No, a Nelf, I don’t have have that funny face with bones protruding out of my mouth =)
Yeah I’ve thought about the outcome if without any system at all and I’m pretty ok with it. I’d rather wait in queue for hours than play a nonsense layering garbage version of the game.
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So desperate to bump your own post that you reply to a 20 day old comment?
Way to go sparky.
Still would rather wait in queue for hours than play a layered nonsense version of the game. I think you’re trying to avoid the truth; layering is garbo and should be removed.
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I just want to remind everyone how many times activision has lied to us and moved the goalpoasts.
There will be no sharding/phasing technology in classic
there will be sharding/phasing technology, but only for the starter zones at launch.
There will be “layering” for the entirety of the world that they “want to be gone by phase 1”
Make no mistake, layering is just sharding rebranded. You log off and log in the next day and are faced with an entirely new server full of people you have never seen or played with before.
This “layering” will be indefinite. I can almost guarantee this company is going to lie a 5th time and keep it past phase 1. I called it first boys
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Actually Grold I beat you too it. But I concur regardless.
First off, it’s very unlikely that it’s going to grow in popularity past the initial rush. The game will do well, but it’s not going to be what the original game was.
The 3k limit isn’t a thing. Ion talked about it. 10,000 people can be online at the same time and the servers won’t crash. But he pointed out that it will be an awful experience. Imagine 8,000 people online competing to play the game in a world designed around only 2,000.
The idea behind layering is that it’s going to start out as vanilla launch. 3,000 person instances of the world. But as people level and spread out, the cap will be raised, while the layers are reduced. The issue is that as people level, at different paces, and pick different paths, you have all of azeroth to play the game in. But day 1, you have 6 zones for EVERYONE. And if you’ve been around at all for expansions and content patches, that first couple days to weeks is when everyone is on, throughout the whole day. It’s only there to smooth out the launch and let people spread out. After that, when phase 2 comes along, they’re perfectly content with 15,000 people competing for 1 world boss.
Alright. We will see I suppose. My gut tells me that layering is going to be around a lot longer than we thought, but it’s not long before we’ll know whether that’s the case or not.
Except that there won’t be 15,000 people, because the server population will be tapering off rapidly in the first few weeks, until they have 1 3k layer because that’s the core playerbase and the tourists are gone.
You almost seem like you hate Classic. Why are you so zealous about it tapering off? Is it so hard to believe a lot of people actually want to play it and might discover it’s a better long term investment than retail?
If layering is removed a week after launch, then that’s fine with me. It could be useful the first day, at the very least. After that, there will still be a crowd but it won’t be launch day crowded, which is crashing the servers. They can also increase spawn rate, which will help alleviate bottlenecks of 5man groups fighting over a named mob and apples.
If layering lasts longer than a week or two, then that’s too long and will ruin the game.
The launch of Nostalrius is a great example of what will happen at Classic launch. Day 1 was long queues and hundreds of groups waiting for 1 mob to spawn and tag. A few days later, things were much more manageable. I would gladly go through Day 1 again to avoid layering… but if layering exists for only Day 1, I wouldn’t mind either.
I think layering really exposes Blizzard’s troubling underlying philosophy regarding Classic. There are many ways they could have solved the population problem without layering but they would have required a greater amount of effort. The servers were already set up for sharding so it was more convenient to just tweak and rebrand the technology.
It seems like Blizzard just wants to flip the switch and walk away - right click reporting and layering being the best evidence for this.
It most concerns me in the areas of customer service and bug fixes. I fully expect that the launch will be a disaster since that’s how it always goes with Blizzard. But with a set it and forget it mentality we might be stuck with a buggy game long term.
I’m still waiting to hear all these solutions from the anti-brigade. All I’ve heard so far is locked layers and server merges (which would actually be connected realms and crz). And a bunch of whining.
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There’s been more than enough plausible solutions offered
Yes. Because that population that tapers off, is comprised of happy Retail players. Anyone genuinely claiming that opening Classic once will instantly create a permanent player… is insane.
The only reason this didn’t happen back in Vanilla, is that Blizzard massively underestimated the popularity and restricted access to box owners, and only produced 350,000 boxes at launch. The speed of growth was initially limited by box sales. I had a friend who was chomping at the bit for WoW and couldn’t play because the physical box hadn’t gotten across the ocean on a boat…
Don’t use the Vanilla launch as an example.
With that covered, all modern games now have this curve, because players are complacent. It’s not about the game’s quality, its about FotM. Everyone rushes to the game, even if they have no interest in that style of game. Streamers will point people at it, including non-WoW players like Pokimane. Retail players will “try it out”, because its free. People who quit through the life of WoW will try it again. And people will quit again. Either because its not a game they enjoy, or for the same reasons they quit previously. Life, free time, interest, etc.
Some new players will be hooked. Many others will look at it as a 15 year old game that has outdated graphics, hard leveling, uninformative UI etc.
WoW Classic is not a title to generate a new market (initially). It is not a game that the modern gamer will be attracted to, because the modern gaming market we hate so much, is shaped by those people’s desires and habits.
So yeah, there will be 2-3 million players initially, dropping back to probably 400k-500k players within 3 weeks, before slowly growing again. Where the growth stops, I don’t know. Probably Naxx. But the initial population will definitely shoot up and crash as quickly.
Name (with detail) a single solution that minimises queues while maintaining a long term population with the expected rise and drop of the first few weeks. The reason they’re using layering, is no-one has come up with a suitable alternative.
Can you pretty please stop bumping this thread?
It doesn’t matter how many threads you make on this. At all. Your voices have already been heard on this. Rehashing it over and over again isn’t contributing anything new to the conversation.
Layering is going to be in Phase 1 of Classic. This is an immutable fact as we’re almost a month from launch. Either accept it or don’t play.
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Megathreads are far more preferable to a hundred tiny Layering whines, where we have to repeat ourselves instead of being able to quote ourselves. So no.
No there haven’t.
Feel free to point at one. If they’re plausible, they’re in this thread.