tuck3r wrote:It seems every time that nostalrius reaches a new peak of players people ask for a 2nd server.
This is a very bad idea and would likely end up killing the original server and the new server created, currently nostalrius peaks at around 7.5k and dips down to around 3k at off hours.
If we made a 2nd server then nostalrius would peak at 3.75k and would dip down to 1.5k during off hours and some people time zones. The reason I play here and the reason that many others play here if because of the very large population, and how you can log on at any time and the server is always packed.
If you do not like playing on populated servers there are a lot of low population servers out there for you to play on.
My suggestion would be to put a queue in place when the server begins to get unstable, I dont know what that number is(10k would be my guess).
So they could just put a cap at 10k players online and then put people in a queue.
A 10-15 minute queue would be a lot better than 2 dead servers,
Some people also act like a queue would be the end of the world but my only guess is that these people never played high population servers in retail.
I played on tichondrius in BC and alot of the time it had a log in queue, ecspically during peak hours.
And last but not least GZ nostalrius on 8K playes online!! It is awesome to see the population continue to grow.
Even at 8k players, the server starts to get laggy and eventually crashes. Without some more optimizations or some hardware upgrades, 10k isn't happening. We're already at the limit, so something needs to change pretty soon.
Also, if you had played on a high population server on retail Vanilla WoW, you'd know that 10-15 minute queues aren't what people are worried about. In retail Vanilla, it wasn't uncommon to have 1-2 hour queues on the populated servers. I don't want to wind up having to wait hours before I can log in, and I don't think that that is an unreasonable way to feel on the matter. This game is already a pretty big time sink even without having to waste time waiting in queues, and queues like that can really add a lot of additional stress to the game. It gets pretty annoying when your whole guild has to delay a raid because the main tank is sitting in a queue. And when you're dealing with long queues, you wind up feeling penalized any time you have to log out for a bit. Say you wanna cook dinner or something, so you need to stop playing for 30 mins, it sucks balls because you wind up being locked out of the game for an extra hour or two on top of that. This causes people to either have to start neglecting crap they need to do in RL or to start relying on scripts and programs that keep their characters from afking out. Neither or those things are particularly great.
Another thing is that you only seemed to mention server instability. That isn't really the only problem that this huge population can cause. Trying to do quests or gather ores/herbs really sucks when the population is like this, especially in the lower level zones. There are just too many people trying to do the same thing at the same time. It's already a problem, and if the population gets much higher, I think the problem will become a deal breaker for a lot of people. Increasing spawn rates can only help so much before it starts to become a problem itself. There are already areas where mobs respawn on top of you faster than you can clear them.
I do understand that you like the way that things are now, and you're concerned that trying to change them too drastically could cause everything to come tumbling down. However, there is a growing issue, and telling people "if you don't like it, then leave" isn't really a good tactic to deal with it. A very best-case-result of your proposed solution (adding a queue and then ignoring the underlying problem) is that new people will stop joining Nostalrius, and everything else will remain the same. After all, adding a queue is basically the same as saying "sorry, dudes, Nostalrius is done growing." That would be all well and good for a while, but if things remain in a state of stagnation for too long, the place will start to wither and die.
Just as a hermit crab outgrows his shell and has to upgrade to a bigger one, Nostalrius' population is outgrowing the server, so we need to give it more room to continue growing. The only feasible way to do that is to add a new server. Simply splitting the current server into two would be a bad thing, and that's not the correct way to go about it. What would need to happen is that they make a new server and allow a limited number of people (maybe 2k max) to transfer over, to kickstart things. Then we'd have one high population realm and one low population realm--this was also a common phenomenon in retail WoW. Then, when people choose to roll new characters, they'll likely choose to roll them on the new server, since it's less populated and they can quest easier and whatnot. Essentially, some of the pressure would be relieved from the current server, without utterly decimating the population and causing too massive of a change, and there would be room for growth so that the influx of new players wouldn't be adding even more pressure.
