Instead of kicking our feet and throwing tantrums about this issue, let’s come up with constructive alternatives/improvements on layering. As it stands, layering was implemented to get rid of queue times and remove dynamic spawning (both issues that people have conveniently forgotten). Obviously what we’ve seen from the beta test isn’t great:
Obviously this creates an issue with black lotus, devilsaur, rare spawns, etc. and is everything against #nochanges. But, this is an opportunity to provide ideas and improvements on Layering because I firmly believe they won’t change it. I understand most of you will disregard this as a troll, #nochanges, etc. but I wanted to open the discussion for improvement. Thanks!
They’ll probably have another update to it for the next stress test to try to fix it. It’s beta, expect things like this.
Following their planned timeline, it’s not even going to be around anymore when most people are at a high enough level to try to do some of this stuff.
Honestly, I feel like Layering should just occur, and there should be no hopping. Allow players to choose what layer they start in so they can coordinate with their friends, and that’s it. I feel like that solves most issues? What do you think?
At Log In: People would be far more able to exploit layer hopping for farming, because they could log in, mine, log out, change layers, log in again and mine more.
At Character Creation: What happens when people have different friend groups that all choose different layers? They have to pick their favourite?
Ultimately there’s two key mechanics that could fix the problem. Firstly, allow people to change layers while in a group, to only the group leader’s layer, but require them to step into a rested zone to do so, so that they’re no-where near a rare elite or mining/herbing node when they do. And secondly, when they leave the group and re-enter a rested zone, they get returned to a default layer selected for them on character creation. That way they’re tied to a layer except when they group, and switching layers is enough of a hassle and time delay that it isn’t as effective for hopping.
Layering is a new technology (not sharding) that needs refinement and edge-case scenarios that need to be resolved. Venruki did a great job demonstrating this bug during testing and drew attention to how layer hopping can be abused.
It’s entirely possible that some contested objectives like Gurubashi Arena will get forced to be a single layer at all times, who knows. Or they may find a way to generalize the fix to work across all zones in the world.
Thank our testers and streamers that make these scenarios come to the top so they can be resolved.