Each game server only holds so many people at one time (I think 20,000 but I may be wrong). Blizzard spun up some additional servers a week before launch and after launch. A lot of players picked a particular game server when the list of servers was small and didn’t want to change, and would rather sit in a queue to start their level 1 than go to another server. I came in on launch night and saw a queue on the server I had reserved my character name on, so I switched to a new server and had no queue at first, then a 30 minute queue later in the evening, and no queue yesterday.
And I’m pretty sure they don’t have a clear model of when people play Classic WOW, because it was just released. They seem to have grossly underestimated demand for it for a long time, but also have no idea how many people are going to play for a week or month and then either unsubscribe or move back to retail.
EDIT: Having specific servers with static communities is one of the selling points of Classic WOW, so they can’t just redesign to have unlimited people on a realm or cross-realm grouping as they’d be removing a core feature of this version of the game.
I think this is the balancing act Blizzard (and by extension, all us players) is struggling with. I am sure they knew first-week demand was going to be extreme. But had they created 100 realms (servers), then three months from now, after all the simply-curious had their curiosity sated and left, you’d have a bunch of realms on which there are too few players- not from a technical perspective - but from a player satisfaction standpoint. You wouldn’t get enough people for end-game content, not enough people for more than a few guilds, not a healthy Auction House economy.
So, everyone predicted launch would be a mess, and it was…but it’s short-term. I’ll bet a 1000 Gold/Space Bucks/Credits that in 3-4 weeks time, with the same number of servers, login queues even at peak times will be < 10 minutes.
Today they increased the player cap on all the realms. This will relieve the queues outside the game, but increase them inside the game as players compete for limited resources. But I think most players will prefer that.
I’m not entirely sure. I think layering makes a complete copy of a zone, including mobs and resource nodes. And it tries to lock characters to a particular layer to maintain the appearance of a single world. But I know there are ways to change your layer, through grouping and instance hopping, which means some are going to manipulate things to maximize resource collection.
Once players spread out across more zones, everything will get better.
I’m wondering what people who never played Classic think of it. I remember finding it almost unplayable without addons. Mostly because I sucked. Still am not very good at finding my way around without quests on the map. Enjoying the things a lot of people found annoying, like a reason for food, taking care of the pet you worked so hard to get and having to think about ammo and managing your bag. Feels more real and immersive.
Gonna see if I can’t find me QuestHelper or whatever it was called.
Couldn’t they start off with extra servers (Atiesh 1 and Atiesh 2, and so on), and then merge them once the starting rush dies down? That would still provide continuity, just with (from any server’s point of view) an influx of new players at some point.
I use the AddOns: Questie (for in-map quest help), Mapster (for better maps), Bagnon (for treating all bags as one giant bag), Bartender (for easier management of action bars and shortcut keys), and Vendor Price (so the tooltip shows the vendor price).
Each server is a unique namespace for player and guild names. Combining servers always causes a lot of clashes. Also, each server develops a different culture, especially when there’s no cross-server interaction like in the current WoW. Mixing two small isolated communities doesn’t always work out well. Plus, there’s the whole “dying server” stress that inevitably happens before a server merge.
I don’t know the right way to handle the rush vs die-off, but there’s good arguments for any approach. I’d hope Blizzard has the smarts to do the best.
I’m on Hydraxian Waterlords. Ardulace (lock) or Alinoë (drood). It’s a small, homey server with zero queues. Except at launch minute, where it was really funny to see a queue extending all the way to the exit of that trogg dungeon in the dwarf starting zone to kill that one named. I took a couple screenshots I shall title “how hard are you willing to work for 450 XP ?”
Anyone managed to get a “dot duration remaining displayed” addon to work ? Neither Domino nor NeatPlates seem to be able to do it - everything else works fine except that.
“You think you do, but you don’t”. Also the slow death of retail since Cata. Blizzard has stopped being able to read their public for a while now.
I gotta admit, I was… intrigued early on to get to play an MMO with zero quest markers or hand holding at all, not even help actually finding the quest givers, some of which are hidden in nooks and crannies. It was fun for a couple of days to rely on reading quests and asking the chat where the hell Big Bad Evil Guy is.
Then a mate introduced me to Questie and it’s just so much healthier to my quest completion OCD.
Also, that Alliance-side druid Aqua form trek was as bullshit as advertised. I loved it, swam from Menethil harbour to the shores of Westfall with a 6-pack, a dream and a guild chat :).
Speaking of : having to have 8 people sign on to form a guild is bullshit. And no guild vault is soooo painful :).
