We need to talk about server caps

[lonely zergling]

Like I said.. I;ve been on hosted pservers with 12,000 online at once... starting areas JAM packed with folks... it was a madhouse.. but the server held up fine... no lag, just pure unadulterated fun!

Server performance wise 12k players is no problem at all but the gameplay sucks. They would have to make mobs respawn much faster. And on that server you talk about the mobs respawned after 5 seconds.. which made certain areas unplayable because you couldnt clear the way to the quest objective. Thats just not vanilla at all. This destroys the economy too.

[Maudib]

Server performance wise 12k players is no problem at all but the gameplay sucks. They would have to make mobs respawn much faster. And on that server you talk about the mobs respawned after 5 seconds.. which made certain areas unplayable because you couldnt clear the way to the quest objective. Thats just not vanilla at all. This destroys the economy too.

No... that's why they will use sharding the first few weeks n the first few leveling zones. It will not destroy the economy because for the additional resources, there will be equally additional demand. It's a self leveling system. The problem is when dynamic spawns are used to artificially inflate resources, but the SAME people are farming them on one instance.

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Yeah and they aren't hosting another 100 servers or using shitty sharding/CRZ. Your anecdotal private server experience doesn't mean shit lol.

And neither will Classic past the few couple weeks/zones...

A bunch of low level peeps with no spell effects, casting one spell a few seconds adn eating and drinking... woo.. such a server load.

so again.. a non-issue.

[RoKPaNda]

That's exactly right... there are folks that prefer the easy mode of gameplay with arrows and circles drawn on the ground, big arrows on your head to telegraph events... A dungeon journal that tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about the encounter before you even see it. No need to look at debuffs and buffs and logs during and after the attempts... just pull a couple more times till idiots can follow instructions.

Nothing exciting there at all. But neither is Vanilla raiding. Still.. raiding is only a small part of Vanilla... it's ALL there is to retail.

Not true in the slightest. There's more content for more people than there has ever been before in this game. Mythic+, Raids, World Quests, Warfronts, etc. Vanilla has raids, dungeons you don't care about that don't scale, and very simple raids. The only thing Vanilla WoW has going for it was that the PvP is fun even if the PvP rank system is the worst thing they ever made and the balance was horrendous.

[Maudib]

Not true in the slightest. There's more content for more people than there has ever been before in this game. Mythic+, Raids, World Quests, Warfronts, etc. Vanilla has raids, dungeons you don't care about that don't scale, and very simple raids. The only thing Vanilla WoW has going for it was that the PvP is fun even if the PvP rank system is the worst thing they ever made and the balance was horrendous.

That is not true in the slightest.

Mythic+ is just the same normal dungeon, same heroic dungeon, same Mythic dungeon... with a feew mechanics stolen from Diablo 3 and ARPG.

Raids? In 3 difficulties? With journals telling you everything about them before you even enter them? With telegraphing circles, arrows, warnings, etc? What a joke. The ONLY thing that makes them challenging is how much they throw at you at once... and they tweak the damage/health until it's just making the fight take longer, allowing for more mistakes.

That's not challenging... that's just idiotic.

World quests? lol really... World quests are no different than dailies used to be... they just rotate them more. The odd thing? You can go in.. tag a mob.. then hang out and let other people kill it. How fun is that? And they give you epics that can titanforge greater than mythic? lol No wonder you love it so much.

Warfronts? Oh.. you mean those things you collect azerite power in... little shopping malls full of grains of sand for your necklace.


You may not care about vanilla raids... but when they are relevant? They are awesome. The gear is scarce so it's valued more.

Scaling? Scaling dungeons? Why in the WORLD would I want to do the same dungeon,. over and over, that scales with the gear I get making it feel like I haven't actually progressed at ALL? I want to go into an instance and make the boss my bitch... because I became more powerful.

I don;t care for PvP myself.. but those that do would take vanilla PvP over current ANY day of the week.

I get you like modern WoW... and truly I am happy for you. But you bashing on Classic only shows how truly unexcited you are about the game you play... and how jealous it makes you that people can be so excited for a version of the game that focuses on every aspect of an MMORPG.

[Outofmana]

Look there will be a change whether you like it or not, which is quitting rate of players being higher (high probability at this point) than back then, which has to be taken into account.

