World of Warcraft: Classic

Wonder how long AQ gates will take to open this time around, and if it will be a single server, or multiple classic servers.

The multiple servers thing is an interesting question, since the player cap per server was lower in actual vanilla. And while it was fun seeing nost/elysium zones packed to the brim with 2-4x the # of players normally on a server at once in vanilla, it was also kind of a pain in the ass, since a lot of those re/spawn rates were designed for an artificially restricted player-base.

I'd imagine it would have to be multiple servers, no way they can handle the rush of Day 1 with just a single server.

The best thing ever would be if they have Classic achieves affect Bnet account and you can get Scarab Lord just by playing on a Classic server.

THE TEARS LULZ

I wonder if they will go progression-style and add the Burning Crusade after two years or whatever.

Yah, depending upon success continuing on w/ BC and WotLK could be in order. They've opened pandora's box here. What I'm really wondering is how they're gonna handle the patch cycle. When WoW launched in November of '04, it was 1.01 or something? I believe Vanilla ended at 1.12 or some such. So are we gonna follow the same patch cycle? Or stick w/ a single patch throughout? Those patches were pretty significant too. Lots of class adjustments, overhauls, etc.. The logistics of this have got to be a nightmare.

its not vanilla unless you have to walk back to your computer to click each flight path till you reach your final destination

The private servers that did progression generally just started the world at 112 and then unlocked content over time. So instead of going through all the balancing and ui ups and down, content was just released into the 112 pool

Palum said:

The best thing ever would be if they have Classic achieves affect Bnet account and you can get Scarab Lord just by playing on a Classic server.

THE TEARS LULZ

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Speaking as a Scarab Lord, I wouldn’t care if a few more joined the ranks. Wouldn’t be that many since it takes an entire raiding guild just to get one scepter at level 60.

Also, by the time event ran on Grizzly Hills, the script was so buggy that the gates opened by themselves 5 days early and Blizz had to manually close them. Having it fuck up during Classic launch is something they need to make sure doesn’t happen.

BoozeCube said:

Having em fuck up is the classic experience though. Need that zone to crash about 500 times.

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During one "zone crash" we were able to log back in but essentially were ghosts. We registered way too above or below on the z y axis so nothing agro'd us. Also it didn't recognize fatigue so a couple of us ran all the way to the maelstrom (which was of course a invisible wall). It still gave us credit for zones visited though so we managed to fill out the entire world map in that period including stuff that was 30-40 levels too high. Was one of the most fun glitches I've experienced.

The smart approach is a single server with sharding to control pop in zone. One issue with that is names. There will be some salt since Blizzard doesn’t do two names or legacy a la SWTOR.

I still say you roll out separate servers for each xpac there is demand for (realistically only through wotlk. Then you put in the final patch of that xpac (minus TBC and Wrath end expansion content nerf patches) then run them with gated release that resets every so often.

Caeden said:

The smart approach is a single server with sharding to control pop in zone. One issue with that is names. There will be some salt since Blizzard doesn’t do two names or legacy a la SWTOR.

I still say you roll out separate servers for each xpac there is demand for (realistically only through wotlk. Then you put in the final patch of that xpac (minus TBC and Wrath end expansion content nerf patches) then run them with gated release that resets every so often.

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Classic

Sharding

Worf.jpg

Get out of here you fraud

Palum said:

Classic

Sharding

Worf.jpg

Get out of here you fraud

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If you have a better way to solve the initial influx of people that doesn't end up with dead servers a month later, I'm listening. I think there should be several, but the inevitable swells in population should be moved to extra instances, no cross server though. If they want to make it playable with, let's say regular subscription, they don't want people to abandon it because they can't find Hogger.

I don't think launching anything but 1.12 is realistic, since it seems like they will be rewriting a good chunk of the server, they could end up redoing all the patches from scratch, which would be ridiculous. Better to just lock the zones if you want people to have some semblance of progress.

Zaphid said:

If you have a better way to solve the initial influx of people that doesn't end up with dead servers a month later, I'm listening.

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If you implement sharding or phasing on a vanilla server you won't have to worry about the initial influx of people, because nobody is going to play that shit.

WOW has been the number 3 game on twitch all afternoon. A bunch of streamers are doing project 60 where they try not to use a lot of modern convinces and raid the old 40 man raids with just 10 at level 60 for the challenge. Classic services are gonna be huge with most the top streamers playing it.

Pretty much all of the top streamers have already said they're going to play it and already working on making guilds for it even though it's so far away. However they are also top streamers so they have to go where the viewers want to see, but it'll be gigantic for like 2 weeks. I honestly believe there will easily be 2m+ people on vanilla servers at launch day at least.