But I really enjoy the exploration and the combat. Everything is big and slow, there are lots of hidden sights. Even with Questie, it feels really rewarding to find your own little corner of the realm away from the horde. It’s kinda weird how initially the mob tagging mechanism made me annoyed at other players for “stealing” my shit or barging in on MY spawns ; but now that I grok that it’s just a way to force lots of impromptu PUGs to form and disband all the time, I kinda like it.
Some dude paid me more as a tip for making 3 bags than I would have asked to sell him some I made from scratch. So that was nice. People seem very happy and friendly in general (although I had to cut the zone chat because, well, it’s an MMO zone chat ).
Symptoms of depression : heading to a mining node tucked away, and hearing “clink, clink, clink” as you reach it.
I’m pleasantly surprised my scantily clad elf druidette hasn’t yet received a single handout or indecent /tell. Maybe old gamers have evolved ?! Maybe they’ve finally internalized that every hot chick is a dude ?
Oh dear, there are certainly some Quality of Life improvements that I would not mind seeing reimplemented.
Guild banks and reagent banks being prime among them.
Strangely, I do not miss mounts. I love seeing everyone on foot, roaming around seeking Pugs for quests together. No more “spam LFG Dungeon until max level is achieved”.
Hiking up my Old Man Pants here but I remember when it took forever to get my level high enough and earn enough coin to purchase a slow ground mount. It was such a big accomplishment.
at some point the “ahh the good old days’ boy were they terrible” factor will kick in and it will get down to acceptable numbers
one thing is there’s been 6 or 7 years of bitching of how bad wow has become that everyone whos joined after WOLTK wants to see what was so great about it and they’ll go “umm yeah ok sure …” and go back to modern warcraft
My server (Mankrik) is still quite full most evenings, the annoying DDOS attacks of last weekend notwithstanding. I have seen the occasional queue, but nothing egregious since opening weekend.
It’s been really nostalgic for me to see places in-game again that were destroyed in Cataclysm or “retooled” in other expansions. Auberdine, Westfall, the Deadmines, Scarlet Monastery.
It’s becoming more commonplace to see people with mounts, though I’ve yet to see a 60 or anyone with an elite mount. (Doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but so far I haven’t seen it.) Seems like the majority of player aren’t really rushing. My toon is level 36 now, so beginning the mount money scramble.
My main is only 20, after ~40 hours of playing. I am obviously not rushing, and a fair amount has been spent just exploring, picking up flight points, and fishing. Oh, and 25 of the 40 hours spent running from one place to another, probably.
I keep running into things (like the hunter lodge in the SE corner of Loch Modan) I’d forgotten about a dozen or more years ago.
It’s interesting to see how popular this has been, contrary to Blizzard’s initial predictions. The ‘brand new’ rush has died down and think queues are mostly gone, but the servers, even the newer ones added at the last minute, continue to show ‘high’ population during prime time. The 15-year-old version of the game seems to have good staying power.
I’m struggling to care about it. Probably made the wrong choice I made the first time around: levelling a warrior (I ended up a rogue, then a hunter). iI took about 3 expansions before a warrior became not horrible.
Let’s start with money. My previous strategy of gathering herbs and ore fails on classic, and while I’ve just clicked past 1gold after 2 weeks of occasional play, a repair bill of 4s knocked me back under. All the ore and herbs are selling for buttons, because everyone is gathering them.
Then you learned a few skills and are broke again. Or another weapon.
But I’ve hit the next stalling point. Well, except for the miles and miles and miles runs from the graveyard because I die if I pull a second mob of the same level.
I’ve hit level 14. All my green gear I blew all my money on when I last had 67 silver to rub together is now pretty much useless. Swords of my level are 2g a pop. Never mind the trousers etc’s cost.
I might reroll a warlock and come back, but were those the killing machines I came across when I first levelled one (dot, dot, dot, dot, dot)?
Or just go back to the normal wow and level my last 3 of the 12 characters to 120, which is easier now I have flying…
I occasionally played with a character while at a friend’s house back in '04 - '05 but I don’t remember liking it too much. I think I got to level twenty, or whatever level the night elves go to attack the robot city in Dun Moroh. The game was too hard and the story was too complicated, but in hindsight that may have been because I was seven or eight years old.
But I seem to remember that I had no money troubles since I played as a thief. I would just go sneak around and steal coins from other players’ wallets, then buy a bunch of alcohol and walk around the city drunk, then get thrown in jail, then I would go play outside. But I think players hang out by the jail on purpose, too. Maybe I’m remembering things wrong.
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