Not talking about vanilla private servers (At least their numbers) in this case makes no sense. Because they're a good example of differing population numbers experienced compared to retail vanilla. Not naming them should be good enough as these servers are in the past now.

* You had a 12k server: Way too crowded and it's obvious vanilla recources do not support this amount; gankers made it impossible to quest often enough, world materials being overfarmed, unsustainable economy and we still do not know how blizzard will handle the dmnorth/dmwest situation which will be more or less required for farming anything worthwhile when you can only play around prime-time. Overall the experience might be fine for some here, for most it was horrible and felt like a totally different, cutthroat game.

* You had a 1k server: Way too difficult recruiting good or reliable people with a lack of applications for every guild, many guilds ending up raiding below 40 people, multiple people in the same few guilds leading to almost every guild feeling the same, Every farm period after an instance release had a dip in players making things worse, lack of mats on AH at times, overall community not being large enough. Retail vanilla had a much more diverse raiding scene than I experienced here, with most guild struggling for members, most simply couldn't continue, simply stuff like for example wanting to raid on wednesday instead of thursday was impossible seeing as the only guilds surviving not having enough recruits were thursday-raiding guilds.

* You had a 2.5k server (longer ago); Couldn't have come closer to truly feeling like vanilla again to me, no overcrowing issues nor feeling like a deadzone without guild identity differences.

* That same server got capped at 1k: Many guilds died being stuck in queue, community got gutted, unsustainable as people are way less likely these days being stuck in 1/2h queues (In retail vanilla I did not mind 2h queues at all back then, it's a crazy idea to do every raidnight these days, another change you have no control over) which in theory means less players overall are playing there compared to then.

I'd say anywhere from above 1.5k till 4k would probably be the best for the largest amount of people. 1.5k might not be enough given the rate of quitting players will probably lie much higher than real vanilla back in the day, just as anything above 4 or 5k will maybe end up feeling too overcrowded.

[Vineri]

Legion servers hold very little players at once per zone, without the use of phasing and sharding.

They hold very little because of all the overhead present in "retail".

If Activision-Blizzard were to fully use their old code (like private servers), they could get 15k players simultaneously. EASY.

But they are using Legions code so they will manage a couple thousand per server, comfortably. The servers can realistically hold more, but not without heavy phasing and sharding.

Legions code is not CPU friendly, and there are going to be many, many lost cycles due to non-existent code, which is not removed and certainly not optimized.

Say I'm a liar? See the demo. Whatcha see is whatcha get.

Activision-Blizzard did mention that phasing would be implemented as they see fit (launch, but they left the door wide open, as they do) ... which, to me, means whenever there is more than a few dozen players in a zone or specific area expect phasing, ala Legions.

Edit: I am looking forward to classic, don't get me wrong. I dislike the implementation. I suppose it's for coincidental stable use with BFA. I don't buy into the anti-cheats. They could all be included in the original WoW client, all the same, just like how WoW Classic is moving to BattleNet. It's all a nice ad campaign.

I wouldn't be surprised if TBC was released eventually using either BFA or the latest xPAC client in 202X.

Far from the originals. /sigh

[perringaiden]

Here's my take on Servers.

* They will be overcrowded for the first 3 months, especially the starter zones, up to Barrens, Tirisfal, Westfall, Darkshore, Loch Modan.
* They will be empty after 6 months.
* Higher zones will be relatively populated.

Why?

1. Classic is HARD. Not "its a bit of a grind" but literally, die a lot, drink/eat a lot, corpse run a lot, frustrated with no drops a lot. Anyone who started on Cata onwards (9 years ago) will have an 80% burnout rate. People who started in BC/Wrath maybe 60%, Vanilla maybe 50%, Day Oners... well we know what's going to be in store. Getting to Level 20 will be where most people stop, if not before. Once you get out of the L20 bracket, you're more likely to push on through, spend days farming leather to get your L40 map, etc. and keep going.

2. Classic is "free". There are X million subscriptions out there and every one of them is thinking that Classic will be cool/fun/hardcore/awesome. Everyone is going to try it. You're going to have massively overcrowded servers on day one, which peter out because of the first point.

