I don't know about that really. I have not much experience from playing on other servers than my own but I sometimes play on my alliance alt (PvE ruleset ftw!) and there seems to be a very different experience there. Maybe I've just been lucky/unlucky but it seems like there are a bit more tanks available and little less healers.

Also, there are numerous of times when the LFG is all empty so I rather take the chances of battling the whole battlegroup for the few available tanks than simply have 0% chance of getting a group.

However, I think the technical difficulties/oddities will prevent blizzard from ever doing it. I also think they want everyone to play on an active enough server that there will be pugs around.

What does "superlinear" mean?

How does your note make sense?

a) If there are 1200 players, 600 will be positioned at the spot of AV battlemaster in Shat, if there are 3000, 1500 will be on the same freaking spot... i can hardly imagine server sends info to each player about _every_ other player's spot. The zones are highly nonuniform as well; you can go questing where you occasionally meet other players. And these are typical zones.

b) the total space doesn't expand when you add more players. The WoW world is pretty much fixed size, with occasional new small zone opened and very rarely new expansion.

From how I read his comment:

Superlinear means "faster than linear", rather than "extremely linear". So 3000 is more than 2x as expensive as 1500.

Your comment about (a) seems to agree with him. He said that for any point, if it has x% of the player base at one size player base, it will have x% of the player base at all sizes of player base, thus 600/1200 and 1500/3000. I'm not sure why you brought up (b) at all?

Sure it does. A certain percentage of players are going to be in instances, and more instances will be active with more players. Each additional copy of an instances is an expansion of the game world.

Yes, superlinear means greater than linear. It's a technical term, the opposite of sublinear.

So if you go from 1200/600 to 3000/1500, you're doubling the global population and the local population. The global population doesn't matter for server traffic, as you mentioned, but local population also doubles, and the game client really does have to have the position of every single person within draw distance. This will only be a fraction of the people online, but it will be the same fraction, on average, for each local area, meaning it scales exactly the same way. And that way is the square of the number of people, since each person needs info on each person within draw distance. The non-uniformity doesn't actually matter either. Each local draw-distance-sized neighborhood can expect to have the same ratio of population increase, so it scales in the same quadratic fashion, meaning the server traffic as a whole scales in the same quadratic fashion. The only exception is instances, which scale basically linearly since there's a population cap, but because they scale linearly, they are not the determining factor of server traffic; the dominant term is the largest population clusters (shatt battlemasters and OG/SW AHs), and everything else is background noise.

WoW population isn't like a liquid that will disburse itself to cover the maximum area (servers) in an even distribution. PvE to PvP transfers changed nothing, all it will ultimately do is lower the population of PvE servers. They don't entice people to join PvE servers, they make good players want to leave them, and trust me, they won't be going to Scilla or Zuluhed or one of those other shit hole servers.

Secondly, the original design of WoW had no PvE servers at all. People who could figure out that holding right-click to spin your character lobbied to have them put in even though it is still to this day nearly impossible for people who, dare I say, don't play the game correctly to accomplish anything end-game wise. Could people really click back and forth between their raid frames and the decurse button fast enough to kill Lucifron? They sure could spam the decursive button. Removal of PvE servers isn't a new or original concept, but I do feel it would raise the average skill level in WoW significantly as long as more checks and balances were put in to prevent blatant griefing. WoW just took the easy way out in this respect.

That said, 90% of the WoW population could quit the game tomorrow and the game would still more than pull a profit. I play on PvP servers because generally players of higher skill level play on them, not because I oppose the PvE ruleset. PvE to PvP xfers undermines this decision.

More food for thought: The most likely reason I've heard for opening the transfers is because they couldn't prevent people on PvE realms from rolling Deathknights on PvP servers which eliminates the "harder to level on a PvP server" argument almost entirely.

Because leveling up on PvP servers takes boatloads of skill, especially when you can get 3x experience and do it in a couple days /played. The argument may have held water at one point but, as Blizzard said, the game has changed. They cheapened the leveling game to the point where it's basically a formality, and that's the only argument against transfers that ever mattered.

That pretty much says everything that needs to be said about the validity of your ideas.

This thread sucks and it's done.