I think this is kinda ridiculous, especially given most servers have a timezone on them. The peak time will be the same peak time for the server every day. Those of us with time off will be able to get on, but when your queue is longer than the period you’re not working (minus a few hours sleep) it effectively prohibits you from playing.
That’s not going to fly with the media or with the players Blizzard is trying to capture. Don’t care about retail tourists, but people returning for Classic are going to walk away again if they pay… and cannot actually play the game.
So, make more servers, the cost of doing that is not my problem, it’s an acti-bizz problem. Greed seems like a logical reason as to why they won’t use a small percentage of a single months revenue to do it right.
Making more servers is negligible cost. But when the population goes from an evenly spread out 3 million players, down to an evenly spread out 500k players, the evenly spread out 3000 player servers, go down to evenly spread out 500 player servers.
Blizzard’s decision is in our best interests. Pretending that Classic will have the same trajectory that Vanilla did, requires all but 350,000 of us to be excluded from the game for the first 2 months. I had an original copy. Are you willing to wait until the time you started playing WoW?
I’m sorry you feel that way. Who determines ones “best interests” is it you? Is it the company making money off of you? Or is it me? Do I determine my best interests? The company is definitely NOT putting players interest above their profit margins.
False dichotomy, there are other options to prevent dead servers, and you know it, because I’ve seen you in many of the threads. So why even present such an absurd argument? Are you trying to be deceptive? Win an argument? Or what is your point in knowingly presenting a false dichotomy?
Because Merges don’t exist. Blizzard will use Connected Realms/CRZ. So any logic that utilizes merges fails because CRZ is worse than dead realms.
As I’ve said before, static layering is less dangerous, but it extends the life of layering, creating a danger that the realms would encounter the “merge shock” that other games have had when they finally are crashed togther.
Layering (Dynamic or Static) is the only solution that solves the launch queues AND prevents dead realms given the expected population graph.
If Blizzard went with static, I would be more worried for the community, because it would last longer, but I’d be less worried than if they got rid of layers in favor of CRZ.
Blizzard has chosen Dynamic Layering because they see it as in our best interests to maintain high realm populations at later stages of the game. They haven’t commented on Static Layering so I can’t say why they didn’t go with it, but I imagine it has to do with “dead layers” and a longer layering period.
Cost of extra realms is not a concern for them since they haven’t chosen to shut down what are effectively dead realms in Retail, instead just using CRZ. Their server technology does not use dead cycles.
I’m not sure how a reductio ad Trumpum is any way relevant to the discussion. That aside, we all want stable high pop realms 2 years/well into launch. We just disagree on how to achieve that.
Only best case scenarion for a merge is 2 servers progressed the same, in the same time zone, with roughly similar economies.
Imagine you’re in a lifeboat and some dude pulls up and talks about how great he is for saving you, how without him you would rot and die. Yeah you would sneer at him then.
Timezone’s are quite an issue. People do actually select their realms based on timezone, cause wouldn’t you know, people want to play with people. The best way to do that is line up your playtime with active hours of the server. Generally that means choosing one in your timezone, unless of course you work funky hours.
A server full of PST people would be quite upset if they got merged with EST and the clock switched to EST. What good would that do if the PST server was lower pop? You wouldn’t have really added anyone to when they are playing. So their pool doesn’t increase at all. All you did was ruin their economy and add a bunch of people that they will hardly ever play with.
That was my experience in the first stress test, and it was wonderful. My group joked around, got to know each other. Added each other as friends. See, those downtimes have value. I know you don’t understand that, and the devs certainly don’t. But that’s when you get to know people, socialize, make friends. Something severely lacking from the Current WoW. And something that Layering will inhibit in Classic.