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Frott:
And this is just bullshit: if you normally play in the “off hours” wouldn’t it make sense to play on a server where your “peak hours” are most of the server’s peak hours? IE, play sorted by locale?You really come across at arguing both sides of the argument, with yourself.
No, that’s bullshit.
Having both coasts play on the same servers means that the population shifts and is kept uniform. Which means that the life cycle of each server for each day last more hours. The server is playable for more hours.
At the same time the population on each server is kept constant and doesn’t have high peaks and valleys. In WoW they had HUGE SERVER PROBLEMS because all the players on a server log ALL AT ONCE. Exactly because all the players on that server chose the same timezone.
This is why Blizzard needed to push more that 100 servers. Because all the servers filled up quickly instead of having a balanced population spread between the hours. If the servers weren’t matched with timezones the population during an evening would shift uniformly from the east coasters to the west coasters. On the same server.
The same server would hold a lot more players thanks to this uniform load because it wouldn’t have 3500 players logging ALL AT ONCE, to the leave en-masse three hours later, leaving the server in a “low” status (and hence the latest resort to mark the servers permanently “full”).
Everything I say was confirmed by Blizzard and all the problems they had. I’m sure you do not remember but Blizzard blatantly begged the players to log on servers flagged for different timezones from their own:
# When choosing your server for the first time, the server wizard will suggest a server with low load to improve your game-play experience. However, if you decide to pick your own server to play on, we suggest picking a server where the population is not high during peak hours (peak hours are 6pm through midnight in your local time zone).
Should I quote yourself again?
Frott:
wouldn’t it make sense to play on a server where your “peak hours” are most of the server’s peak hours? IE, play sorted by locale?
As you can see your idea isn’t Blizzard idea. They asked the players to go play on different timezones as they saw that the idea of localizing the servers had DISASTROUS consequences (should I remember you the situation of the servers in the first months? And should I remember how unbalanced they STILL are?).
Not only. Two weeks after launch they applied an EMERGENCY PATCH to REMOVE THE TIMEZONES from the UI.
Because they finally noticed, too late, how completely retarded were those ideas and how completely clueless they were about these problems.