Im curious as to where this 75 percent of players that quit classic will be going. They are quitting classic and just going back to their normal lives, quitting for other games? What is the reason they will be quitting?
this will happen. long ques.
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Here is a solution to avoid layering and no queues. Not a really good one though.
Blizzard will allow phase 1 to take 6 months+ so many people would leave until the servers are stable then introduce phase 2 with no layering
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Youâre assuming itâs an all or nothing proposition with Layering. It isnât, as Blizzard has indicated with âWe could allow more, but we wonâtâ stance.
They can âlower the boomâ on the overpopulated realm over a period of weeks.
Iâd guess the goal is no layering on most realms by the end of the third week. At that point the âmega-serversâ will start seeing their login queues get longer and longer as the concurrent population limit is lowered(and fewer layers are created to host said population). Theyâll simultaneously allow free realm transfers to a lower population realm.
Youâll probably see âlayer population capsâ vary between 2.2K and 3.5K-ish at a guess depending on how recently theyâve âcollapsed a layerâ on that realm. Where a 2.2K population layer means another one is about to âpopâ and a 3.5K(-ish) layer would indicate they just âpoppedâ one.
Between continuing attrition as some player (âthe touristsâ) simply quit, and others transfer off, theyâll continue to lower the bar on the allowed maximum population on the server. Basically theyâll be âtuningâ for a specific queue size/length on those âmega-serversâ and depending on things look population wise, theyâll either expand or shrink the targeted queue size.
Iâd basically guess that sometime around the end of week two to see queues to begin to grow in earnest on a lot of realms as they try to get populations to shift to other realms so they can turn layering off and get phase 2 underway. As Iâm not expecting Phase 2 until November at the earliest, that would give them two months to depopulate the over populated realms.
You wonât see it jump from no queue to a 10K queue, it would more likely to be no queue to a 500 person queue when they start, moving to a 1,000 person if not enough have left by the end of that week. The second week would potentially see up to 2K person queue by the end of the second week. With it possibly moving into the 3K range by the end of the third week if people arenât leaving for other realms quickly enough for Blizzard.
The only realms that would be likely to see a 10K queue once theyâre ready to phase out layering are the ones that are (somehow) pushing 10K queues with layering enabled prior to their phase out of layering starting.
Nah the numbers will drop off. A lot of retail folk will go back once they truly realise they can not move transmogs and mounts and whatever. Classic is not a game for a lot of people on retail but they will make accounts to at least troll if nothing else our community. But once Blizz releases literally anything new for them to do on retail, they will be gone. This is no shade on anyone please understand. It is just that these are 2 different games built for different gamers. Not better or worse, just different. And people will go to what game they like more. But the numbers will certainly drop on both games at one point. Retail at start of classic and classic when new stuff is released on retail.
As for hardware, it is much better then it used to be and can handle many ore people then it used to in the past. Does that mean there will be no wait lines? HA!!! But you got no-one to blame but yourself for choosing a full server. Having said that , itâs not like you donât have enough time to roll on a low pop. Crying at the wait lines while refusing to go to lower pop servers that are available is ⌠lets not go harsh here, silly to say the least.
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70% of players quit before reaching level 10 as per Michael Morhaime, then President and CEO of Blizzard Entertainment at the close of Wrath of the Lich King. It was a very large part of their justification for the leveling revamp that happened with the Cataclysm.
As the level 1 through 10 content in Wrath is the level 1 through 10 content in Classic, it is reasonable to expect that 70% quit rate is likely to be matched or even exceeded by the players who are new to Classic. Wrath was 10 years ago after all.
What isnât so clear cut is how the returning players will respond to that, and if the 70% quit rate would likewise be valid for them.
As to where theyâd go after quitting classic? If they quit at level 10, they probably didnât spend very long in the game in general, and theyâd probably just go back to whatever it is they normally do.
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I like the idea I proposed elsewhere, that if the players on certain realms are particularly insistent on remaining on grossly overpopulated realms, they simply leave those realms on Phase 1, and let everyone else move into Phase 2.
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Many Alliance!.. Left side, even side! Now, handle it!
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Theyâre interested in a high population, not on being stuck in Phase 1 content. Thatâs a pretty silly suggestion.
