Classic Overcrowded Realm Update

[Queen of Hamsters]

new report eh? guess I will have to take your word on it being factual, cause you haven't linked shit.

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Yeah, you're right to not trust that statement.

1.7 million might seem realistic to someone from the good old "lol dead gaem"-crowd, but that crowd was always grossly underestimating the game, even when subs were revealed.

If they say 1.7, I'd instantly think triple that amount. But since I'm not taking their word for it, any number is needless. MAUs increasing/decreasing and the odd mention of increased sub count = all we get these days.

[justandulas]

Yeah, you're right to not trust that statement.

1.7 million might seem realistic to someone from the good old "lol dead gaem"-crowd, but that crowd was always grossly underestimating the game, even when subs were revealed.

If they say 1.7, I'd instantly think triple that amount. But since I'm not taking their word for it, any number is needless. MAUs increasing/decreasing and the odd mention of increased sub count = all we get these days.

We know from blizzards last MAU that wow is not the reason for their dips in MaU in 2019. They said wow was doing great financially and overwatch was the one that was the reason for the drop

[Sensa1]

I explained all this to you already I feel.

Limited servers is because of fear of player retention.
Limited character creation because without it everyone registers everywhere and no useful data is gained.
They are begging players to move because people are stubborn and even after informing them thousands of people will QQ about the queues on those realms despite being warned because no one ends up moving.

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If they did all this sooner there wouldn't be a lot of time for Blizzard to react and no time for guilds/friends to react to Blizzard reacting.

Now you have time to talk to your friends about maybe starting on the new server instead.

I basically agree with this...for Classic to succeed...because of no CRZ/ Cross realm LFD/LFR and 40 man raid size...it needs fairly strong server communities and Blizzard being conservative at the start is the best approach imho.

There's also the issue that if they increase the size of Herod (which they acknowledge they have the capacity to do) that even more will flock to it and when the inevitable population drops happens Herod's population will be reasonable but the other servers will become low population because they didn't have as many people to begin with or flock to the busier server (Herod).

The problem for Blizzard is that they really don't know what the drop off rate will be and when it will happen because Classic is a giant ongoing experiment. Blizzard isn't faultless in all this. They probably actually should have lowered the total capacity of the servers and limited name reservations to 1 (think about it - you never got to reserve your name before to begin with and you definitely didn't get to reserve names for Alts). If they were worried about nostalgia in this regard reserving 1 name still would have been good enough because most people that had alts gained 1 toon in Vanilla and if that name wasn't available they could use their second best known character name to potentially reconnect with friends. If you won't play Classic because you didn't get a specific name you probably weren't sticking around long anyway.

[StillMcfuu]

I don't want to be the bearer of bad news.... but you do realize that ff14 is outperforming BFA, right? I don't even play ff14, it isn't my style, but they just bragged last month after their big new expac dropped that they were top sub mmorpg

Performing as in performance of the game. ESO and Starwars play like shitty upgraded SNES games. You never mentioned FF14, but since you did, that plays like the programmers wrote all the code, then threw it away for code that a bunch of interns wrote.

I will also take FF14 sub numbers with a grain of salt because they tend to over report everything.

[joxur]

ESO and Starwars play like shitty upgraded SNES

Have you heard of a game called World of Warcraft? The mountains are gumdrops man.

[justandulas]

Performing as in performance of the game. ESO and Starwars play like shitty upgraded SNES games. You never mentioned FF14, but since you did, that plays like the programmers wrote all the code, then threw it away for code that a bunch of interns wrote.

I will also take FF14 sub numbers with a grain of salt because they tend to over report everything.

I do take ff14 subs with a grain of salt. I’ve said I’m not a player of ff14 but to dismiss them as nothing is ignorant as they are gaining popularity and it gets good reviews. /shrug not my cup of tea tho and that’s ok

Swtor has always ran poorly because they chose a poor game engine, but they have come a long way in terms of cleaning it up over the years.

