Launch Day Question

[Thor79]

Hi Guys,
I wanted to ask a quick question about launch. So, I took off Tues-Friday from work, was hoping to really get a good head start. I'm going PvE, and not one of the "full" servers (Mankrik-PVE). Is it likely to be impossible to level on Monday, even on a smaller PvE server? What's your thoughts on how the week will go? By Tuesday if it's a shit show, I'm guessing I will just go back to work.

[ellieg]

Bfa launch was incredibly smooth for almost every server. This launch is a little dif tho. I'd expect maybe a shortish login q then maybe a server restart, but overall I think its gonna be fine. By Tuesday shld be real smooth

[Thor79]

@ellieg how do you think it will be for leveling bottlenecks and such? Lot of big crowds waiting for named mobs, everything dead?

[Ogarash]

Well since the servers will have phasing in the beginning, you really should have no large issues leveling, if the phasing works well enough. If it does, you should be very minimally inconvenienced by all the people, as each phase is capped to a workable amount of players. It's quite smart, if it works. They have their stress test data tho. We're hoping. But we don't know how many will show up for this...

[Thor79]

Thanks @Ogarash. It should be interesting, for sure. I'm guessing there will be a very large crowd for the first week - and once people figure out how hard leveling is in Vanilla (how long it takes, etc, you can't pull 5 mobs at once) there will be a drop off.

[babyback]

Queues won’t be the biggest issue if you’re on a smaller realm. It will be fighting over mobs and items. Mostly items like the pick axe in Durotar etc.

[ellieg]

@ellieg how do you think it will be for leveling bottlenecks and such? Lot of big crowds waiting for named mobs, everything dead?

There is some dynamic respawning enabled so I don't think most waits will be too bad. There will be a few bottlenecks I'm sure, you'll just have to decide if you can skip that quest. Make sure you group early on for " kill x number of mobs" quests so u can share the tags

[Thage]

Between the smooth launches they've been having lately (after the total clusterfuck that was WoD launch, Legion and BFA have had relatively smooth launches) and layering, you shouldn't have any trouble playing for the duration. Your biggest problem is going to be all the players crammed into your starting zone; even with layering there's going to be a lot of people in a relatively small space until things open up in the 5-10 zones.

[Azsune]

Based on the stress test I would say it won't be that bad. There were tons of people fighting for the same mobs but they were also spawning so fast that any red area was deadly. It did take awhile to get outside of the starting zone but with Layering and the boosted spawn rates and standing on mob spawn spots spamming right click it was doable. I will probably form a group with friends to tag mobs together. Being on a medium pop server should be about the same as a high pop without the queue times because of layering.

As long as its better than classic launch with constant DCs and relogging into queues with the odd server restart.

[Thor79]

Thanks for the answers, guys. It's helpful. I played in Vanilla, but not in beta / at launch. I came in around 1.12.

[Gorgodeus]

Well since the servers will have phasing in the beginning, you really should have no large issues leveling, if the phasing works well enough. If it does, you should be very minimally inconvenienced by all the people, as each phase is capped to a workable amount of players. It's quite smart, if it works. They have their stress test data tho. We're hoping. But we don't know how many will show up for this...

Each layer caps at 3000 players - the same amount that Vanilla servers could hold when full. It will still be a massive clusterfook.

[ZazuuPriest]

to be honest with the que times they are expecting its going to be a shit show unless their layering tech is off the charts good

[Aurabolt]

Each layer caps at 3000 players - the same amount that Vanilla servers could hold when full. It will still be a massive clusterfuck.

It will be until folks get out of the starting zones for sure. Probably for the first 30 days by my guess. More so given most will be rushing to get as far from Northshire Abbey, Valley of Trials, etc. as quickly as possible. First week's gonna be Hell in a Cell for sure.

[Hottage]

Well since the servers will have phasing in the beginning, you really should have no large issues leveling, if the phasing works well enough. If it does, you should be very minimally inconvenienced by all the people, as each phase is capped to a workable amount of players. It's quite smart, if it works. They have their stress test data tho. We're hoping. But we don't know how many will show up for this...

Phasing in Classic won't be the same as in retail. They dynamically split the retail population in high traffic areas on the fly, in Classic you're assigned to a shard/layer/whatever and you'll be locked into it until Phase 2 (normal party rules apply).

They already said that each layer should contain about a "classic servers" worth of players (3,000), so even if they are fairly evenly distributed over the 6 starting areas you're gonna be competing with ~500 people for those first few NPCs.

In reality it's likely to be far worse in the human and orc/troll starting locations because they are most popular.

[forrestgimp]

Queues won’t be the biggest issue if you’re on a smaller realm. It will be fighting over mobs and items. Mostly items like the pick axe in Durotar etc.

Lol, yep waiting in the cave for the respawn with 20 others all furiously clicking where it will spawn hoping to get it.

[Big Thanks]

@Thor79

Blizzard recently "fixed" the respawn rates of mobs to be Vanilla-like.
Yes, it seems like Vanilla had some kind of dynamic respawns depending on how many people were playing on the server.

On the first couple Stress Tests we DiDNT had this "fix"

But according to a youtuber...now is much easier to level up because of this "dynamic respawns" we now have (and didnt have before on stress tests)