I’m just wondering if anyone of you guys even played in the stress test at this rate. Without layering, you couldn’t do anything if you just wanted to quest. Even in a full party, it was, mind numbing. Heck, most people didn’t even play because of how many people were competing for mobs, or wait a while to try again later.
Blizzard has two options that they can do,they can make raid groups work with quests, or have hard login queues for players when it comes to making a character till players leave the 1-5 area for more players to come in.
I got into WoW about 13-14 years ago when my dad played. He played at least 9-10 years and was an active multi-boxer. He didn’t even know Classic was coming back because he quit so long ago. I agree with you.
Stress test is an extreme you wouldn’t see in normal servers. Ideally they would make the cap like 6-9k on launch and then if people quit in 2 weeks like people are saying it would go to a normal 3k cap. Private servers launch with bigger numbers than this and mob competition dies down within a few days. There’s no need to split those numbers into layers it just causes a ton more problems.
The testers not testing isn’t Blizzard’s fault. They get a fair number of bug reports from the ‘early access’ dorks when something doesn’t go their way, but some are dutifully testing bugs.
1.12 ironed out bugs BACK IN THE DAY. But when you have to recreate it, smack it into some tech that didn’t exist back then(Current client and such) and then have to tweak other systems… you get bugs. I’m not a professional and even I know that. Tinkering with code is fickle as heck, and can’t be assumed to just ‘be perfect’.
Saying it needs to go doesn’t help. Shift the discussion to ways to improve it, since it’s far too late to change the systems. Outright removing it would be detrimental. At this point, anyone saying “REMOVE IT” is effectively asking not to be able to play for a good portion of the first month. Embrace multi-hour queues and constant crashes if you really want layering gone. But you better include that in every post you make supporting the removal of layering.
Someone did the maths either here or in another thread. But with the base cap of 3000, assuming the populations of races were approximately even, each starter zone would be dealing with something like 500 players. You’d rather add MORE to that/accept huge queues? Like… most of these layering arguments just don’t make sense. It almost sounds like most of them are “I don’t want to play the game right away. You shouldn’t either!”
Yeah I don’t agree with upping the cap that much. Instead I think they should just have more servers, and later on merge the low population ones. I don’t mind if it causes some realm queue issues or low pop communities get merged (which isn’t a bad thing because after the merge it’s consistent). Layering is a dark evil.
So… layering. That’s basically what it’ll do. Just with the connection of the community(if in smaller bits) earlier than the inevitable merge. Just think about layering that way. A partially connected bunch of extra servers.
I was talking about seeing it work the way it was intended. Meaning, me seeing transitions happening as i got group invites, or seeing others start to disappear as they switched groups to other layers.
I talked about seeing big groups of people quickly disperse into a very small group as people found there were better layers to play on out there through chat.
I was talking about not liking the transition that happenend when Asmons army overloaded my layer, pushing me and others out into a new one.
And then, seeing all the social reprecussions that started to pop up very, very visibly ("/inv me to fun layer!!" “any fun layer?” “pls inv, i’m on dead layer” x 12451341, etc)
I wasn’t talking about actual bugs it causes, like being stuck at city gates. I’m talking about seeing the system work as it was announced to work.
And that was a bad experience, and one that didn’t feel like old WoW to me. Makes sense, cause it’s not the same game like this anymore.
Thanks for the reminder that it’s a beta again though!
You’ve already told me before, but i’m glad you are so dedicated to keep people informed about the games current status that you came here again to make sure i and others didn’t forget.
I was talking about not liking the transition that happenend when Asmons army overloaded my layer, pushing me and others out into a new one.
So if enough players form raids etc they can push other people into a new layer? What if you’re aoe levelling say 10 gnolls and that happens? I’ve seen videos where the transition happens and suddenly all the mobs are alive and attack the player.
I’m wondering how much griefing there’ll be with this.
That’s what appeared to happen, yeah. It makes sense too, because in order for raids to be able to stay together, they all need to be able to stay in the same layer as the person who’s the group leader.
The layer i was in already was quite busy, so when people started grouping up in it en masse it kicked me and a few people around me i could see out, because we we were just solo players.
But i knew it was a layer switch, cause i also saw players disappear at the same time as the mobs disappeared.
Just a moment later there was a new set of mobs coming in, and the layer suddenly was really quiet.
So ya, it looks like there is a prio in who gets transitioned over first when a new layer needs to be formed/or gets empty. Raids/groups definitely seem to have a prio to stay over solo players, and i’d imagine guilds active in the layer would too.
There’s definitely plenty of abuse potential like this, be it to mess with players or gather resources, farm mobs for leveling, etc.
Not sure what they can really do about those type of abuses as long as the system stays dynamic like it is now.
500 isn’t that much. You have to consider how fast everyone paces away. Immediately some will go to a higher zone to kill mobs, others will group and kill even higher mobs. So that 500 splits into 250 which splits into 125 which splits into a whole giant quest area which splits even more as people level at different speeds. Then within a few hours this paces out a ton more and soon enough you are dealing with only a small handful around you as you get into zones that spread out more and people come on at different times.
Like I said they can verify this works from private servers where some have had 10k+ players and by the time you are in the 12-20 zones you have enough space. You can bet I’m going to be playing right away but I think this is crucial to have instead of splitting the world. A few hours of chaos is worth preserving the realm.
Something like dynamic respawns. Mark Kern calls it something different than Kevin Jordan. Kevin Jordan isn’t a systems guy so I wouldn’t go with what he says.
I know I’m late to the party, but a 5-30 minute cooldown on layer swapping would have no effect on login server load. Some very short and lightweight code would be needed to implement such a change.
Dynamic respawn is just what people call it and have been using for years. Mark Kern calls it overspawn but the term isn’t really used with WoW spawning externally. Not like this matters, they are both referring to the same thing when they describe it.
Sure but there are many pservers that do it differently and Blizzard has never officially tested in that environment. Just saying they have the basics for dynamic respawn in and they could have a similar result if they wanted.
If you’ve ever played a pserver, you’d know that launch is ALWAYS flooded with players. And these are illegal servers with no advertisement, only known about through word of mouth.
Now think of how many people are going to be flooded into an official Blizzard game with tons of advertising.