Eso runs like a dream outside of cyrodiil, and to be fair, no mmo runs great with pvp the size and scope of cyrodiil. Wow doesn’t either, see big pvp clashes on the wow classic beta or in bfa for proof. Around 100 players fighting in a small area and wow starts to suffer too

Swtor definitely is not a threat to wow but eso and ff14 are popular and pretty well received

[leviathonlx]

I don't want to be the bearer of bad news.... but you do realize that ff14 is outperforming BFA, right? I don't even play ff14, it isn't my style, but they just bragged last month after their big new expac dropped that they were top sub mmorpg

Source for your bogus claim?

[Multitorix Davlen]

"Though Blizzard stopped providing subscriber numbers for World of Warcraft back in 2015, a new report has stated that the subscriber base currently stands at 1.7 million"

says a quote, doesnt cite the source. You get an F- on your report and imma have to send you to the principal's office for plagiarizing.

[justandulas]

Source for your bogus claim?

ff14 was bragging all over the internet about the sales of their recent expac and how many people bought it etc.

For the record, i don't play ff14 so i'm not gonna beat the drum for it or anything.

All i was doing was pointing out to the person who dismissed it as nothing, that, FF14 is probably the biggest threat WoW has faced in this generation (the 2010's).

It isn't for me though, tbh

[glowpipe]

Source for your bogus claim?

don't listen to his bullshit. he claims classic gonna have like 8 million people etc. He try so damn hard to make retail sound bad and classic like the next coming of the christ.

[Kallisto]

I don't want to be the bearer of bad news.... but you do realize that ff14 is outperforming BFA, right? I don't even play ff14, it isn't my style, but they just bragged last month after their big new expac dropped that they were top sub mmorpg

To be fair saying top sub could just be "top sub by review from x."

Square Enix doesn't know wow sub numbers. Blizzard doesn't know ffxiv. It was a marketing ploy nothing more.

[StillMcfuu]

Have you heard of a game called World of Warcraft? The mountains are gumdrops man.

Wow has it's issues, but the core game is solid. You press a button and things happen. It's not like ESO or SW where you press buttons and you wait a second for something to happen (not lag, actual just poor responsiveness).

[Marrilaife]

tell me about it, i started Stormscale EU as alliance, then Bronze Dragonflight, then Ghostlands as horde until it literally died and had like 3 max lvl characters online at rush hours, left game for 3 years, Bladefist until it started dying, 2 years, then Twisting Nether and f8ck it and no way EVER to even think of go to f8cking dead servers again
Ghostlands is ranked 'medium' and it literally had for weeks a max of 3 max lvl characters horde, u can't even think of go a dungeon not talking about raids, Ghostlands was amazing in wrath but i bet so was entire wow back then when we had 12 million sub with zero from china which had 5 million during TBC (because china banned wrath, u can even check how wrath zones look in china, heck death knight is renamed unhappy knight in china)

Yep, I remember back in wotlk they gave me (and everyone else) "free transfers" off Argent Dawn EU because it was full and often queued. Guess what, I dumped some alts on these "transfer servers" (Moonglade and Darkmoon Faire) and kept playing on AD, until I left to look for better raiding opportunities. Fast forward few years and I wanted to check out playing my old alts... holy hell, both Moonglade and Darkmoon Faire are deader than dead.

Oh yeah, Chamber of Aspects was another EU server where they tried to dump overpopulation from other servers. Guess what, it's dead too!

Which servers aren't dead? The ones that were full pop since basically TBC. Well not even that is guaranteed, since Sylvanas, Frostmane and Al'Akir used to be full and are semi dead now.

I'm also regretting letting myself be milked for hundreds of euro on transfers over the years until I got wiser and settled down on a server that is full and has raiding population (Argent Dawn didn't really cuz it's RP).

Now remember Classic has 40 man raids so you need even more people than you need on "retail" for it to work.

Imo best thing would be to leave many servers up but then aggressively merge them as the population drops because it always drops faster on low pop than high pop (people quit equally but then low pop migrates to high pop making low even lower but compensating for the ones who quit on high pop). Since they failed to do it on retail, they are expected to be equally or more negligent on Classic, because "Classic is about realm communities".

[ONCHEhap]

ESO has like 500k players and Wow have around 5 million. People are pulling numbers out of their asses and saying things they have no clue about.