Why punish people because they donât mind playing on realms with queues?
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Predicting at least 50% die-off in concurrent players by the end of the first month. 85% in the realm of the possible depending on if they actually make people wait more than a month for phase 2.
Queues. First of all, the chances of a 15 year old game that has been available for free through pservers being able to reverse a decade long decline in MMOs and surpass retail is very unlikley. The main 3 pservers have less than 200k active players, retail has 2-4 million.
But Iâll play out your fantasy. Layering is gone by phase 2, that is happening even if servers are still peaking at 20k. The immediate result would be 17k players in queue. Blizzard would just open new servers and offer transfers off of the full servers to these new servers. It really is that easy.
The âAverage playerâ should take about 3 months to hit level 60.
Unless they no life it, or min/max their way to 60. Which probably wonât be the âaverage playerâ but a substantial number of people all the same.
Dire Maul and the PvP honor system went live about the same time the âaverage playerâ was hitting level 60. At least for North America. Patch 1.3(Dire Maul and the World Dragons) released on March 5th, compared to a November 23rd release. Thatâs over a three month spread. I think a November release for Phase 2 to go with an August 27th release is reasonable. I also think thatâll probably be about right for Classicâs âAverage Player.â
The power gamers will simply have to rage for most of September and all of October.
But nobody really knows. Your guess is as good as Blizzardâs guess is as good as mine.
But I seriously doubt it will be 95%. Iâd be willing to bet a lot on that. This game is just too good and too well-designed and too addictive. There was a very good reason that it was so successful back then, and most of the âimprovementsâ have made the game worse, not better.
I think that for 6-12 hours on Aug 26th in the U.S. and 27th in EU, classic will have a higher number of concurrent players than retail.
One thing to remember: even if there were absolutely no drop in the number of active players, we would still expect to see a large drop in the number of players logging in at the same time over the course of weeks.
Think about it: a ton of people are planning to take time off the first week, even no-lifing for a while. They certainly arenât going to do that every week though. Life canât be put off forever.
Eventually, theyâre going to go from (for example) ten hours per day to eight, six, five and four⌠Until a couple months down the road, theyâre playing for perhaps 10-20 hours a week.
And when you go from playing say 60 hours per week to 10-20 across the player base, you get an effective 66% to 80% drop even if the player base remains the exact same.
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Idk if this blue post will help
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Probably, but that would be due to retail getting free access to Classic.
Not at all considering the vast majority of the playerbase isnât new people, itâs people who already have had a sub for countless ages, like myself. Iâll play Classic to the end, or at least as far as I can go, but thats not going to stop me from enjoying the updates and expansions from retail and new raids and content and story.
My sub is for both, you wont see a decline in numbers, youâll just see less people there on average. And yeah Iâm pretty confident the drop off will be as such. Especially if they dont time retail and phase because iâm going to chose to raid next level content over a diremaul patch or wsg or whatever any day.
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Agreed. I think 70% is probably going to be a good estimate for the initial crush of players. Itâs probably going to be lower than that all considered, but as a conservative estimate it has a strong grounding in historical precedent. As such, 95% is way too high.
The reason why 70% is likely to potentially be excessive is that a LOT of the people coming in to play Classic WoW played WoW extensively at some point in the past, as opposed to the âunwashed massesâ that were logging into the game during Wrath(or earlier) to see âwhat the fuss was about.â
I think a number of apathetic Retail Players are going to find Classic oddly addictive even for them, but a lot of them will be able to set it aside regardless.
I donât think there is going to be much(comparatively speaking) in the way of people coming from âoutsideâ to participate in the initial crush of players, so it will be interesting to watch play out. Plenty of variables in play on this, and not much to compare it to.
I do think a lot of the people who will return to check out Classic âdonât have the timeâ to invest in it like they did back in the day. So while itâs possible theyâll âbingeâ for a bit, their activity is going to also drop like a rock as well after that initial binge. They may come back periodically to play some more, but theyâre not going to be playing on any kind of schedule. Giving an effective if not actual sharp decline in population in the aftermath of launch.
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I think itâs entirely possible that for the first week after launch that Classic is going to be well ahead of retail before things settle down again. Classic may eventually overtake Retail once more, but its going to probably be at least a couple months before it happens again.