would there be any downside to this?
once you xfer layers, put a debuff that only the player can see, (the cd time is up for discussion obv), could be 2mins, 5mins, or a system that starts off small but stacks up big.
another idea is to add a layer module to the minimap that lets the player see all available layers, population of each etc, and also a section that shows the layering xfer cooldown time.
even with a 5 minute layer hopping cooldown, you could still fish up and down the coast of southern STV and get tons of stuff from the fishing nodes for hours and hours on in if noones there to compete with you for them, which will likely be the case if you powerlevel fishing while everyone else is levelling other stuff
and then you’d end up with tons and tons of bolts of runecloth and rugged leather and lvl 35-40 green items and 12-14 slot bags and stonescale eels
but the economy could live with fishing node abuse
theres also the coast of northern tanaris to worry about; same stuff there
Can only be done in a capital city or at a summoning stone.
Tiered CD that starts AFTER you return to your home shard. Starts at 2 (for that OOPS invite, bad group, etc), then 5, 10, 20, 30, 45, 60. Caps at 60. Decays at one tier per 2 hours. Resets completely after 12 hours offline.
I’m guessing because this concept of sharding is so built into their infrastructure. Layering is just another larger form of sharding. It depends on the way sharding was designed. It could be as simple as a configuration change to include more zones.
It would take significant work to do move to a new method. They didn’t want to maintain 2 MMOs.
hundreds of thousands consistent people playing launch and you wanna do the old-school method of pushing servers over the edge and causing max lag / traffic. does it make sense to buy 100 servers with old tech that arent as reliable? or get a new-style server and split it into multiple balanced workloads. i think we all just want a smooth launch. blizzard should edit the layering after.
Is layering actually an issue for the average player?
It makes sense to me why the only people I see complaining about it are streamers because they will naturally horde in hundreds of people to their layer causing issues.
I don’t see why the average player would constantly switch layers if they are playing vanilla how it’s supposed to be played (not trying to exploit resources, gather massive amounts of viewers for raids, etc.)
I would like to see some insight from a typical player who has played the beta without trying to be around streamers or layers that are over populated to begin with.
But I’m not going to constantly try to find a person to switch a layer. If I do, it would be with someone I already know and they should be on my layer to begin with.
Have you played on beta and would like to share your experience?