Where does it say 3 weeks. Jw
I think people have taken the dev water coolers and put a lot of trust and try to spin it positive. When even blizzard did say that the characters are not static to one layer.
The best they could offer was possibly staying on it per session, so if you were to relog and go back in their is a decent chance you won’t be back in the layer you previously we’re playing with.
Layering isn’t good for building communities, it’s only good because they won’t have to guess how many servers to launch with.
Yes I’ll still play, it just sucks that communities and those weird, “hey I remember this guy from a month ago in so and so.” moments won’t happen until 3-4 months in when phase 2 is implemented and they squish all the layers together.
That’s IF they squish layers together, sorry.
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Well they did say it was supposed to be unnoticeable or at least that’s their plan .
Being in the stress test,it feels like phasing. Nodes disappearing in front of me as I walk up to them, current mob fading out new mobs fading in, I’ve lost a few quest items.
On the plus side I phased/sharded/layered into the same camp of mobs a total of 4-5 times over 30-45 minutes and got a full chest to loot each time I whatever’d they want to call it.
This is the one thing I was hoping to actually experience and if its suppose to be as inconspicuous as possible its doing a poor job at it at this stage.
exploit! ![:wink:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
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This thread needs all the attention it can get! Layering, in its current iteration, is horrid and needs to be majorly re-tuned before launch.
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You know whats worse for communities? Keeping everyone separate then merging servers with no shared identity. We have to be realistic. We won’t get the perfect launch of a healthy pop on one server and no log in queues. Its not possible. The only options are sharding (no), letting people sit in 10 hour long queues (no), or merging servers. Merging servers is the best option, but it is still terrible for a community. What layering does is essentially give you the plus-side of merging servers after the hype dies down without completely killing server community. Everyone on these layered servers gets to interact in some way. Guilds will become known, people will become known, etc. And when the layers drop (‘servers’ merged), you don’t have clashing server identities… its still the same server.
There will be downsides to every option. In the end, I think this is the best option to deal with that rush for phase 1. Now, if they keep it past when its necessary, then we have a problem. Otherwise, it is realistically the best option we have.
The phasing, as we know it, is where buildings and such can appear, or not appear, based on some character stat, like what quest you were on.
It just looks like a bug, where the dragon is just respawning almost immediately after despawning, which is immediately after it attacks someone. We saw him get dazed even though the dragon did zero damage.
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Everyone will notice after 1 dc or reload even if they nail “layering” exactly as they want it.
Have a high chance of not seeing the same people, it can lead to people just grouping and leaving, being rude and selfish, ninja looting ect cause hey, ill just log out and back in for a new layer, phase 2 aint for 3 months so why not?
Not a good solution, but just shard 1-5 and cross fingers and hope for the best 5+, or dynamic respawns till lvl 15 or so
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it doesn’t work though, as I teleported layers while in combat. It currently functions the same as sharding.
While I can’t speak for the video, while I was playing the stress test in my time of leveling 1-5 I had the world phase layer(?) around me 5 times total. Each time I was engaged in combat with an enemy for a quest, about to kill it, when suddenly every mob and player around me vanished and then entirely different players as well as corpses phased layered into existence in front of me.
Each time it happened /1 would of course comment heavily on it. It was EXTREMELY jarring each time it happened, each time it was mid fight for me, and each time it took me from acceptably dense zone population to areas that were far more packed and camped.
It just flat out sucked.
I have nothing against layering BUT I personally think that it should only happen when you change zones, reload, or enter a loading screen to a different area as opposed to just happening whenever and wherever the system pleases. Layering currently seems to encompass the absolute worst parts of sharding/phasing/whatever name you want to call it.
Also, after getting off I got back on the stress test later on and sat near the mailbox in Razor Hill while typing up some forum posts and every so often, about 3 times total, I would glance over because the mailbox I was next to and all NPC’s and players in the area would vanish and then everything would re-populate. New players would pop in, the mailbox and npc’s would return, and the two wolf rider NPC’s that patrol from Razor Hill to the fork in the road between the troll village and orc/troll starting area would spawn right at the inn as if a fresh world had loaded in.
Its bad, its extremely bad in its current iteration. Its extremely intrusive, its very jarring and abrupt, it was absolutely the ONLY detractor from my play experience. The only negative thing I can say about Classic on the stress test was the Layering. Even the tiny bits of lag was acceptable to me just because of how populated it was, to be honest I was surprised it was as smooth as it was. The layering though, every time it happened I felt a bit of me die on the inside.
Its bad, its really bad, and I really hope that Blizzard takes this seriously. I have a lot of faith and hope in the Classic team, I really hope this does not pull a BFA and manage to make it to live in its current state.
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Ok what you were experiencing is not was layering is. You were phasing into different layers but that is not what layering will be. You will never phase ever in classic unless you get invited to a group thats on another layer. You will never see mobs phase. And you will only see other players phase in if they were invted to a group by someone on your layer.
Some of us are less optimistic.
Yeah, but if I say “phasing” people seem to get upset over it and claim that there is no phasing in Classic. So I just use the word everyone want’s to use.
Needless to say, I can only express what my experience was.
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It is an actual phasing. The dragon disappears as soon as I enter the “Caverns of Time” zone, and once I leave it, it reappears. Regardless of how much time I spend in that or that zone. Definitely phasing.
Plus, it makes not only buildings and such appear, but also NPCs. And, it is zone-specific - you can have one phase in this zone, another in that, usually depending on your progress on quests in certain zones.
It is, because it is broken.
Except that what I’ve shown on the video, is a demonstration of an actual phasing. Not a layering bug, or anything like that - an actual per-zone phasing. This is what phasing does - you appear in a different version of the zone, with different NPCs. Normally, this happens when you have progress in certain quests - as soon as you enter the zone with that quests, all NPCs disappear, and NPCs from your phase appear.
Here, this exact thing happens when I enter “Caverns of Time”. With the exception, that it actually sends me to an empty phase with no NPCs.
This is how Blizzard implemented it. So caves with quests for example are layered and force layering/sharding, not just joining parties. They spent countless man hours divvying up the map and making forced layer areas based on population in classic and fully expect to utilize it, just like live BFA servers utilize it.
This saves blizzard money as the load can easily be transferred between processors and significantly cuts costs - which is exactly why it is mandatory in classic and non-negotiable on their part. it’s not great for a vanilla experience, it’s quite the opposite actually. But it’s great for business. There are good and bad things that come with layering.
Not that it matters much, but phasing is different.
When you complete a chain of quests (in Icecrown, for example), the world changes. That means you cannot see a player who hasn’t completed the quests and is in the same spot of the world, no matter if he is in the same shard or group.
So report it then.
Vanilla did have issues with vanishing mobs. That looks like the dragon is bugged as it keeps resetting and pathing the same way.
Actually the next Stress Test is next week May 29…check the blue posters above …and everyone that was in the first Stress Test will be invited back to play again.
[quote=“Byucknah-agamaggan, post:50, topic:181128”]
I have nothing against layering BUT I personally think that it should only happen when you change zones
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I agree with this part.
If they insist on a layering or whatever they want to call it, just layer each zone or something, wont be as noticable
That’s exactly what the video is showing. CoT is the phased area that the player is stepping in/out of. Granted it’s a very small area, but how many others might exist?