Go read Blizzard’s description of layering functionality. The details matter. Pay attention to them. You will learn that layering is quite different than sharding and phasing in a few very important ways. Yes, there are a few similarities to sharding - but the differences matter a great deal.
Stress tests were intended to test a number of things. Without question they were testing layering. They don’t need to say it for it to me true. Logic demands it. It is what testing is all about.
Different games. One big difference is that there wasn’t open world pvp. In classic, people are going to game layering system to avoid ganking, putting a button that allows an instant switch out of their layer makes a bad system worse.
On a pve server - who cares I guess.
I don’t care if the tech is working perfectly (it isn’t in beta).
If you can manipulate what layer you are in either by logging in and out or changing groups, it is a broken system.
Yelling doesn’t make it true.
If you are a non techie then just fess up because folks with a tech background will call you out and ask for proof / evidence.
IMO phasing is being used to describe 2 different actions.
We have the phasing that happens when you do the DK beginning quest.
We also have that word being used to describe how the players appear and disappear (“they phased out”).
“phasing” is overloaded so I try not to even use the term.
I see layering as continent wide sharding…the whole thing is one big shard so you should not see stuff appearing and disappearing as you play.
Now layering is similar to the original CRZ. With the orginal CRZ you could group with someone on a different realm and be ported to their realm…hence all that realm hopping we did back in X expansion to farm rares/pets/etc.
With classic you’ll be able to layer hop by grouping up to farm rares/resources/etc.
Good point
I don’t know how Guild Wars 2 does it, but in Guild Wars that only occurred in the cities while the rest of the world was instanced. It was most noticeable for holiday events, when the sheer number of cities and the number of people in each one was immense. The two big positives were being able to see where you were and being able to decide for yourself to switch, so long as there was room.
It wouldn’t work the same in WOW because the world isn’t instanced. We expect to randomly run across players, and hope to see the same people different days, different logins, because we’re on the same realm.
I do think more transparency would make some more accepting (both Retail and Classic), but it wouldn’t really solve the issues that I personally consider biggest.
One is that the larger realm population makes it harder to build connections over time, because every new day we log in, we have no control over which group of players we’ll wind up layered with. Instead of crossing paths with someone in Mulgore and again in the Barrens, we might not see them again because they wound up on another layer every other time we logged in. If we connected the first time, we might add each other as friends, but that requires grouping to get together even if we really are more into solo questing.
The other is that layers will mean more world resources being collected - more total gold accruing on the realm, more materials, more world drops. They’ve said it won’t last past the start of Stage 1 so we don’t get two Kazzaks, but that’s still long enough to have ore node x layers, herb node x layers, skinnables x layers, cloth off humans x layers. (The most touristy who don’t stick around long aren’t likely to collect much, but anyone who sticks around will be in an economy reaching stage 1 with everything x layers adding up.)
First off, there has to even be a second layer to even try that.
And it’s not similar to the original CRZ. It’s splitting populations rather than joining them, i think that’s a pretty huge, significant, difference
Guild Wars 2 prompts you no matter where you are.
Layers could be considered as different instances i feel like for this specific argument as you can still get moved between Layers.
I would really like a little more transparency on when i get moved or at least some kind of warning when it was going to happen.
As for the rest of your post i feel like they shouldn’t have bothered with Layering and just stuck with servers and merge them when they would have stopped using Layering if it was needed. Because that’s basically what is happening when Layering goes away (as how i understand it) the only difference is that the new server is considerably larger than Vanilla. I bet we would have had the game at the start of summer instead of the end ![:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:")
I wasn’t even addressing population. I was addressing the ability to switch in order to farm.
Each layer is like a virtual realm…it’s full to capacity. There is no splitting. If there weren’t layers then you’d have more realms.
You’ll probably have 3-5 layers per realm name.
They want lots and lots of new subs come August with the least amount of investment in hardware/cloud services.
Let’s say I accidentally drive a nail into my hand with a nail gun. Then I accidentally stick a knife in my other hand. Both are very different processes, after all the nail gun is nothing like a knife, but the end result is roughly the same, bleeding from a hole in my hand.
CRZ and layering are fundamentally different in implementation, but the result of both are similar. In the end, entire realm sized populations are shuffled, screwing with the formation of communities since you no longer have a consistent, persistent playerbase on your server.
speak for yourself.
I’ m not even gonna bother with classic if there’s no layering/sharding
No, you’re creating a scapegoat. I promise, someone in STV being in a different shard from you while you’re in Arathi isn’t exactly hurting your community, especially since it’s still treated as a single server.
No but an enchanter standing in town giving out free enchants and you can read it in chat but not see them can impact the community.
STV vs Arathi…yeah some example you gave
Yes but it ends in an identical result. That’s the point we’re to make to you. The internal reasons for the split might be different, but the result remains the identical.
Advocating your opinion and pushing it as some feasible fact doesn’t change the point people disagree or their reasoning for disagreeing. At this point you’re cherry-picking everyone else’s arguments to try to make yourself right.
Well the problem is that your arguments make absolutely zero sense. You’re creating problems that don’t exist
I have learned to hope for the best, but expect blizzard to do the worst. If they did not say that sharding is off the table, I fully expect it to be used.
Then prove it. You can’t say something and not provide proof. I’ve yet to see anything you’ve said that proves anything I, or anyone else has said that is wrong, other than the fact you trying to type in caps and grasp straws on these arguments that you’re trying to push as fact.