That’s what layering is… There is Illidan layer A,B,C,D,E and they all play as their own servers, but you can CR between them and as the pop dies down Layer E will go away then Layer D and you’ll be left with Illidan A with no need for any manual merges.
i think the idea here is his suggestion would make it so you can’t phase between the 3 layers/miniservers while playing on them, this would maintain the community aspect and disable layer exploits, there would be only one phase shift/merge and it would happen when the miniservers are ready for it
Idk much about programming but would it be too hard to make it impossible for people to loot/mine/herb the same node in a different layer? like putting a cooldown on a specific node/location equivalent to the respawn rate of said resource?
For pvp i’d just make the characters that already engaged in pvp unable to phase to a different layer until they reach a capital city or something.
I think this might be too complicated. That would require giving each and every node their own item ID so when a player attempts to interact with that node it can query the database and see if that player has already looted it. This would also have to coincide with each nodes respawn rates. It would be a lot of work to add this kind of functionality to gathering nodes and create a lot of problems because bugs and glitches happen when trying to add a new system to an already existing one.
I don’t see why they can’t add a debuff to the player until they leave a zone and at least 5 minutes have past. That debuff would prevent gathering nodes and killing rare mobs. You can still kill normal mobs and skin them, no herbalism or mining or looting chests. If the player doesn’t leave a zone but 15 minutes past, the debuff is removed. Simple fix for the layering abuse.
This is actually worse than layering. Layer hopping isn’t going to be that big of an issue for resource farming. The problem is having the vanilla player base spread across multiple realms/layers. The perk of layering is that layers can be removed faster than servers can merged.
Under your idea, servers will need to decline to around 1k active players before being merged. With layering, once each layer drops to around 2k, they can drop down to 2 layers.
Think of it this way. Under your idea, we have 3 servers Black Lotus can spawn on, giving players 3 times as much BL to farm. Layering has the same problem, but can get rid of one of those spawns quicker.
Yes, to prevent abuse. If you REALLY want on that layer, you can get on, but deal with the debuff. That way someone doesn’t camp the Guribashi (sp?) Chest or Black Lotus nodes, etc. If you make it easy and friendly to swap layers anytime it invites abuse.
server merges are worse down the track, what if some guilds have the same name? what if players have the same name, what happens to the economy when 3 collide, what about the server culture and communities when they get clashed together. the implications of server merges are worse than layering imo as the server communities and culture will spread through the layers.
i didn’t necessarily agree with the suggestion i was just explaining it, i think it would be best if they didn’t include layering at all, to counter that however, they could lock guild name/character name spots between both layers, and although economies/communities/cultures may collide, it would happen early on in the server’s lifespan before they get the chance to develop, but again, i think the best answer is to just have que times, it’s not a big deal and they’ll go down eventually
Layering isn’t only about tourists. Everyone is gunna be on at the same time when servers come up. The playerbase will naturally spread out and players will not all be playing at the same time. 3k caps doesn’t mean there can only be 3k characters created. Once the launch rush is over layering will be minimal or gone. Give it 2-3 weeks tops imo
que times is the worst solution. especially for the people who only have 3-4 hours a night to play and it’s spent in a queue… a scuffed launch is better than a queue simulator.
i disagree, layering takes away from the integrity of the game and goes against the classic design philosophy, they would skip waiting to play an inferior version of the game, people have already grown accustomed to login issues at launch for online games so i don’t think it’s a big deal
i don’t think it will be a dead wasteland, i think it would just have increased que times for around that amount of time, and then those would go away, instead of damaging the quality of the game
You must be pretty pessimistic about the popularity of Classic then. Many of us expect 2-3 million players at launch. If they only open 30 servers, that’s queues of 97,000 people.
i don’t think that many people will end up leaving to the point where they’d have to implement layering, if the players are dedicated to the point where they’d stick around through phase 1 then they’re probably not tourists and are worth buying servers for as paying customers
![:thinking:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/thinking.png?v=6" ":thinking:")