Examples of Layering exploits and problems

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

Many thanks to Venruki, Monkeynews, Staysafe, Asmongold, Cdew, Sodapoppin, Ayle, Frostadamus, TipsOut and other streamers who have recorded the significant exploits and problems that result from layering. Also thanks to everyone who has contributed the below links to this post.

If you have any clips to share, please let me know and I will add them!

Thanks in advance to Blizzard for their consideration.

Layering exploits and problems:
[Various Streamers]

Gurubashi Chest exploit:
[Venruki]

Mining node exploit:
[Monkeynews]

Rares de-spawn (or spawn) if you group up with players ON THE SAME LAYER:

Layer hopping exploits:

Ruins World PvP - enemy players and players from your own faction can be phased in and out at will. You can also use this to your advantage to escape PvP.

Ruins immersion/community (even during questing) - Layering creates UN-Vanilla gameplay and separates players from each other by making players appear and disappear around you between layers - even without grouping with other players). The world loses integrity. It’s frustrating to simply group up with a friend. You could end up in a boring, dead layer.

Controversial Community Reaction:

Staysafe:

Kargoz (Good Morning Azeroth):

Frostadamus:

Tipsout:

Countdown To Classic:

Kevin Jordan (a Vanilla WoW game designer):

WoW Classic Dev Team,

I’ve tried to make a good argument to keep any type of sharding out of WoW Classic since it goes against Blizzard’s own Mission Statement and puts (Vanilla) gameplay second. It’s a modern solution that harms authentic Vanilla gameplay.

You worked hard to address the shortcomings of sharding - and we thank you for that!

However, while layering (i.e., continent-wide sharding) reduces the frequency of sharding, it creates economy-breaking exploits, diminishes immersion and community and breaks World PvP in Classic WoW.

Perhaps the most serious problems caused by layering are around the economy and World PvP. There is likely to be significant gold-farming, which will result from high-level AOE farming (e.g., mages) and guilds continuously hopping from layer to layer to farm resource nodes and rare mobs. And anyone on a PvP server who wants to escape PvP can simply hop to another layer at will.

114 Likes
2

Just curious

With 2 months until release from a development standpoint why/how would they change this for you?

3 Likes
3

Haha, holy crap at that first video :joy:

3 Likes
4

Any zone that has a unique event or boss or anything that is unique to the zone should have an exception to layering. Whether that be that specific area shouldn’t be layered or the entire zone. I watched the venruki one and that’s pretty game breaking. There are also videos of people losing rare spawns due to layering, that shouldn’t happen. I mean imagine going for kazzak or Azuregos and you run into the zone just to find out you’re in the wrong layer…

6 Likes
5

I’ve seen people suggest to keep layering to low levels. 1-5 or even a little higher.

The launch day is going to be hell, but its gonna be neat to see so many hyped to play.

3 Likes
6

Because this is game breaking and not vanilla.

39 Likes
7

I dont disagree with you, its an exploit and needs to be addressed.

What do you propose?

8

So you just want sharding?

The difference between layering and sharding was that layering is azeroth wide, while sharding is zone wide.

9
5 Likes
10

If you manually trigger a layer hop, what if you were blocked from looting anything for a minute or two?

11

so, crash the server?

12

Time to farm Black Lotus!

10 Likes
13

with the technology they have today it won’t crash a server. If Nostalrius, LB, ND, etc could all do it then bliz for sure can being an actual large company.

On the pservers there were HUGE battles over azuregos and kazzak I’m talking a few hundred people. If that didn’t crash the server we’ll be fine.

Also there are several videos of the AQ opening event on pservers and all the vidoes of end of Nost. All those people and the server was laggy but didn’t crash. I’m sure bliz can handle it

3 Likes
14

Only thing Blizzard seems to care about is leveraging classic news and content release information cause thats basically all they have to present for the rest of 2019.

100+ day closed beta, people exploiting and abusing layering beyond belief and now all of phase 1 is now to be layered. Blizzard is the company to give an inch and take a mile nowadays so i’d be hesitant to believe layering isn’t here to stay considering how much “effort” they are putting into testing layering for 100 days.

There were and still are so many bugs in the closed beta, it makes you wonder what the actual @#$$ they have been working on.

7 Likes
15

Who knows, at this point. Communication is not forthcoming, so people are getting more and more shrill, it seems. But something needs to be done. Here’s hoping the next two months are about fixing things likes this.

4 Likes
16

Guys, this is exactly why the beta is a thing; to make sure these kind of things are working correctly. Of course a new feature like layering will have bugs! We just gotta make sure said bugs are stomped before launch happens. Say what you want, but Blizzard is pretty good about fixing bugs, so this will likely be fixed before launch happens.

17

I never stated my desires, I just dropped an idea. I’ve seen both exploited, and sharding seems to be worst of the two.

Currently in beta as seen, people are intentionally manipulating layering to take something from that layer (nodes or that trinket). We’ve also seen it remove a group from killing a rare, which folks assume that was a bug.

While we definitely need a way to unchoke the beginner zones, I think the priority concern is how we are seeing streamers manipulate it, which, if left too long on release, could make things sticky.

18

We need some type of loot/rare/node lock out when a player changes layer. You best believe this will be exploited repeatedly

19

Remove it completely.

It’s a terrible feature that wasn’t in vanilla and has no place in Classic.

20 Likes
20

it’s even worse in BFA. You fight a rare mob and get it down to 5%, and then you get moved to a different shard. The mob is usually still there, but now it has full health.

This can happen a few times before you can actually kill it.

3 Likes