How many players are expected to play on Nostalrius?

[secondary]

1.12.1 server usually can't handle as many players are later expansions. 2k players is already a good mark.
Depending on how fixes are done its more or less.

Hackfixes = less performance = less players
proper fixes = better performance = more players

An answer only the staff can give you.

[Ike]

1.12.1 server usually can't handle as many players are later expansions. 2k players is already a good mark.
Depending on how fixes are done its more or less.

Hackfixes = less performance = less players
proper fixes = better performance = more players

An answer only the staff can give you.

That's a pretty bad generalisation you're making. While it is true that so called hackfixes aren't "good", that doesn't mean however that they are bad for performance either. A hackfix is nothing more than a somewhat cheaty shortcut to the actual solution. They don't necessarily hit performance. Hell, I can even give you examples where hackfixes will yield better performance. You don't want to do hackfixes because they are hart to maintain and that's pretty much why they are "bad". Trust me on this one, I'm a (software) engineer!

The 2k player thing is also not entirely right. If you do it like this server will and implement serverside clustering (meaning each map gets its own server) you can support a gigantic amount of players. If you go even further and cluster single zones (like Blizzard does on retail) there is technically no limit to how many player you can handle (assuming an even spread among all zones). The thing is, however, that this doesn't come with your standard Mangos core and requires actual software engineering effort in order to accomplish. This is why most server can't handle these huge playerbases, because they lack the staff to implement something like this. Granted, many don't need to, since they don't hit that critical mass, but that's not the point.

So assuming their implementation of this is working, I don't think we will hit login queues any time soon. Maybe on launch if the hype is big enough, since everybody will be on the same two maps (Eastern Kingdoms an Kalimdor), but I don't think any time soon after that. Again, assuming they didn't screw it up, which we don't know as of yet, but their Videos about this matter are looking promising.