How the hell are we are supposed to have a community on a ruleset if everyone phases away on zone lines/boats/zepps. There’s supposed to be some sort of algorithm but why am I having a conversation with someone on a boat, then we zone and it’s a whole new group of people??
At least give us agency to choose a persistent layer from a list with a cooldown.
Give me something like this:
To be clear, this image is a mock-up made with AI. It’s not in the game.
Jokes on you this is a single player game. Grouping kills XP and slows down progression, dungeons are no longer worth doing, and ninja tagging and spamming are better.
If you were worried about a community i would suggest advocating for removal of mob tagging, and bad drop/repsawn rates.
Agreed with this post and would like to see someone on the team address it, because its a real problem. I’ve been playing with 1 friend regularly and we are getting layered away from eachother often. That on it’s own is bad but its making it hard to meet new people because the world does not feel persistent at all.
I can’t stand grouping up for a quest and being layered as soon as it disbands. That makes absolutely no sense considering the players that invited each other are on the same layer to begin with.
Secondly, running into a city and seeing everyone phase in and out is just… no. Absolutely no to that in MMOs.
Thirdly, players heavily abuse this system. Layer for instant respawns, layer to get away from PvP situations, layer to control farm spots. Get layered at the wrong time and you just die on HC (even though I don’t play HC I know this happens). The farm spots one I don’t know how to get around, people would try to do that anyway even with a solution but a lot of these other problems could easily be solved.
Other games solve this problem by giving players control over which shards they sign into, I don’t see a reason WoW can’t be the same. If a shard is full then sign into a different one?
Agreed. Automatic layering is bad right now. It can be fixed by allowing manual channel selection which is a technology that existed before WoW in games like Flyff and Maplestory.
5 minute channel change lockout after combat. 30 minute lockout after change.
It feels so bad to get invited to group and you dont even get layered with your friend.
For real. If a layer is full, that’s fine, my and my friends can say, hey swap to layer 20 because it’s not full.
Hell, enforce faction balance on the layers. I don’t care. The algorithm is crap, give the agency to the players and out of the hands of dumb computer code.
Now that I’m thinking about it I was in a group for an elite quest, and one guy got screwed because the group disbanded before he could loot the mob and also got killed from being layered. He whispered me about it and I helped him do it again. That kind of stuff just shouldn’t be happening though.
After 35 hours spent in Badlands trust me we need more layers. Getting my Shaman weapon was the most horrible mid levels experience I’ve ever been through.
Totally agree. I had the same thing happen: I was grouped up killing mobs with a few people, left the group, and instantly got moved to a different layer. Everyone just vanished. You can’t build any sense of community if the people around you disappear every time you leave a group or cross a zone line.
A few things that would help a lot:
Make layers “sticky.” After leaving a group, keep the player on that layer for at least a few minutes instead of moving them right away. Same for zone lines, boats, and zeppelins.
Your idea of choosing a layer with a cooldown is a good one. Even something simple like “stay on my current layer” or “join a friend’s layer” would solve most of this.
Plan to reduce layering after launch. In Classic 2019, layering was only meant to handle the launch rush and was phased out once populations settled. Forever should do the same, so the long-term community lives on a single shared world.
Layering makes sense for the launch crowds, but right now it’s working against exactly what makes Forever feel like an MMO.
I’ll agree with you on a couple of those. Dungeons not being worth running is a real problem; I’ve been asking for dungeon mob XP to come back up for a while. And bad drop rates and slow respawns definitely push people into fighting over mobs instead of grouping. Fixing those would help a lot, especially in crowded starting zones at launch.
But I don’t think removing tagging is the answer. Shared tags don’t create community; they just let everyone hit the same mob silently and move on. The quick “want to group for this?” is one of the few moments that makes strangers talk at all.
And none of that fixes the layering problem. Even if grouping were perfect, it doesn’t matter if the person you just grouped with vanishes the moment you leave the group or cross a zone line. Layering has to be fixed regardless of how tagging and XP are handled.
That I don’t mind as long it can’t be done during combat. Because it’s pretty tilting when you try wpvp and people vanish in your face. One the reason I detest retail, people just queue for bot dungeon to avoid dying
Edit: had to check with Google, I said bot dungeon but it’s called follower dungeon in retail, a tool oftenly used to escape a pvp death
This is a valid concern. The developers discussed this in the podcast last week. Hopefully it’s being resolved. Quite frustrating to invite someone to kill a rare mob and be layered away from the mob lol
→ retail