this is a tough one because i totally don’t want layering to exist or be something that can be abused; that said, i’d also prefer as few servers as possible.
EXAMPLE: SWTOR, one of the biggest (and certainly not the only) reason the game bombed so hard is that it succeeded so fast right out of the gate that they had ques in the hours and went from 12 servers, and added about 150 more with free server xfers. Problem was, no cross server pvp or pve so the entire game basically died due to population starvation.
I don’t want this to happen to wow classic once the initial surge calms down.
i think classic will have a much slower spawn rate than pservers too, where the devilsaur mafia became famous. pservers had upped the rate of respawns because it was one big server with like 10k people playing all at once.
Honestly it’s a catch 22 unless you are farming something specific and rare. Nothing says that if you log out and log back on you will always end up on a different layer, additionally there is no guarantee the same node won’t already be taken on the other layer. Furthermore the time you spend logging out and layer hopping could cause you to miss nodes that are up on your own layer. Your basically just taking a gamble with your time to ultimately probably yield a fairly similar result. Example would be like entering a zone and trying to calculate if starting clockwise are counterclockwise would be better. Exception to this would be like farming delvasaurs in un goro or rare spawns etc… hopefully layering will be removed before that gets too out of hand.
I was wondering how layering would affect the auction house, considering the limited amount of trade material at any given time, this was vital for balancing the auction house.
other solution: if the layer isn’t your assigned session layer, you can only loot quest objectives, so unless that lotus or skin is a quest objective, you wont be able to skin it/herb it. … or in the case of ores, rares and whatnot, mine it, loot it.
yeah layering is gonna mess everything up. should just have permanent assigned layers that the players choose from server selection. like stormrage blue, stormrage red, stormrage green. pick one. invite friends to make chars on yours.
I think, for limitation of at least layer jumping, assigning a primary layer that you can get resources from and denying all other layer resources, would be a decent solution.
I haven’t been keeping up with the latest news, but is layering just the word Actiblizz is using for Sharding? Sounds like I shouldn’t get my hopes up to play this game.
Blizzard will do what they see is best, i cant imagine they liked the idea of layering in the first place. A lot of the charm in vanilla was all the players around you, blizzard knows that.
layering is where the entire continent is one big shard, instead of area sharding or zone sharding. this means you can run all over kalimdor with another ungrouped player and still see them no matter how many zones you cross over to. it only changes when you take the boat to a different continent, like eastern kingdoms. also its session specific. it will remain on that layer till you relog or dc. and you may still get put back on the same layer.
it also makes it so if you have friends/family on same server but different layer, you can invite them to group but you cant do so if they are on another realm, so no cross realm grouping. they are also looking into making it so all members of the same guild, will always be on the same layer together
the server will have a shared character name database, so when all the layers merge at the end of phase 1, there wont be forced name changes, as the name you choose will be checked against the names of all the existing players on the various layers of that server.
Most servers aren’t even going to keep layering for very long. Its just a way for servers to expand their capacity for the initial rush, when there’s 50-100 players in a zone instead of 5000 it won’t be necessary.