It sounds like they are aiming for authentic concurrent player caps when they remove layering.
I think they overestimate how many leave, resulting in more queues. So I think there will be free transfers away from some Realms at that point.
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Lots will move immediately when faced with a 10 hour queue, so guilds that are OK with possibly not being able to play for the first few days might get more reasonable queues later on when enough have grown fed up with the queue.
The world was balanced around a ~3k cap. You arenât meant to be surrounded by other players at all times.
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Not true according to Blizzard.
From the sticky regarding Herod being overcrowded:
âWhile we are able to fit several times more players on a single realm in 2019 than was the case in 2006, we are not going to raise that cap any further, even though we have the technical capacity to do so. Raising realm caps would simply forestall the problem, letting more players in at launch but creating an unsustainable situation down the line, with severe queues when we turn off layering permanently before Phase 2 of our content unlock plan.â
So technically, the game can sustain more than 3000 players. They just donât intend to raise the cap any further, which I agree with.
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Yes Vanilla, this is Classic, based on the 8.0 client. Blizz can and will go above 3k, highly likely that it wont ever be a fixed number to boot.
To be fair, they didnât specifically say the capacity wasnât being increased past â2006 levels.â and nowhere did they say there would be a 3k capacity. People have been asking that exact question in the thread, wondering what the server cap will be once layering is removed.
While you could be correct, you are making an educated guess regarding these things because Blizzard hasnât confirmed this.
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I will offer the same bet I did to people that said layering will be off in the first few weeks.
There is no way one of these large servers ever sees a 3k pop in the first year after layering is turned off.
Exactly.
During the interviews they refused to comment on pop. numbers. Likely because they know their answers wouldnât go over well with people that want authentic server populations.
Itâs 3k per layer, this is confirmed
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They refuse to comment on max pops during launch, each layer is 3k and they wonât extend past that after layering is removed. Like someone said earlier, the server populations may have 10k people after launch but because everyone doesnât play at the same time 3k pop caps are easily obtainable with little to no queue.
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I honestly donât understand some of the debate based on the OP. It doesnât matter what the capacity per layer is (3k or more). If you have multiple layers and then on a certain day do away with layering⊠then concurrent capacity is going to be reduced unless single layer capacity is increased and there doesnât really seem to be an indication that is the plan.
So the assumption would be that they expect enough people to quit or at least play less⊠that it will work out.
If you as an example had to run 10 layers on a server and on X day because you promised you did away with all but 1 layer but had zero reduction in active players⊠the result should be obvious. 9 layers worth of players would be waiting to get into game.
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This debate comes down to two different mindsets. Realists like myself donât believe that a 15 year old game that has been available for free is going to reverse the decade long decline in MMOs. Less than 200k people play vanilla pservers, 2-4 million play retail. Add to the fact that retail gets free access to classic.
And then there are those who think every single person who played vanilla is coming back to play classic. These people are throwing out insane predictions, claiming classic will reach 10 million players. Wow, FF14, ESO, and osrs combined donât have anywhere close to that number.
I could see 10 million people playing Classic or Classic+ should it ever happen. But I donât expect it to happen in the first few months after release.
I expect itâs going to spike at launch, then drop like a rock, after which it starts a gradual increase in population that may start to âsnowballâ cartoon style as the populations grow.
But they have to survive the initial population drop. Which is why we have layering.
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ok but what if they didnt
Then mob spawn rates, node spawn rates, etc wold be screwed up, itâs nothing about server capacity its about how the game coded at the time.
it can sustain more if need be as stated inr ecent blue post but its most likely that server capacity wont be reduced
There is a difference between technical capacity and design/âtunedâ capacity.
It was designed and tuned for about 3K players. It now has a technical capacity for far more than 3K.
So while they could host more than 3K, theyâre not going to(once layering ends), because the world isnât designed for more than 3K players to be in it.
I think 10 million is a wildly unrealistic number. If they can do classic+ right and follow in the footsteps of osrs I could possibly see ~1 million.
But Blizzard has openly said in their blue post that they will NOT enable higher quantities of players even though they can. When layering goes away queue times will get a lot worse unless most of the players who started have given up.
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Iâm generally agreed, itâs one of those âpossible, but not probableâ type things. I think millions is possible. I think surpassing retail is a lot more possible and probable than many want to acknowledge. But getting into the 4 Million+ players category is pushing credibility IMO.
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