3. Classic was not designed for high caps. Many of us remember Burning Crusade's release day, where pre-sharding, you struggled to find your kill count, even with increased spawns. Some of us even remember Day One. I remember having to fight to kill plainstriders in the Barrens, because they would spawn and then immediately die. I got into the habit of spamming Fire Blast highly inefficiently just to tag mobs before everyone else. There was no sharding, no increased spawn rates, no multi-tagging etc. You got it, it went grey for everyone around you except your party. I was in a party of 3 with a rogue and a warrior, and all I did was search and tag and they killed the mobs.

So even though #nochanges is the mantra, this is what I think we need:

a. Low Server Count - Once the burnout happens, the actual population to my mind will be around the 500k - 1 million mark. That's only about 50-100 servers per region, taking into account play times etc. WoW Vanilla hit 1.5 million in the first quarter 2005, but it was the new kid on the block. Classic won't have the same staying power for many people because the world is far more 'entitled' and 'instant gratification' now.

b. Sharding of Starting Zones up to 20 - These zones should be intentionally packed, with less generous sharding than a Retail area, to make competition for mobs like it was in 2004, but not so much that 50 people stand around each spawn point of the dozen random ones in an area. By the time the numbers drop, sharding will be back to non existent if your cap is high. If you want #nochanges, you need the packing, but you don't want uber packing.

c. No city sharding - No-one is going to be in the cities for long periods in the early levelling.

d. 10-15k Server Caps - Even with 100 servers per region, 15k caps only account for 1.5 million simultaneous players in any region. That's going to still cause queues, just like it did back in the day. But when the numbers drop down, the servers will be will full/high with just the lasting players.

e. Character Transfers or Server Merges after 6 months - If the plan failed.

The goal is to handle the early bulge without leaving 600 decimated servers with low populations afterwards. Classic needs to have strong, populated servers because there isn't CRZ or LFD. There needs to be strong communities who have enough players that people can weed out who they do and don't like to play with and still have a good depth. Eventually, 5k caps would be easy to manage and keep things under control etc.

Ultimately it's Blizzard's choice, but I'd much prefer to have some #minorchanges to handle the flash in the pan startup bulge, which either go away or never engage 6 months on, than have a "calm bulge" and server genocide down the road.

[perringaiden]

which, to me, means whenever there is more than a few dozen players in a zone or specific area expect phasing, ala Legions.

The Classic team seem to want the game to be like Vanilla. That means you can see everyone in the zone with you. While I'm happy to bend that for the early zones, I'm expecting the "per shard" count of players to be much higher, using less shards. Modern sharding isn't bad for heavy zones, they intentionally underutilize it to give everyone more mobs to kill, more things to do more "you are the hero". Its the way of the modern world, but the Classic team is trying to recreate the old way. I can't remember where, but I do remember an interview where they said that competition for mobs is going to be encouraged, not avoided, when talking about sharding.

The L1-20 zones will need sharding early on, but if you tweak it so the barrens can hold 500 players at once, you'll get mild overcrowding without giving up the ability to work forward.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

But you bashing on Classic only shows how truly unexcited you are about the game you play... and how jealous it makes you that people can be so excited for a version of the game that focuses on every aspect of an MMORPG.

Wouldn't the opposite be true then? "Bashing Retail shows how truly unexcited you are about the game you play... and how jealous it makes you that people can be so excited... etc."
I think calling anyone jealous for enjoying a game you don't like is just silly and childish.

[vashe9]

That is not true in the slightest.

Mythic+ is just the same normal dungeon, same heroic dungeon, same Mythic dungeon... with a feew mechanics stolen from Diablo 3 and ARPG.

Raids? In 3 difficulties? With journals telling you everything about them before you even enter them? With telegraphing circles, arrows, warnings, etc? What a joke. The ONLY thing that makes them challenging is how much they throw at you at once... and they tweak the damage/health until it's just making the fight take longer, allowing for more mistakes.

That's not challenging... that's just idiotic.

World quests? lol really... World quests are no different than dailies used to be... they just rotate them more. The odd thing? You can go in.. tag a mob.. then hang out and let other people kill it. How fun is that? And they give you epics that can titanforge greater than mythic? lol No wonder you love it so much.

