Anyone who played in Vanilla or TBC extensively will have a lot of achievements automatically granted on the date the achievement system was launched with the 3.0.2 WotLK pre-patch… sometime in October 2008. If someone has no achievements from that month, then they almost certainly weren’t a max-level player in TBC.
None of this has any relevance to discussions in this forum.
Or else didn’t log in until some time later. My rogue there was made day 1, but I didn’t log in after achievements were added until May 2009.
Granted, I didn’t have a max level character until Wrath. The highest I reached in Vanilla was 56 (…I was a slow leveler) and I skipped BC.
What kind of hallucinogen are you on? I’m not talking about “Scare Tactics” by saying only 500k people are likely to be playing in 3 months. That number puts it about 2nd or 3rd worldwide in MMOs, only competing with WoW Retail and FFXIV.
Again, showing your ignorance. The title achievement was awarded in 2009, because that was the first time in years I’d logged onto that character since achievements were added. Achievements were added at the end of 2008.
Not sure, but he’s really making himself look like a fool.
Regardless, his only attempt to discredit me is “You weren’t in Vanilla” which I can prove, while he’s on an account with zero legacy achievements.
That is certainly a fair point. Another is the one that applies to me… I deleted my Vanilla/TBC main when I quit playing in early LK. This character is my re-roll from late-LK.
But it’s not really meaningful to any of the topics discussed in here. For example, if someone doesn’t believe I played in Vanilla because this character’s armory doesn’t reflect that, I don’t really care.
Two things. First of all, 1 million players after the retail exodus is not a conservative number. Pserver players only number around 100k. If you look at recent relaunches like EQ and lineage, they do not boast massive populations. Games like retail WoW, ESO, and FF14 are still kings of the genre and all have a lot of similar qol features older games do not have.
Retail Wow is still the most popular MMO on the market and believed to only have somewhere between 2-4 million players. FF14 is somewhere around 1 million, and ESO is somewhere below that. MMOs have been declining for nearly a decade, there are less people playing MMOs today than just played wow 10 years ago. Thinking that a 15 year old game is going to come anywhere close to modern MMOs is just silly.
Secondly, not everyone plays the game at the same time. If servers are capped at ~3k like they were during retail vanilla, something they have stated was intentional and planned for Classic, that does not mean only 3k unique players play on that server. I’m not sure what the actual number would be, but I imagine that a server peaking at 3k players probably has at least 15k unique players. Going with that number, 13 servers should be able to support at least 195k players, which is a far more realistic number as far as expected player retention. There are probably only about 100k people playing vanilla pservers. Most of those are UE, RU, BR and CN players though. I would be surprised if the US pserver population exceeds 20k.
Because they know they’re going to keep layering.
I did mention both of those things in my next post.
I mean, I wasn’t making a retail vs. classic argument, but technically retail does have a great deal more content than classic if that’s the comparison you want to make. Regardless of what you think of retail, classic WoW doesn’t have enough content to keep people interested for a long period of time outside of the people willing to repetitively do a very small amount of content for a long period of time.
I don’t know why you’d think Classic WoW has more content than retail, but it’s not even remotely close. It takes longer to level in Classic, but there’s still dramatically less content along the path to max level as well as less at max level in classic.
BfA isn’t fun because of class design and certain other things, but the actual total amount of content in the game is undeniably massive compared to classic.
The only long-term classic players will be the ones into raiding, which historically is always a minority of players and the people willing to put in enough time to grind to the higher PvP ranks. Repetitively leveling alts is also a thing that took up a lot of time for some of us in vanilla, but I’m not sure that will be as big of a thing in a game that no longer feels new and in a world with a lot more options than we had 15 years ago.
They said they will be keeping a close eye and are ready to spin up new servers if needed. This isn’t the final list.
They can add servers if and when it’s needed. They might indeed be underestimating the amount of players but then again that matches the original #no changes
Tell you what. If I find that I get clumped into a shard where I repeatedly come across the same players, and there’s anything like in Retail, where you’re in a party with someone, standing in the same spot geographically, but you can’t see each other because of PHASING—PHASING—PHASSSSSSINNNNNNNGG—THEN THAT’S IT! Sub will be gone forever.
Why so few? Because all of these guys were wrong:
Better too few realms they can add to later than so many they have to reduce soon after release. Thats good for players and shareholders. Personally I am happy to queue for half an hour for a full realm and I dont care if they have a thousand realms or three, I can play only one at a time.
Could be, buuuut…
5 to 7 layers per server X 13 initial servers (by name only) = 65 to 91 “Vanilla” sized servers.
65 to 91 servers according to vanilla values is already ahead of the original “Vanilla” launch figures, and given that Classic WoW has zero paid advertisement campaign and will grow organically as it should; this is a decent place to start out life.
It’s very possible that Classic will need quite a few additional servers as demand for the game could be a lot higher than expected.
Most “players” do not get on to test realms, do not beta test and are simply not interested in stress testing.
Quoting this one for when layering is removed and we’re still under 30 servers with a Vanilla sized population cap.
Phasing because of different quest progression isn’t as big of a thing in retail as it was in say WotLK or whenever it was that quest phasing was a big thing.
Unless you’re in a different mode (war mode on/off) than someone in retail, it will typically move everyone in a party into the same shard immediately if you’re in the same area.
Although in Classic beta it seemed like major cities may have still been in their own shards even though it was supposed to be the entire continent. You could tell because as you walked over the threshold into any major city next to other players, they’d briefly vanish and then re-appear inside the city. That may have been changed already though.
I mean, I’m totally cool with the low server start number because I believe they will make more if we overpopulate into huge queue times. If I’m wrong, whatever. I’ll admit that openly if I am.
BUT…This is the whole point. It wasn’t a small beta. It was a TINY beta. There were thousands of us wanting in who did not get in. I played Vanilla almost from the beginning and our guild cleared all endgame content except Naxx to the point of farm. I wanted to get in there and help search for bugs and missing textures and experience it with everyone. There were literally thousands like me.
But it was an extremely small beta, and very few people who wanted in got invites.
I don’t think it was exclusively streamers, but it was too small, imo. The first stress tests were too short and too limited. This one has been better. I’m still in it, btw.
Why do so many players take Blizzard’s side on the layering issue? It’s just like retail, they’d present a change, thousands would say NO, a few would just repeat Blizzards reason, then the game would just get worse and worse driving more and more players from it.
Layering stinks. It’s fine if Blizzard wants to do it. But how can anyone who wants to play the original game experience possibly accept it?
Nostralius at it’s peak popularity would need 2 normal size Blizzard servers. 13 servers for NA may very well be the right number. Blizzard will obviously be watching behavior during the name reservation on Monday. If it becomes apparent that they have underestimated demand, they will add more.
Nobody has a better estimate of demand than Blizzard. That said, they might miss by a mile, but they have the ability to fix it.
50% ppl wont play on ps they want real deal and now we have it.
Blizzard’s side? I think layering doesn’t go far enough personally.
You’re not going to get anything like the original game experience anyway given that we’re starting at 1.12 with content phases that don’t really re-create the original experience those of us who played from day 1 had. Also, you probably aren’t using a CRT monitor, you’re already familiar with the game and will never re-create the actual new-game feeling you had when you originally played, the addons and addon API are different than they were in vanilla etc.
Re-creating server-specific population problems from having too many servers that were then abandoned or having multi-hour login queues isn’t something you should want to re-create. It wasn’t an important aspect of the actual gameplay. It was an unfortunate limitation of the technology at that time and was an awful experience for many.