Some key points about layering, you choose if good or bad for the authentic Vanilla experience. :
When you come to a new questing zone and you see the opposing faction making life hard, change layers and continue a long your journey.
When farming materials and there are none to be found , change layers and continue a long your journey.
When hunting chests, rare spawns etc, HOP LAYERS AND CONTINUE a long your journey.
When getting camped because you are a noob, HOP LAYERS, and continue a long your journey.
When big world events happen, many layers will be dead. Some might not want to participate in this or might not be in the know and are thus forced to be on a dead layer.
When general chat or world chat is going on about alliance coming to org to defeat Thrall and you want in on the fun only to find out when you run there it was all a joke because there is NO ONE AROUND. Oh wait ! INVITE ME TO RAID LAYER!!.. again ZERO immersion. I should be able to LEERROOY into the fight and not ask for an invite to a specific layer. This happened to me on the last stress testâŠ
I have seen this on a stream. When you are solo questing and you finally get to the named mob that you have been working towards for what seems like for ever, only to see someone else who is there that needs help too. You party up and the mob VANISHES. âlayeringâ
A smooth launch with higher than expected server populations due to the real popularity of Vanilla wow. Causing layering to not go away or for there to be super long ques to log on and or forced server transfers.
When the known bridge ganker is doing their normal stuff, change layers and avoid himâŠ
When your friend is getting ganked but you are already in a group but are near by and decide to help. Only to find out they are in another layer. âimmersionâ
When the new meta is having layer spies to know where your rival opposing faction guild is at so you can avoid the raid fights entering raids⊠âimmersionâ
Layer hoping to to get world buffs vs just being in town and getting them. Again âimmersionâ I would assume this can be stomped out by just making any dropped world buffs go through every layer regardless which layer it was dropped on. But probably has not been thought of.
Did I say smooth launch? Cuz I mean, smooth launch amiright?
What happens when you think you do, but you donât backfires in your face and you are stuck with servers that have over 10k active daily players? force 5+k ques and wait for people to log off or force whole ream transfers? Because you promised to remove layering and these are your only two options to avoid changing the core code to help that over population, spawns, nodes, etc.
I have made many edits adding to this, I might add more but this seems to be good enough to make a point.
Screw it ! When a big event happens and the majority of the server hops to one layer, How does this get fixed? Through logging? What if no one logs for 8 hours? Many are screwed and forced to play on dead layers?
Layering removes immersion, can be exploited, will leave some layers super populated while others are empty, big world pvp events only happen with invitesâŠ, world pvp can be avoided with invitesâŠ
Get real, if layering is in the game count me out. I uninstalled the game and recently noticed that the beta/stress test option is back. Not sure if its beta access or just stress test again, but who cares. Layering is not classic and that makes me not care about it. Until layering is removed from discussion I will not take part in any of it.
you create a character and now you have to select a server. the system pops up a questionairre, whether you want pvp or normal server, with a brief description of how they differ. then after selecting that, it asks whether you want to Quick Create your character or Manually select a server and layer, with a brief description of those options.
if you select Quick Create, the system checks what layers and servers have room for your character - this takes the stress off of the server/layer of people only manually selecting a server because of its name, which will balance the server load.
If you select Manual, itâll show you a list of servers. you select the server name and a dropdown box will spawn with the available layers, which would have names. so if you selected the Leeerroy server, itâd drop down a menu with layers, red, blue and green. then you select the color name and youâre thereafter on Leeerroy Red or Leeerroy Green, or Leeerroy Blue. you tell your friends/family the server+layer name and they make their chars there also.
lock the layers to the player, no hopping. when phase 1 is done and merging commences, any layer that is too full to merge can still be a server in its own right.
The onflow problem from this is during the collapsing to.
Day 1: 3 layers, A, B and C with 3000 people each.
Day 14: 3 layers, A with average 2100 people, B with average 1200 people, and C with average 2200 people.
Server wants to collapse Layer B so that the world doesnât feel empty. It canât put B into either A or C, and it canât get rid of all layers yet. If it splits the layer between the other two, do people get split up?
