Crossbreed

I suppose my two big main concerns are some of the common ones: 1. PuG vs Premade. It just entirely takes the fun out of BGs for both sides. Blizzlike or not, this needs to be entirely prevented. Much has been said already, so will leave it at that, and just add: Truly random BGs have always been, and still are, my most favorite aspect of WoW! (but Premade vs PUG is pure cancer) 2. Honor decay. Probably more controversial, but: I think if you don't (get to) participate on a certain week, your rank should be frozen and not decay. At least for everything under R11 or R12 or so. I suppose for most working people, myself included, it's very tough to invest enough time to rank up. And by ranking up, I don't mean R14, but more like.. R9 or so. It's a very slow journey, and even that requires me to make some changes in my RL schedule so I'd get a few weeks with some extra free time. I wouldn't mind too much - but usually, I know I have, say, a business trip or a holiday or whatever else coming up in x weeks from now and won't be able to play that week, losing so much hard earned progress for no real reason. That pretty much made me stop trying back on Nost.. why put in so much effort this week when I know next week much of it will be gone again and there's nothing I can realistically do about it.

The same way warriors deal with most solo PVE situations below level 60 of course; Weep silently on your 10 minute corpse run, then ragequit when your equipment breaks after another 3 failed attempts. I'll write a guidebook soon.

Wait, there's something wrong here. All the cool characters are around at least until Wotlk. This is not Blizzlike at all!! /salute & Thank you for your huge contribution to this project!

They're in epileptic shock and the first thing you do is take a video? Millenials...

Let's put it this way; I started leveling one character on Elysium when it launched (now level 20), and one shortly after Zeth'kur launched (now level 18). So both in the same level range; i.e. I've played both for a bit, but I'm not really invested in either of them more than into the other. At the moment, I'll definitely conitnue on Zeth'kur, no plan to go back to Elysium. Questing on ZK is so much better there. It's full - really full. I'd still consider most spots overpopulated. Heck, I'm still not done with the raptor head quest in the barrens on ZK because there simply are none around, and ever since starting out I've maybe found 10 copper nodes at best, maybe less. So it's definitely more than busy. However, its still all dandy in comparison to Elysium.. on Elysium, rarely have I ever completed any collection quest in under half an hour, many took significantly longer. Often, every single spawn point for every single mob, item or node is camped by 10 players, all of whom are machinegun-clicking and spamming macros to instant tag anything that spawns. It definitely wasn't fun. So at the moment, ZK is MUCH better imho. In the future? Who knows. ZK population could drop by 50% and it'd still not be underpopulated; if anything, it'd be closer to how actual retail servers were what with their lower cap. If it drops even significantly more? Then I'd assume devs would merge the servers, timelines are the same anyway.

I doubt its not the Nost core. Elysium had the same bug prior to the last Uldaman boss that Nost had as well. Seems unlikely to me two separate server (scripts) were bugged in the very same way at the very same place.

You're comparing the number of concurrent players active on a server at the same time (30-40k on Elysium realms) with the number of all active accounts (11million in WOTLK - not sure if these included accounts from asia, which weren't subscription based afaik). Anyway. I think when Nost shut down, they mentioned they had something like 150,000 active accounts. Elysium said they gained 150% more players, which would translate to something like 375k active accounts. This is HUGE, given Warlords of Draenor only had around 5 million subscribers at times - from the figures we know, before they stopped publishing them. So maybe even less subscribers afterwards. And you'd need to exclude a few more for accounts that are subsribed, but haven't logged in in some weeks, to make numbers comparable.

I'd call this "Schrodinger's Plan", just because it works and it doesn't work at the same time. The underlying issue is really simple: Too many people want to play at the asme time. Sure, you can try to be sneaky and cut the queue somehow (teamviewer), and it kind of works. But it still doesn't solve any of the issues on a bigger scale, as if everyone did that, we'd just be back to square one. Plus, leaving your computer up & running all day every day when you leave for work in the morning, just so you can remote login in the afternoon, kind of .. sucks. So sure, this tip kind of works for the individual player, but not as general advise to "the working population who want to play on Elysium"

Well, it's not wrong unfortunately. For me personally: I come home around 7pm. So far, I'm usually facing queues of roughly 10k when back from work, which takes around 5 hours or so (assuming no disconnects or anything else). So when I log on the very second I come back from work, I could effectively start playing at midnight - which of course isn't really realistic seeing the alarm clock is ringing at 6:15am again. Bottom line, with current queues I'm not really able to get a single moment of playtime on weekdays, unless I'm super lucky and just catch a server restart or something. This makes Nost/Elyisum's current numbers even more impressive, given likely most "normal" people can't really play at all. I do expect numbers will drop a fair bit after the initial rush - I think it would be best to open up a second server, but wich a shared name database (e.g. server 2 can't have any player names that are already taken on server 1, and vice versa). This would spread out current demand so much better, and when & if numbers drop, you could fairly easily merge the two.

Your call, but I wouldn't do it. I think this launch will be unprecedented in terms of players rushing onto the new server. As you said, we don't even know if it will be stable enough to handle these masses, or whether it may be down a lot in the first days. Second, even if its somewhat stable and you do plan to no-life it, there'll be tons of other players trying the same, so I'm not even sure if you could reliably get ahead and stay ahead of the other players. Third, it's not like Naxx is going to be released tomorrow; you will have a lot of time to run all of the content. So would consider whether its even really worth it aiming to be one of the first level 60s, especially if it means investing a ton of time during a stage of the server where it's probably least fun to play (lags, crowds etc). But that one's personal of course.

Great video! One showing the same for horde - undead in particular - would be pretty cool. There have been a few for alliance now, but none for horde as far as I know

Quoting pottu here from a thread about DM changes, Though I'm not quite sure if they mean A - High population -> disproportionally large number of farmers, meaning they need to put a halt to these farming methods, or B -High population -> servers can't take the load of everybody maxing out the instance limit per hour just to farm gold A) I couldn't really understand intuitively, B. would sound more reasonable, though if the high population actually meant they need to stray from the blizzlike-path, I do wonder if it's not just better to open up more servers. Maybe with the same naming policy (e.g. 2 servers, but you can't take a name that's already taken on the other), so they could be merged easily in case population ever drops. But then again, not sure if e.g. 2 servers with 6000 pop each tie up more resources than 1 server with 12k pop, so dunno if they have the manpower for that

Maybe they've finished their clustering tech by now? They've showcased the basics of this shortly before Nost shut down. Guess they would have already announced it it that was the case, but eh.. would still be cool

Maybe others can correct me, but I haven't heard of any event ever that was sanctioned as griefing on Nost?!

I can't find any infos about this nerf, where did you read this? If true - it sucks. Gold farmers have always been in WoW and they always will be. Don't nerf or alter gameplay because of them, that's like treating cancer by killing the patient. If you want to get rid of goldfarmers, improve your mechanisms to identify them, then ban them and revert any transactions they have made. Don't alter gameplay though. In terms of DM; I really, really enjoyed grinding up there with my mage from lvl 54 - 60, and the end of which I just had enough gold to buy my epic right at lvl 60. And even afterwards, DM:E and DM:N were my most visited farming spots by far. So yes nerfs would very, very clearly affect non-gold farmers as well. One of the major reasons for why I loved Nost was they stuck to vanilla gameplay as close as possible. Don't change paths now, please..