I found a thread on FOH’s forums that reminded me my (futile) crusade against the localised and “timezoned” servers in WoW more than a year ago, with me in full berserk on any known forum. Today, my words are even more valid than how they were at that time.
This is what I replied today to that thread.
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Kolle:
That’s all sad and terrible, but the conspiracy part comes into play with server listings. Some of you have probably noticed that the realm select list isn’t exactly accurate. I noticed this many months ago when I was searching for a new home loaded with PvP and PvE endgame. I quickly realized that I couldn’t judge things by the realm select list. This was a painful lesson when I bothered getting about 40 levels on a character before bothering to do a census on both sides during primetime to actually see what the truth was. The ‘full’ listing was anything but right. I only thought to check because I found out how dead the lvl 60 BGs were.
I can explain this.
Before they introduced the “full” flag the “high”, “medium” and “low” values weren’t dependent on “fixed” numbers. For example an “high” server during the offpeak was equal to LESS players. This because, instead of using a fixed value, the flags were set on a percent value based on the overall pool of players between all the servers.
This means that there were always 1/3 of the servers flagged for each category, no matter of the time of the day and the current population (for example you’d find about the same number of “high” servers even if checking during the early morning, when you would expect all servers to be “low” or “medium” at best).
When the “full” flag was introduced nothing in the system changed. The “full” flag was just an added “manual” flag, set directly by Blizzard.
This means that a “full” server will be always shown as full even if there’s just one player loggeed in. But this also didn’t change the previous system. The system still wants 1/3 of the servers for EACH category. With the difference that it considers the “full” servers as “high”. In fact you can see that, at any time, there are only 2-3 servers marked as high, while all the other available “spots” in the category are taken by servers *permanently* marked as “full”.
The division between “high”, “medium” and “low” is still correct (while the order WITHIN each category was broken by Blizzard and still is). Instead the “full” servers are manually and permanently marked as full, no matter of the population.
Kolle:
The situation is this: Several PvP servers are listed as ‘full’ when in fact they are low or barely medium.
If you follow what I wrote you can easily understand why this happens. The “full” flag isn’t set by the log-in server as it happens for the other three flags (high, medium and low) but it’s instead set *manually* and remains *permanent*. This means that it will never change, no matter of the actual situation of the server.
Blizzard decided to do this because servers like Blackrock had insane peak times, focusing on just a few hours to then descend to low or medium for most of the day when they were even surpassed by more balanced servers. This had the result of players rolling on those servers expecting to have them moderately crowded when instead they had just insane peaks and off-peaks. So they decided to brand them permanently “full” and discourage the players to create characters no matter of the time of the day.
Ultimately this is again the direct result of the retarded decision to divide the servers in different timezones and localize them as much as possible. Creating and making critical the peaks and off-peaks of the population.
Making a point: I ranted *endlessly* for MONTHS against this during beta. We were discussing and criticizing that retarded decision to localize the servers in September 2004. Quoting Walt:
WoW’s population peaks and valleys will be worse than most other MMO’s out there.
Having a worldwide server – like EQ – means that population lows in Europe, East Coast, West Coast and Asia don’t coincide – the servers remain relatively populated as players log in and log off throughout their peak playing hours.
WoW won’t have that – when they are at off-peak, they will *really* be off peak, and their server populations will be very low.
And we were discussing the problems of the BGs and the cross-server idea back in early June 2004.
And quoting myself again months ago:
Most of the problems they had about load balance are design problems before techincal problems. That they BLATANTLY ignored. In the same way they are having now SERIOUS population and faction balance issues that will become cronic six month down the road.
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Right now the servers are starting to see the beginning of many problems that will become critical in the next months. In particular in the battlegrounds (but not only).There are simply not enough players and not enough balanced between the factions to support properly the battlegrounds and make them accessible and playable. While this can be tolerated on an high populate server, the possibilities to enjoy the PvP in a smaller server or during the off-peak are TINY. Tiny right now that the Battlegrounds are a novelty and everyone goes to check them. Now think to what happens six months down the road when pretty much everyone will be bored to tears to perma-catass an insane honor system that isn’t satisfying for anyone.
Why this belongs to this thread? Because it’s back about the role of the design into balancing BOTH the population between the servers AND between the factions. My simple point is: this is a relevant aspect of the game that CANNOT be ignored, it has the highest priority and you should start from there as you start to plan something. Surely not something you discover and figure out six months AFTER RELEASE.
Six months (and more) have passed. And I stand correct.