request, you cast a heathstone like ability that takes you to a rested area in that zone (or the closest one available) and then changes shards from there. This way you don’t randomly vanish and if PvP is a factor people have the potential to attack you and stop you from casting, just like a hearthstone.
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In an emergency where a specific area is overcrowded on a specific shard and not enough people are voluntarily leaving and it becomes too unstable, and the shard is going to crash, it can disconnect people, give them a message explaining why, and as people log back in, split the people who were all in that zone up into different shards.
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If possible, maybe they could implement something special just for the AQ opening where anyone capable of banging the gong is visible in Silithus across all shards. Maybe ghostly outside of their shard so you can see them but not interact with them directly yourself? /shrug
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If server transfers are ever an option, nobody on the megaserver could transfer off onto a normal server. This would be to avoid complaints of megaserver people moving onto normal servers after enjoying a larger economy, potentially higher access to gathering by working inns into their routes and easier access to groups for various content.
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If battlegroups or xrealm battlegrounds are ever a thing for normal servers, they’ll never play against megaservers to avoid complaints of how much easier it is to get x y or z on a megaserver.
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To facilitate communication, in addition to having normal global chats like General chat, which would be limited to that shard + that zone, there could be a global general for each zone that is for that zone, but universal for all shards (and rate limited). I imagine there’d also be discords and what not to make it easier for people on the megaservers to connect and group up if addon communication is limited. I could also see an argument for having the pre-made group finder UI (this is the one that facilitates manual forming of groups, it’s not automated like the dungeon finder) active on the megaserver only to make dealing with grouping with a much larger population easier.
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I could see summoning working cross-shard if you’re summoning into a shard that’s not full. If that became an issue for some reason they could change it so you had to change shards before being summoned to an open world area. That rule would always be ignored if you were being summoned into a dungeon/raid instance since those are separate from shards and you could always do that.
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The number of people gaining honor ranks every week on the megaserver could be modified by the total population. IE: if there’s 100k people competing for ranks on a megaserver instead of 3k, you could have 33x as many people per rank eligible. The ranking system would probably be the most messed up aspect of a megaserver but there’s not much else you could do besides changing how many people qualify for each rank every week.
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World bosses would also be another issue for megaservers. I think the only way to deal with them would be to have their spawn frequency modified by the number of people playing on the server. Have a weekly lockout and make it so people who had already been locked to it unable to tap it again the same week. It could spawn randomly in a specific shard when up (or multiple shards at a time potentially if it needs to spawn that frequently). The shard menu for the zone the world boss spawns in could show a dragon icon next to the shard number to indicate that a world boss is up in that shard to make it less ridiculous trying to figure out when a boss is up and in what shard.
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If they wanted to make it easier to find a name that wasn’t taken on the megaservers they could let you add one space in the name (and require at least one letter after that space).
The reason for these changes, particularly with how you move between shards, would be a compromise between having sharding and trying to maintain a more vanilla style of play IE: not letting you randomly shift around shards in the middle of nowhere so you can rapidly group up right in front of that elite quest, finish it and disband, vanishing back into whatever random shards you all end up in.
Of course, even if they wanted to do any of that there probably isn’t time between now and classic release to set it all up anyway.
TLDR: Have both normal vanilla style servers with their normal server caps as well as a megaserver for each server type. Having a megaserver for each server type for people who don’t care about sharding would allow them to make fewer normal servers and have fewer population issues with abandoned servers later on. The rest of the post is a bunch of specific details in how sharding could work on a Classic megaserver.
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Dynamic respawns and server cap.
Blizzard won’t do this because dynamic respawns require programming and attention to detail, whereas sharding systems are already in place.
Accepting sharding is rational, but you white knights who actively defend sharding disgust me.
All of this would be additional development, and they’re already doing it on a tight budget. Whatever solution they choose, it’ll be for all servers.
I agree it’s not likely they’d do anything like that. I just figured I’d offer an example of another way it could have been done since the OP asked for ideas.
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Exactly this. For every person wanting there to be no sharding on this issue there would be 100 posting on the forums and writing bad reviews about how the game is an unplayable mess. I imagine even some of the guys here would be mad the launch wasn’t smooth, without realizing it would be because of no sharding.
Having said that I think quite a few people here really just want to ensure that their is no sharding past the starting zones and I think they have a right to worry a bit. The same justifications you can give for having sharding in the starting zones could be used in other particularly crowded zones. Private servers fixed this by having INSANE respawns that wasn’t authentic at all and honestly created a ton of problems I wasn’t fond of. Like day 1 Mages hitting 60 and an economy that was completely out of wack because of things like instantly spawning Devilsaur and Blues and Purples becoming way over abundant from, well, infinitely instant respawning mobs.
If we do have larger servers though, it is curious how most people would consider handling the situation. We either have much smaller servers like Classic had, or we have a bit of a situation if they can’t use sharding or respawns. Hmm…