I’m not saying launch won’t be flooded, it will. But I still think 6 months after launch there will be overall a higher amount of players playing than when at launch.
Gonna say this - with all the exploiting, unless Blizz locks later hopping with a deserter Debuff to prevent constant hopping, sharding the starting zones was the better approach. As much as it sucks I’d rather see people phase in my first 10 levels than see what’s going on right now mid-game.
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Except that Blizzard literally said that if you were seeing this that it was them manually changing things
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A “bunch of extra servers” with elements of sharding and CRZ that randomizes entire server-sized populations. I’m 100% fine with layering if the layers acted like actual servers rather than mimicking a continent wide CRZ.
I’m gonna have to ask you for a source on that one.
I quoted it 14 hours ago, in this thread
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That post applies to the last stress test though. I was only in the first 2, not this 3rd one (cause EU), where they only announced ingame whenever they were going to do something specific.
I do remember that there was something odd with someone crossing the barrens and durotar, having a mob disappear on him which looked like sharding (in the beta). That’s not what i’m talking about though.
What i saw wasn’t even during the initial stress test phase anymore, it was after, where they prolounged the realms for a few couple hours so people could play.
It made perfect sense that i and a couple others around me got switched over to a new layer once ours got stuffed with asmon raids overloading the thing.
Layering has to work this way, because otherwise it would allow a layer to carry people way past it’s max active capacity (3k~).
We had to be switched over, or the whole worlds resources etc would no longer be correctly designed according to the population.
The system allows that to happen without logging anyone off for example, cause as they said, it’s dynamic.
All it did was dynamically adjust to the new population demands, so it threw me out even in my active play session, and put me over to a new layer.
What do you think will happen to you if you’re in a situation like that, where your layer gets stuffed with groups and raids, and you’re out there solo?
And it gets full to the point where the active cap is reached for that layer, making the system redistribute excess players to ensure appropriate populations?
Who’s gonna get the boot over to the new layer first in your opinion? The solo players, the raids, the guilds? And when? Is no one gonna see any transition if this needs to happen even if they actually change their whole world out for a new one?
Perhaps you see something i’m missing.
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There’s only been 2
LOUD NOISES!
am I doing this right?
But for real, Blizzard figure it out!
TL DR : OP is late to the forums and not taken the time to read about the game he claims to love. GG
Stress Test 1: May 22th
Stress Test 2: May 29th
Stress Test 3: June 19th
That’s 3.
Also, if you don’t mind, i’d still be curious to hear what you think caused me to see the transition, based on what i just told ya.
Whenever you have time, I’ll be glad to check out your explanation, cause it always helps to understand what we’re dealing with here in regards to layering a bit better.
Just like BFA, Blizzard has already decided what will be and won’t be in game within a very narrow margin for discussion. Any feedback that doesn’t directly praise their choices will be ignored or lost in the noise.
It’s very simple why they will never get rid of layering at launch.
Blizzard moved to a cloud based server infrastructure instead of dedicated servers for realms which is why you see such huge lag in BFA when there are more than 20 people in any given localized zone as they attempt to load balance across their cloud.
In order to support a huge population in a small game area you need dedicated LOCAL hardware in order to process all the updates without the added latency of maintaining data integrity across a wide area network. It also allows Blizzard to rent cloud services instead of purchasing and maintaining dedicated hardware.
This is the reason they can’t get rid of layering. They would have to change their underlying infrastructure to support the initial influx of players but then would see a huge drop off in required computing power as players leave the initial zones, spread out or even stop playing.
This is super simplified.
TLDR; Blizz uses cloud based services now which are bad at handling huge populations in small areas. Too expensive to upgrade to dedicated servers for vanilla when they expect a significant % to be tourists.
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Blizzard manuallly doing things.
Also, there were only 2 stress tests.
Also also, 6 days ago was the 19th.
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Okey.
Ah! Indeed it was. Once again, thanks to your efforts i’m always informed of the current year, and past dates. I know you’ll continue to offer your calendar service to the forum, so thank you in advance for any future reminders!
nevermind i missed that
I’m glad we can at least agree now that there were 3 tests ![:smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smile.png?v=6" ":smile:")
its fine don’t worry
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But regardless, the people phasing in and out, the major test on that was only this last test. Before that, while they might have been testing it, it was still very early in its implementation. There’s still 2 months of getting this working right.
I will give you that yes, it was early in its implementation, but even so it worked surprisingly well, given what it was supposed to do according to their explanation.
The only bug i saw during the testing was people getting stuck at the SW gate, where layering seems to cause some weird issue there that doesn’t add up with what it’s supposed to do.
I’m not sure they can prevent any of the phasing transitions from happening, because the whole system relies on that to do it’s thing.
Either they have to put restrictions on it (which again, introduce a whole new set of issues, further changing and damaging the game), or they scrap it.
I doubt they can come up with a new tech with only this little time left. We’ll see.
Why would I ? I’m not a developer, not even near.
I hardly understand a thing about that, let alone the depths of their intents. I leave it to those who work on an everyday basis on it to decide what’s best for their game.
I’ll give my feed back as to how stress test feels, nothing more.