Warfronts? Oh.. you mean those things you collect azerite power in... little shopping malls full of grains of sand for your necklace.


You may not care about vanilla raids... but when they are relevant? They are awesome. The gear is scarce so it's valued more.

Scaling? Scaling dungeons? Why in the WORLD would I want to do the same dungeon,. over and over, that scales with the gear I get making it feel like I haven't actually progressed at ALL? I want to go into an instance and make the boss my bitch... because I became more powerful.

I don;t care for PvP myself.. but those that do would take vanilla PvP over current ANY day of the week.

I get you like modern WoW... and truly I am happy for you. But you bashing on Classic only shows how truly unexcited you are about the game you play... and how jealous it makes you that people can be so excited for a version of the game that focuses on every aspect of an MMORPG.

MM+ ARE challenging, affixes change every week... You don't even play retail, how can you say its not challenging ? I've been playing this game since Vanilla Beta too and I can say that BFA raids are a lot harder than classic raids... How is it different to run mm+ over and over again or run MC over and over again for years ? It's the same thing, thats the essence of mmorpg : doing the same things over and over again... In retail, the dungeons are replayable, in classic, after a while dungeons are just irrelevant and you have nothing to do outside raids...

Warfronts give ONE heroic level gear every 2 weeks and it's a mean to stuff rerolls, no one chains warfronts with a main ...

[oplawlz]

Like I said.. I;ve been on hosted pservers with 12,000 online at once... starting areas JAM packed with folks... it was a madhouse.. but the server held up fine... no lag, just pure unadulterated fun!

That's the opposite of fun. My enjoyment of vanilla was questing in largely empty zones and running into maybe 3 or 4 people. Makes you feel like the center of the zone doing important things rather than just another shmuck picking up poop.

[Vyox]

MM+ ARE challenging, affixes change every week... You don't even play retail, how can you say its not challenging ? I've been playing this game since Vanilla Beta too and I can say that BFA raids are a lot harder than classic raids... How is it different to run mm+ over and over again or run MC over and over again for years ? It's the same thing, thats the essence of mmorpg : doing the same things over and over again... In retail, the dungeons are replayable, in classic, after a while dungeons are just irrelevant and you have nothing to do outside raids...

Warfronts give ONE heroic level gear every 2 weeks and it's a mean to stuff rerolls, no one chains warfronts with a main ...

Dungeons are relevant always. You will be doing them for money because DM:E and Strat Live will always be good money (DM:E less after 1.9 because abundance of blues but righteous orbs always sell). You will also have alts that need to do attunements. In patch 1.7 you get class quests with gear that requires special challenges in Dungeons. You will be clearing DM: North every week maybe twice for your tribute buff. You also have patterns for potions like fire resist in LBRS for your alchemy alt. You will need Darkmoon Deck Heroism for Naxx so you will need the ace of Heroism from DM:N. Strat UD also has great pvp consumes if that is your bag. Librams and Abomination Stitches from dungeons are needed for class enchants, which you will have re-farm every time you get a new piece of gear.

[Xyrax]

Wouldn't the opposite be true then? "Bashing Retail shows how truly unexcited you are about the game you play... and how jealous it makes you that people can be so excited... etc."
I think calling anyone jealous for enjoying a game you don't like is just silly and childish.

I imagine it COULD be true.. but is it? We are classic players here on the classic forum. What exactly is he doing here crying about Classic on our forums in our threads? Do you see us posting over on retail side? I certainly don't, the game is dead to me, why would I even go there....

And that's the difference. You can always tell when people are unhappy because they go out of their way (and their circle) to find the people that are happy so they can try and share some of their misery. If @RoKPaNda is having so much fun in BFA and has so much to do, tell him to go play it instead of trolling classic forums. It would at least make his claims that live is so good somewhat believable...

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

I imagine it COULD be true.. but is it? We are classic players here on the classic forum. What exactly is he doing here crying about classic on our forums in our threads? Do you see us posting over on retail side? I certainly don't, the game is dead to me, why would I even go there....

I really hope you're joking. If not, yes there are tons of Classic only players that post in the Retail side, constantly bashing and insulting players just for enjoying it. Many go around saying people that play Retail are "retards", have zero taste, calling them addicts, etc. It's a constant shitfest.