I'm pretty sure ESO recently had server troubles because the population spiked to almost 2M concurent players in a very short period and the devs weren't expecting it.Led to horrible stuff such as several hours long queues and cyrodiil being unreachable. ESO has had several population spikes recently and seems to be growing still

[Thetruth1400]

ITS NOT HEALTHY FOR THE GAME. Gosh why people dont understand that.

Because what you're saying is opinion, not fact.

I can state examples of things that have been implemented that on paper show they've been bad for the games health, but if they've actually been the direct cause and not just correlation are debatable.

- CRZ. They came about to make the world feel more alive with people in them when there were very few on your particular realm in that area. Instead, you're sharded into the zone with other people who are also in the zone. The good; more people there to do things with. The bad; more competition for things like rares, herbs, ore, mobs, etc.
- LFG. Implemented to make group finding easier. The good; a heck of a lot easier to find people to group with. The bad; hard to make consistent connections in the game as you're being matched with people on dozens of realms instead of just yours, easily replaceable so people don't try to stick around and learn fights, instead just quitting and finding others, and a watered down level of content to compensate for all the negatives it brings.
- Overpowered catch up gear. This lowers player engagement as they know they can sub for a month, do the dungeons / raids 1 time and then unsub because they will be given catch up gear in the next patch that is easy to obtain and will put them up to a higher level than if they stuck around and farmed gear for the entire time.

All of those have clear examples in the sub numbers throughout time that have shown just how bad they are for the health of the game. The game is not healthy when its subs swing wildly month to month, patch to patch, expansion to expansion.


So looking at all those, your argument kind of loses its oomph. How layering more people onto a server, which again they admit they can do, and having those layers slowly drop to fewer and fewer layers as the server pop drops is a bad thing, I just don't get why you think that's bad. It won't increase queue times, in fact it lowers them as those people are layered. It won't have the negative effects that other "fixes" have had over time.

[Clozer]

Because what you're saying is opinion, not fact.

I can state examples of things that have been implemented that on paper show they've been bad for the games health, but if they've actually been the direct cause and not just correlation are debatable.

- CRZ. They came about to make the world feel more alive with people in them when there were very few on your particular realm in that area. Instead, you're sharded into the zone with other people who are also in the zone. The good; more people there to do things with. The bad; more competition for things like rares, herbs, ore, mobs, etc.
- LFG. Implemented to make group finding easier. The good; a heck of a lot easier to find people to group with. The bad; hard to make consistent connections in the game as you're being matched with people on dozens of realms instead of just yours, easily replaceable so people don't try to stick around and learn fights, instead just quitting and finding others, and a watered down level of content to compensate for all the negatives it brings.
- Overpowered catch up gear. This lowers player engagement as they know they can sub for a month, do the dungeons / raids 1 time and then unsub because they will be given catch up gear in the next patch that is easy to obtain and will put them up to a higher level than if they stuck around and farmed gear for the entire time.

All of those have clear examples in the sub numbers throughout time that have shown just how bad they are for the health of the game. The game is not healthy when its subs swing wildly month to month, patch to patch, expansion to expansion.


So looking at all those, your argument kind of loses its oomph. How layering more people onto a server, which again they admit they can do, and having those layers slowly drop to fewer and fewer layers as the server pop drops is a bad thing, I just don't get why you think that's bad. It won't increase queue times, in fact it lowers them as those people are layered. It won't have the negative effects that other "fixes" have had over time.

If you let all people freely on these realms they cant turn off layering. It's literally in the blue post.

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.

It's not like this is my opinion or something. This is fact.

[SiMka]

Nice try, blizzard.

I'd rather wait in a que every time for the first few months and 100% know that my server would be populated 1 year down the road than move to the consolation realm and be trapped on essentially a lower pop server after the rush dies down.

This is a YOU problem blizzard, fix it.

ESO, and every other MMO's out there do MEGAservers that have all the players in a SINGLE server.

Maybe you guys should invest in better tech? kk thanks for classic tho

You, sir, are an idiot. Ok, thanks, bye!

[Appelgren]

I wonder if everyone creating 3 characters each has something to do with it!? ������������

[Tiwack]

Concept of name reservation is just stupid to begin with - especially considering the needless strain on the servers by a lot characters that'll never be played.

[Lunavale]

especially considering the needless strain on the servers by a lot characters that'll never be played.

You can't be serious.