The queue situation on Shazzrah has worsen over the last weeks and it wouldn’t be a suprise at all if this server gets locked very soon as well. They might as well unlock some of the “less full” servers as well if the general activity has decreased again.
But as we saw in the US, they kept servers locked after they removed layering again. So I assume it will be the same here and the “fullest full” servers like Firemaw probably will be locked for a very long time even after layers are gone.
I kind of feel like Blizzard is some lowcost company, because if “Nostalrius” had 150,000 active accounts, I don’t understand why Blizzard has a problem and has to lock servers, or add Layering. It’s stupid and it spoils the feel and experience of the WoW Classic, these things that ban Blizzard are the reasons we went to play the Classic and Blizzard took them away from us.
Well, the biggest difference is that Nostalrius was an international server, so the playerbase was spread over all timezones and the activity level was more or less the same over the day while in Classic we have regional servers where everyone is more or less in the same time zone. This results in a huge activity spike in the evening (everyone wants to raid at 8 ST on a Sunday), where usually performance issues and queues occur, while on an international server there is always peak time in some part of the world. You can’t compare that at all.
The concurrent user record was 15k, that’s still way more than the 6k we have without layers before queues start, but at that point there is simply a problem with the engine. Classic has been built on the retail engine, which hasn’t been optimized for as many players as possible in the same zone but for sharding etc, while those p-servers probably used the Classic engine and put a lot of effort in optimizing it for more concurrent users. I never played on those but I’ve read many reports that those servers also had (huge) performance issues sometimes but the avarage performance was probably better than in Classic.
But sometimes I think people want a different game. The community has always asked for an rerelease of Vanilla and begged Blizzard for #nochanges and recreate Classic as close as possible. In Vanilla the avarage server had a pop of 2k, not 10k+, with 2-3 raiding guilds and if someone got Sulfuras it was really special. It was also normal that building a group could take a lot of time (on the Blizzcon they even used the example that they don’t want a lfg-tool for Classic even if that means you have to spam 1h “LF1M - Healer” before you can go, as it has been a part of Vanilla and it was way more important in Vanilla to be in an active guild and to have a well sorted friend list you could ask if you wanted to do a dungeon.
But today big parts of the community would consider a server with 2k pop and 2-3 raiding guilds as “dead” even that is as close to Vanilla as it can be. Everyone is speaking on how important “community” is in Classic, but they are not talking about being in an active guild or having a well sorted friend list, “community” is for them to have a de facto lfg-tool by having such a huge server pop that filling up groups with random ppl via chat goes within minutes.
I mean the whole world and game was designed for a max pop of around 3k players and not 10k.
Additionally, we have also restricted character creation and transfers to the Zandalar Tribe realm. <== This one is going to make me stop playing wow. 16 days playtime left…
There one more thing i forgot to mention - servers would become less populated if somebody would just ban most of the bots. They spend their days literally 24/7 in ST and Strat. You know these groups - 3 mages, 1 druid, 1 priest. No guild, no talking, nothing. Run to Strat, farm it, port to UC, sell everything there, return to Strat. Night or day everyone see same names in these dungeons for weeks.
Chopping off these parasites would reduce population on servers, no ? And this is exactly what you COULD do and SHOULD do. It is just a friendly hint, in case nobody has any ideas “How do we lower the population on servers, hmmm ?”.
Cause right now situation looks ridiculous - servers are locked and layered because they are overpopulated… with bots. Good luck solving this puzzle.
OMFG how long do we have to wait until stupid dev. unlocks servers??!! Open Golemagg for new players!!! There isn’t so many players now like before a few months ago! Many ppl stop playing because Blizzard is unable to post any information regarding lock servers. Also many ppl now start work after covid so servers are not overloaded. So please for God unlock the servers!!
Open the servers and ban the bots. It is not that hard! Everything beside 60 content is diening and locking realms will not make people to transfer new expansion anyway.
UNLOCK Realms! Let us play with our friends !! I am waiting since 2 months, blizzard : hear your clients who pay money for services, it’s not a normal situation and it needs to be fixed asap
We most likely can’t expect or hope for the unlock of the servers before the release (and opening) of AQ. First of all Blizz will remove the layers while still keeping the servers locked (that is what they did in the US) and in Europe we still didn’t see the removal of layers (while in the US 4 realms got layered again).
The unlock won’t happen before AQ because they want to avoid even more technical problems caused by the amount of players who will want to go to Silithus and be part of the event.
It’s even more likely that all servers will be locked around the AQ event to prevent title snipers (I think it was the same in Vanilla).