I understand why we have Layering. Here's how to make it better

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

Layering exists for two reasons. Number one is obvious. The clusterf at launch where you’d have a million people fighting for 5 minute boar respawns, the server crashes that would happen at BRM or any time a streamer sneezes. Blizzard would like these all to be avoidable and so would the players, as long as the tradeoff isn’t severe.

The second is long term server viability. Rather than capping realms with queues and dooming them to die on the vine when the tourists who aren’t invested in Classic quit two weeks later, this allows a more natural server merger to occur than actually merging servers. This is an admirable idea with clear drawbacks.

I’m sure the team is aware of the pitfalls with channels (Layers). Rare spawn just got killed in front of your face? No problem, just get 9 of your friends to invite you one after the other to their channel and check if you can get that Tidal Charm to drop. RMTer looking to make a quick buck? No problem, just switch
Layer with a fellow farmer to get multiple Black Lotus spawns while they kill another Devilsaur.

These problems are clear and will have wide-ranging effects, but I’m actually far more worried about the small-scale fallout. The memories that made original WoW, and other games before it, so special that we’re hoping to recapture here. These memories arent formed via “I can play with friends I already have” or
“I can premade vs premade for the nolifer championship” - as fun as those things are, it’s about making new friends. It’s about being level 18 in Redridge and teaming up with someone to work on the first elite quests, then logging out and seeing them the next day in Darkshore. Maybe they were just some faceless guy in your group at first, but now youre questing next to each other again, one of you asks to team up and then you become friends who bond over
the corpse runs and escapes from the Horde in STV.

Or you finally hit level 60 and it’s time to farm gold for your epic mount. You head off to grind satyrs in Felwood or whatever your spot is and you find someone of the opposite faction has the same idea. They attack you but aggro
multiple mobs in the process and die. After their corpse run, they resurrect to jump you while you’re low but being half hp and mana comes back to bite them and you survive again with a sliver of health. You rest up and prepare for round 3 but this time you see the smoke of a mount in the distance and the player ride off on their 60% mount. Your victory. The next day you come back and find the same guy. This time things don’t go as well for you, but you have some fun back and forth fights over the next week.

A month passes, you have your epic mount, and the first PvP patch just released. After tiring of the Tarren Mill Southshore zerg you ride up with a friend - maybe it’s that guy from back in Redridge - to EPL. There you find a skirmish and some of your allies have just fallen. Your friend picks off a wounded Horde but off in the distance you see…the guy who you had been fighting in Feralas for a week, zipping off on his own 100% speed mount. You chase, but it’s fruitless, you’re both on even footing. He’ll live to see another day, or at least another hour until he tries to jump you and doesn’t see your friend hiding in a bush.

That’s what people want back. And Layering will rip it away. In the first example you log on the second day and you’re on a different Layer from the guy you played with in Redridge Mountains. In the second, the guy you killed in Feralas
switches Layers to get back to farming after the first death and you, the player, form no relationship with either.

So how do we keep that and avoid Scenario B where all three of these people log on Day 1, are hit with an unplayable lagfest or a 10,000 person queue, and quit Classic never to play again?

Easy, make Layers like mini-servers.

Keep the merger idea, just be more blatant about it. On server Barrens Chat you have Layer 1 - Mankrik’s Wife; Layer 2 - Chuck Norris Jokes; etc and make it so
you’re tied to a Layer. If there’s an overfill on one, sure, there’s a backup youre generally tied to as the secondary. And if you have to switch
layers to play with a friend, that’s fine, but put a cooldown on layer switching to prevent farming/exploiting/etc. Then, 3 months down the line if the layers start to thin out you can merge everyone into Barrens Chat together. But at least when you do that you’ll know some of the people.

2

tldr: Alien History Guy:
:raised_hand: layers :raised_back_of_hand:

3

Sharding can disappear within a week or two and none of this is an issue. They only guaranteed not past Phase 1, because after that we see world bosses.

They are.

4

No, right now they’re Channels, which we’ve seen in every garbage kMMO ever created.