I'm just hoping Fairbanks starts to fill out now that Whitemane is 'full'. It will be really interesting to see how these server populations grow over the next few weeks and whether Blizz adds a few more in the meantime.

Whitemane was medium yesterday! This is going to get to be an authentic classic experience, with queue times that are just sublime.

I don't mind having to wait for queue times come Phase 2 because that just means that the world is full of people!

Can anyone think of gameplay implications besides the queue times? I doubt layering will be a cure-all for this. Rank 10-14 grinds will probably be exponentially more difficult.

I'm on Pagle and I'm surprised it filled up. Thought people would flock to Mankrik for the memes, but maybe everyone else made the same calculation.

Can I also say that the statement "I play on Pagle" sounds like I'm some shitty little gambling website?

Can anyone think of gameplay implications besides the queue times? I doubt layering will be a cure-all for this. Rank 10-14 grinds will probably be exponentially more difficult.

Meh, I'd say that a really low population at launch might be an issue just because finding 5 mans could be an issue, but I'm kinda confident that if some of the other servers end up being overpopulated that they'd allow free transfers. I'm sure some people who are more into the game than I am could talk at length about the classic economy, but there are economic ramifications with pop size. In smaller servers, single players can stand out a bit more, like the "go-to" leatherworker guy who has all the recipes or whatever, so maybe if you want to be THAT guy its good to be on the smaller pop server. But typically a big population server provides both high demand and supply, so shit isn't super expensive to buy and you can casually throw stuff on the AH and reliably get a sell.

If Herod actually had 100K people reserving names as you speculated, then Blizzard is probably already discussing how they're going to introduce free realm transfers before phase 2. Classic WoW is simply not playable with those kinds of populations. I believe Nost was regularly running with 10K simultaneous players and that was considered much higher than any realm in Vanilla had. They will need to force players into new realms.

I think everyone should understand that Blizzard can only do so much in anticipation of Classic WoW. The hype is insane around this game. The servers aren't even live yet and we've had tens of thousand of players discuss realms and communities and their dreams and aspirations, who they want or don't want to share realms with, etc.

I am fully expecting the possibility that one or two months in the populations can remain very high despite Blizzard's expectations that they would dwindle. At that point they would likely introduce the realm transfers to balance things out before removing layering. I think guilds should be aware of this possibility, and it may be best for all of us to not get too attached to our realms. ;-)

I don't mind having to wait for queue times come Phase 2 because that just means that the world is full of people!

If you think upwards of 100,000 people will be squished to one cohesive world by phase 2 you're... Wishfully thinking. I guess by your estimates you are anticipating only a 10% retention rate on the playerbase with a final squish of 10k players in one cohesive world (which would still be a massive population). Interesting. In this sense, your world wont be full, it will still be segmented in layers.

I don't mind having to wait for queue times come Phase 2 because that just means that the world is full of people!

If you think upwards of 100,000 people will be squished to one cohesive world by phase 2 you're... Wishfully thinking. I guess by your estimates you are anticipating only a 10% retention rate on the playerbase with a final squish of 10k players in one cohesive world (which would still be a massive population). Interesting.

"100,000 people" is complete speculation based on absolutely zero evidence.
But, I do expect there to be a significant player dropoff.

There is a number behind whatever the client or server considers 'low', 'medium', 'high', and 'full' populations. It's not like there is a manual button somebody had to push at Blizzard to say 'I guess we're full here, folks'. It's not like they had so many players sign up for names on day 1 that they accidentally let in more players than they wanted to. One thing we can say for certain is that the servers all had population caps set in advance.

Blizzard is expecting to be able to squish the server down to a single layer not long into the game. STF is right, there's no way the game designers set this up so they'll have 100,000 players on a server. That's unplayable.

"100,000 people" is complete speculation based on absolutely zero evidence.
But, I do expect there to be a significant player dropoff.

Its speculation based on some of the markers we're seeing with queue times and surveys. Its not accurate, but it is an estimate. What do you think a "full server" population is? What do you think the retention rate will be for the playerbase?

To be clear, I dont necessarily agree that there are 100k players per realm, but I think an estimate of 30-50k is pretty reasonable at this point. Even at this rate, squishing by phase two is a bit unrealistic.

"100,000 people" is complete speculation based on absolutely zero evidence.
But, I do expect there to be a significant player dropoff.

Its speculation based on some of the markers we're seeing with queue times and surveys. Its not accurate, but it is an estimate. What do you think a "full server" population is? What do you think the retention rate will be for the playerbase?

Where are these surveys or queues that indicate that 100k accounts signed up to play on Herod? I have no idea what a "full realm" population is, that's why I'm not speculating.
If I had to take a wild guess, I would say that I would be very surprised if more than 50% of the people who created a character day one of Phase 1 were still actively playing on day one of Phase 2. Considering that the subscription is all tied together with retail, we all know that people will try the game and quit.