[RoKPaNda]

That is not true in the slightest.

Mythic+ is just the same normal dungeon, same heroic dungeon, same Mythic dungeon... with a feew mechanics stolen from Diablo 3 and ARPG.

Raids? In 3 difficulties? With journals telling you everything about them before you even enter them? With telegraphing circles, arrows, warnings, etc? What a joke. The ONLY thing that makes them challenging is how much they throw at you at once... and they tweak the damage/health until it's just making the fight take longer, allowing for more mistakes.

That's not challenging... that's just idiotic.

World quests? lol really... World quests are no different than dailies used to be... they just rotate them more. The odd thing? You can go in.. tag a mob.. then hang out and let other people kill it. How fun is that? And they give you epics that can titanforge greater than mythic? lol No wonder you love it so much.

Warfronts? Oh.. you mean those things you collect azerite power in... little shopping malls full of grains of sand for your necklace.


You may not care about vanilla raids... but when they are relevant? They are awesome. The gear is scarce so it's valued more.

Scaling? Scaling dungeons? Why in the WORLD would I want to do the same dungeon,. over and over, that scales with the gear I get making it feel like I haven't actually progressed at ALL? I want to go into an instance and make the boss my bitch... because I became more powerful.

I don;t care for PvP myself.. but those that do would take vanilla PvP over current ANY day of the week.

I get you like modern WoW... and truly I am happy for you. But you bashing on Classic only shows how truly unexcited you are about the game you play... and how jealous it makes you that people can be so excited for a version of the game that focuses on every aspect of an MMORPG.

I'm not jealous of people that want to re-play a game from 15 years ago at all, I'm just realistic in my expectations for it. For all your criticisms of things in BFA being the same or your criticism of scaling, you're going to have a handful of dungeons to run that never change and raids with the simplest mechanics out of any time period in WoW that never change.

Also warfronts are the PvE things that reward inferior gear for casuals and a decent piece once per cycle. You're thinking of Islands. You can hate them and World Quests all you want, it's still more content for the average player than Vanilla had. I'm happy for you that you're exited for Classic, and maybe it'll be wildly popular after the initial rush but I don't have high hopes for that tbh.

I imagine it COULD be true.. but is it? We are classic players here on the classic forum. What exactly is he doing here crying about Classic on our forums in our threads? Do you see us posting over on retail side? I certainly don't, the game is dead to me, why would I even go there....

And that's the difference. You can always tell when people are unhappy because they go out of their way (and their circle) to find the people that are happy so they can try and share some of their misery. If @RoKPaNda is having so much fun in BFA and has so much to do, tell him to go play it instead of trolling classic forums. It would at least make his claims that live is so good somewhat believable...

If sharing my experiences with real Vanilla when it was current content is "whining" to you, maybe that doesn't say much for the state of the game at that time. Do you know how I browse MMO-Champion? You apparently go specifically to the classic forum, I look at what's currently being discussed through the tracker on the main page. The only thing I filter out is general OT. I don't go out of my way to post here, but when I see something relevant to my interests or experiences I'll participate. I suppose I've always thought of forums as being for discussion which includes things we don't like about whatever we're talking about. I've never thought of them as supposed to be an echo chamber in which to only discuss having identical views on everything.

Ironically I was a supporter of the idea of classic servers since at least Burning Crusade. When they put up the arena tournament realms and demonstrated that they were able to have two very different versions of WoW running at once. I argued with people that copy pasted the wall of no for as long as the wall of no existed. I disagreed with Blizzard when they said that having Vanilla servers wouldn't make sense. I wasn't surprised when they changed their minds and I was overjoyed. However I'm going to be realistic with my expectations for Classic servers. I'm going to talk about the things that I didn't enjoy about Vanilla and the things that I don't think new players will enjoy about Vanilla. The game can go back to being the way it was, but I don't believe the players will. I don't expect what little social interaction there was that created the sense of community that many people feel has been lost over the years to come back. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. You seem to think I want Classic to fail, and I don't, I'm just not betting on it being this absolute perfect return to some bygone perfect era that everyone is going to think is great.

