Right, but as has been pointed out a player could get to L20 in a day (likely judging by PS standards and a non-startup climate). Would 1-20 taking an extra day or two really effect the time to get to L60 in the grand scheme of things?
I agree. Once over a certain amount it doesn’t matter how many more above that number. The trick upon release is to team up and haul butt out of those areas. If it is a matter of “stability” then blizzard needs to spend the money to make whatever background tech work. PSs manage it on a shoestring budget.
Are you for real? Up until now you were claiming that you’d never be able to get things done without sharding. Now the difference “wouldn’t even be noticeable”?
This isn’t really about what I like or don’t like. I’d personally like no sharding myself, if only to shut up the people crying about it. This is about the health of the game, and contrary to your hyperbolic reasoning, sharding is NOT going to damage the community in any way, shape, or form.
You may say “But look at retail!” but I have news for you – the community in retail was crap long before sharding came along.
This topic has valid points on both sides of the spectrum. However, I think the topic of “sharding” is primarily subjective.
For me personally, a server launch with no sharding will brings out the best and the worst in players. However it gives players the opportunity to experience the “Hype”.
I would love the opportunity to be left in awe of the madness that is launch day and be able to laugh with friends about said madness created by the love for a game we all want to play. To me that is the vanilla experience.
There will be plenty of time for leveling alts in newbie gohst towns later on but the madness only comes once.
Remember when games were so good they became the exclusive game and was simply referred to as “The Game”? No title necessary.
This isn’t even about “the madness.” It’s about avoiding all the negative consequences launch will bring that can be negated at least partially with sharding. You know, unacceptable things like crashing servers, login qeues, lag spikes…
My situation is very similar except I was in queue well up over an hour and sometimes two hours during primetime. I would have to plan my logins well before I actually wanted to play.
The unknown factor that no one can really know is the retention rate of classic players. In vanilla, we had extremely high retention rates obviously since blizz released sub numbers. They grew from 0 to 8 million before TBC came out. Player retention was high.
Since it was high, blizz could release new servers knowing they would ‘fill up.’ Hyjal was offered a free transfer to Winterhoof. I remember many servers being offered free xfers to low/new servers.
Continuing on, the retention rate is what is deciding sharding vs queue times for classic. We do not know or can predict what that ratio will be. It is not a new product. It is a preexisting product that is getting remade. If the retention rate is a perfect 100% then blizzard would not need sharding. As servers filled up, they implement a login queue that slowly diminishes out as people spread out into the world. The goal would be to get x amount of people onto each realm and 100% retain that playerbase.
However that is not feasible or practical because we all know retention rates could be as low as 10% or as high as 90%. We do not know. Before I stopped playing live there were many guildees saying they would try it to see what it was all about but doubtful they would stick with it. Those people lower the retention rate.
You will see several types of players affecting the retention rate from the diehard private server guys, people who dabbled in the private servers but afraid to commit, nostalgia players, rose tinted goggle players, “just wanting to see what the buzz is” players, etc etc.
What we do know is that all these players will affect the retention rate of classic wow and will be present at launch. That is why blizzard is sharding at the beginning of classic. It is not because they want to, but because they have to. It is the only option currently available to deal with the unknown retention rate.
I should have elaborated more that the end goal is a sustainable healthy server. Which option gives that more than the other dealing with the unknown retention rate? Overpopulating and sharding while knowing players will drop out or implementing queue times and hoping enough people stick through it.