If I had to take a wild guess, I would say that I would be very surprised if more than 50% of the people who created a character day one of Phase 1 were still actively playing on day one of Phase 2.

Okay, so youre speculating a 50% dropoff and how many players do you estimate are on each realm?

We don't have population numbers. All we have are names of realms, and vague ideas of population numbers described by 'low', 'medium', 'high', and 'full'. I'm curious how full are these servers as an aggregate?

Let's do some quick seat of the pants math.

I replaced the population descriptions with fractions just as a stand-in since we don't have real numbers. I'm just going to say low population is at 25% of capacity, medium is 50% capacity, high is 75% of capacity, and full is 100% capacity. Tight. What does that look like for NA realms?

Roughly speaking, we're about at 57% capacity spread across the 11 realms Blizzard set up. We don't know what the actual numbers are, but this is how much room is left in the realms they created.

Something like ~57% capacity across 11 realms the day after early name registration opened up. If we believe the Reddit polls are accurate, and most classic players haven't signed up yet and just aren't bothering with name registration, then we can expect this number to grow a lot.

I think we're gonna see some new realms open up before launch day.

If I had to take a wild guess, I would say that I would be very surprised if more than 50% of the people who created a character day one of Phase 1 were still actively playing on day one of Phase 2.

Okay, so youre speculating a 50% dropoff and how many players do you estimate are on each realm?

Mate, like I stated several times before, I have no idea about how many players are currently on each realm. For anyone to try and make a claim otherwise is complete speculation generally stated in a negative context.

My first post was me just simply stating that I don't mind that the realm I'm playing on has a high population because I enjoy playing in a populated world.

Mate, like I stated several times before, I have no idea about how many players are currently on each realm. For anyone to try and make a claim otherwise is complete speculation generally stated in a negative context.

My first post was me just simply stating that I don't mind that the realm I'm playing on has a high population because I enjoy playing in a populated world.

Right. So have you followed the beta or participated in any of the stress tests? The layers actually make the world feel a whole lot smaller because they dont auto fill or balance. So lets assume you are on a full pop server. And lets assume that that server has 50k users. That will be about 17 layers... However, because of how layering seemingly functions, there will be additional layers that arent naturally squishing, and layers themselves wont operate in the manner that Blizz has insinuated... So assuming you are not playing at peak times, your world will NOT feel full. Your world will feel incredibly empty. As it did during the beta. As it did during the later stress tests. As it did during the previous stress test last week... My point is that a "full" realm that has an extended period using layers (which is realistic if we are anticipating 30-100k players per realm), may feel a whole lot more empty, than a low pop realm that has fewer layers or potentially has layering removed and is operating with 6-10k players in one cohesive world.

Mate, like I stated several times before, I have no idea about how many players are currently on each realm. For anyone to try and make a claim otherwise is complete speculation generally stated in a negative context.

My first post was me just simply stating that I don't mind that the realm I'm playing on has a high population because I enjoy playing in a populated world.

Right. So have you followed the beta or participated in any of the stress tests? The layers actually make the world feel a whole lot smaller because they dont auto fill or balance. So lets assume you are on a full pop server. And lets assume that that server has 50k users. That will be about 17 layers... However, because of how layering seemingly functions, there will be additional layers that arent naturally squishing, and layers themselves wont operate in the manner that Blizz has insinuated... So assuming you are not playing at peak times, your world will NOT feel full. Your world will feel incredibly empty. As it did during the beta. As it did during the later stress tests. As it did during the previous stress test last week... My point is that a "full" realm that has an extended period using layers (which is realistic if we are anticipating 30-100k players per realm), may feel a whole lot more empty, than a low pop realm that has fewer layers or potentially has layering removed and is operating with 6-10k players in one cohesive world.

Which is also why in my first post I said, "..come Phase 2". Where Blizzard stated that layering will absolutely not be happening. :biggrin:

Which is also why in my first post I said, "..come Phase 2". Where Blizzard stated that layering will absolutely not be happening. :biggrin:

Which is why this conversation is important :biggrin:. Because if you assume a 50% population loss, and you also estimate as few as 30k players per realm, they wont be able to squish that to one cohesive layer at 15k players by phase 2. :biggrin: :biggrin: :biggrin:

Which is also why in my first post I said, "..come Phase 2". Where Blizzard stated that layering will absolutely not be happening. :biggrin:

Which is why this conversation is important :biggrin:. Because if you assume a 50% population loss, and you also estimate as few as 30k players per realm, they wont be able to squish that to one cohesive layer at 15k players by phase 2. :biggrin: :biggrin: :biggrin:

Literally my first post word for word:
I don't mind having to wait for queue times come Phase 2 because that just means that the world is full of people!

If 15k people want to play on the same realm come Phase 2, then I guess we will just have some queue times eh?