Edit: Also, don't you have multiple monitors? I'm usually playing WoW while I'm posting here.

[Maudib]

Wouldn't the opposite be true then? "Bashing Retail shows how truly unexcited you are about the game you play... and how jealous it makes you that people can be so excited... etc."
I think calling anyone jealous for enjoying a game you don't like is just silly and childish.

I'm in a Classic forum? I'm excited about a game I am NOT playing.. yet.

When you come to a Classic forum to take a poo on their excitement... it's not silly or childish.. it's pathetic.

Like I said... I understand why you would be bored and find forums more entertaining. Nixxiom recently released a "try Azeroth f9or Free" results video... it completely shares how I feel about modern WoW. He did better than I did.. I logged in and bouyght 10 tokens for CLassic game time. The farme da couple mounts from Firelands... then logged out.

I have about $35 in Battle balance... and almost bought the game because it was on sale and just to have it in the collection... but before I clicked to finalize the purchase.. I realized... I really didn't want to buy the game. So I clicked off and never gave it another thought until now.

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MM+ ARE challenging, affixes change every week... You don't even play retail, how can you say its not challenging ? I've been playing this game since Vanilla Beta too and I can say that BFA raids are a lot harder than classic raids... How is it different to run mm+ over and over again or run MC over and over again for years ? It's the same thing, thats the essence of mmorpg : doing the same things over and over again... In retail, the dungeons are replayable, in classic, after a while dungeons are just irrelevant and you have nothing to do outside raids...

Warfronts give ONE heroic level gear every 2 weeks and it's a mean to stuff rerolls, no one chains warfronts with a main ...

And? People forget WoW used to be about things other than just dungeons and raids. Now it's a lobby game for ONLY those things. Enjoy all that challenging content.

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That's the opposite of fun. My enjoyment of vanilla was questing in largely empty zones and running into maybe 3 or 4 people. Makes you feel like the center of the zone doing important things rather than just another shmuck picking up poop.

Certainly is something to be said for that too. It'll be a little while before Classic is EVER like that regardless of server caps/sharding.

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I really hope you're joking. If not, yes there are tons of Classic only players that post in the Retail side, constantly bashing and insulting players just for enjoying it. Many go around saying people that play Retail are "retards", have zero taste, calling them addicts, etc. It's a constant shitfest.

Probably self hating retail players finding it better to troll their own than to play the game.

[Gaidax]

I'll probably get to 60 in classic with warlock for the sake of old times, especially because I still remember the optimal route and build, but I don't expect sticking around simply because it's a done thing for me.

As for server caps, I was participating in one of the most epic vanilla movies that culminated in a massive Alliance vs Horde battle and we crashed the server 10 seconds in with something like ~300 players in the zone.

IMO Blizz should be as authentic as it can including the caps. Later on when the thing inevitably evolves this can be rethought, even if it will actually be needed at that point.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

When you come to a Classic forum to take a poo on their excitement... it's not silly or childish.. it's pathetic.

You literally do the same exact thing but in the Retail forum. You don't see that as being hypocritical?

Probably self hating retail players finding it better to troll their own than to play the game.

You're not even trying to hide it.

[vsb]

d. 10-15k Server Caps - Even with 100 servers per region, 15k caps only account for 1.5 million simultaneous players in any region. That's going to still cause queues, just like it did back in the day. But when the numbers drop down, the servers will be will full/high with just the lasting players.

I think that you are confusing online cap with server population. A huge lot of players play infrequently. So 2k online cap will allow for 20-40k active players total. And 1.5 million simultaneous players: I don't think that WoW ever had that.

It'll be like this: 20 servers in the world. Each server will have 1-2k online. Each server will have 5-20k players total. So you're talking about 200-300k players. 100 servers is insane.

[Trend]

Nothing exciting there at all. But neither is Vanilla raiding. Still.. raiding is only a small part of Vanilla... it's ALL there is to retail.

You are always spouting such utter nonsense. A) You don't play BfA so how the hell do you know what there is for end-game? B) You're completely wrong.

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When you come to a Classic forum to take a poo on their excitement... it's not silly or childish.. it's pathetic.

As has already been pointed out, if anyone has a right to a complaint like this it is not you, Mr. Poo himself.