Or are you saying that it doesnât matter how low a given layer gets in terms of active players?
TBC launch was a nightmare. Thousands of players all trying to zone into Hellfire Peninsula? First few days were just crash after crash.
Wrath mixed that up by having two entry points into the expansion, halved the populations by having two points. Still crashed like crazy in the beginning. Youâll note that this was repeated in Cataclysm with two zones to begin adventures in, before Mists introduced more phasing into the world, which is basically sharding/phasing.
TBC I could not play the first night. It kept crashing and would roll everyone back pretty bad- up to about 15 minutes in one instance. I finally got pissed off enough that I logged out and waited to play until after work the next day.
Wrath was a disaster. The realm I was on had over a 2-hour queue. I got in but several friends were stuck in line due to differing download/update speeds. Since our realm was pretty hard-hit on population, Blizzard offered free character transfers to new, low population servers. We decided to take it, so we logged off and opted for the transfer, only to find that it would not transfer any toon that still had mail in the mailbox. So then we tried to get back in to clear out our mail, only to be stuck in a 2±hour queue again. Then once we got in and cleared our mail, there was up to a 24-hour turnaround for the transfer to go through, during which time you could not log in to your character at all.
So yeah⊠I didnât play Wrathâreally play itâuntil almost three days after launch.
at the end of phase 1, itâs happening. so if blizz says well, we need to merge these and theres still too many people, ion says the ones that are too full will be pulled out and made into a separate server. so the same problem arises either way. you still end up with layers that have too many to merge and layers that dont have enough that need to be merged.
quick create will resolve some of that because the influx of new players that select it instead of manual, can be directed to a low pop server layer instead of leaving that choice completely up to a player that actually doesnt care otherwise.
I was watching. Like clockwork, sometimes in the same order, around the same time gap between each. I could easily character hop and do the same.
Someone is trying to inflate their opinions to seem more popular than whatâs really happening⊠unless some troll is planting evidence. Lol. Conspiracy theories abound.
Itâs already been said but yea, more servers and those servers had a lower player cap. Itâs a far cry from the 10k+ player servers we have today in BFA.
well your idea and mine are nearly identical, the only difference being the quick create or manual select options. once you show people the server list, then they start getting specific. but if you ask them if they want the quickest option, the one thatâll put them on a server where theyâre least likely to have a login queue, they never have to see the names or population numbers/stats, till theyâre already placed on a server/layer.
and since its a new game and login queues would be a problem, this quick create idea also would be a relief if you just wanted to get in the game as quickly as possible.
I was there for all the launches from WotlK and onwards. I canât remember the detail of just how many people were in the queue - but what i know is that it didnât take very long until i got into the game considering the immense demand, and a certain paladin was getting in quite quickly, power leveling to 80 like the madman he is/was.
The issues were very slight at best, and everything was over so fast in terms of launch aka the first 2ish days, that i mostly remember all the awesome fun i had leveling alongside my server.
Another reason why i donât want layering - because during that super simple leveling by myself in Dragonblight, i ran into a Shaman that was questing there as well.
We grouped up, and both were playing for a long time in that zone, so we ended up doing many quests together, got talking, goofed around, and so on.
What i didnât know until later was that he was one of the best shamans on the realm in PvP, and member of one of the most competitive PvE guilds on top of that.
His brother was the GM, and because he had such a fun time with me, he invited me to that guild. After doing a dungeon with them, they asked me if i wanted to heal for them (i had 0 xp healing raids at that point and was still pretty new to the game lol) and i happily agreed!
Even a complete noob like me, just by being on the same realm doing stuff with the same people, ended up in a super hardcore raiding guild with players that i thought, if not for my shaman friend, wouldnât even have looked twice at me.
Except instead, i became their main healer quickly, friends with almost everyone in the guild, and experienced the fun of being part of a group like that even if they were mostly very elitist players even, and fell in love with the raiding scene.
With layering iâd maybe never run into the people that allow for such cool experiences, cause not everyone actually gets to see eachother everytime they log in, and can quest in the same spot without knowing thereâs someone there just like them.