For purposes of this discussion, we’ll have to accept that Blizzard will be using some sort of tech to manage the short-term population explosion that should temper off, to ensure a healthy long-term realm population.
With the caveat stated, is “layering” really a better solution than “sharding”?
Layering
A realm can have multiple layers. A layer is a separate world from each other. You cannot see players from other layers though you can chat with them. You can always see players that share your layer even if you’re moving to a new zone. These players will never suddenly wink out when an area is busy. It essentially ensures continuity of seeing the same players throughout your play session and makes the game more immersive.
The issue with layering is that if you are invited to another group, you will be ported to the invitee’s layer. This can create some abuse where a player can try to jump around layers to farm resource nodes and rares.
Sharding
Sharding does not create new worlds. Rather, it will spawn a new zone if a particular zone has exceeded its population cap. Players may wink out randomly if they get shardedto a new instance of a zone. It makes the experience less immersive. On the flip side, it’s less prone to abuse. While you can be ported to an invitee’s shard , such potential farming abuse would be limited to early level zones.
So, which is better?
I think layering may cause too many issues of abuse. A lot of players are skunks and would take advantage of this system. I would rather have sharding out of early zones and deal with players winking out.
Ideally, if they could just layer 1-20 zones instead of the whole world, that would be my preference. Thoughts?
Edit: corrected terminology (sharding vs phasing - thanks)
Good post. I honestly don’t know or have a strong opinion on which is better or worse. I kind of don’t care as long as it’s very short term and removed as soon as it isn’t absolutely needed.
Instead of Blizzard saying sometime before phase 2 - I would rather they give a factual, specific statement we can all trust and bank on - like, “We will remove layering when queue averages go down to under five minutes.” Or something like that. I have no idea how that would work so my example could be crazy, but you get the idea.
You mean sharding, not phasing. Phasing is when you finish a quest and the area updates to reflect your quest progress.
That said layering is just sharding with some extra rules that are aimed at making it seem less obvious that it’s there.
Personally I’d agree with layering in the low level zones being ideal. It knocks out a lot of the concern for abuse with high level crafting materials while also keeping the sharding part of it as hidden as it can be.
That said since layering is what we’re getting it on the whole world, hopefully they remove it before too many people hit max level and can abuse it. That and potentially take action against people abusing it to a high degree.
Phasing is what was introduced in wrath, where as you complete quests you enter new phases so the world actually changes based on your actions and was a great way to improve story.
Sharding and layering are the same thing, layering is just larger shards. So while a shard is usually zone wide layers are continent wide.
Oh and there are typically more shards than there are layers so layers are harder to abuse.
From the sounds of it they are only going to have a few layers per realm, so one you have to get random people to invite you through trade chat, and even then there is no way to guarantee they are in a different layer and then you have to hope that node/rare is up on the new layer. It is very inconsistent and not really that succeptiple to abuse. Also if you are on a realm with multiple layers that means you are on a realm with twice as many people as it should have so there should be twice as many node/rare spawns. So even if it does work its not really abusing anything.
You also dont understand how that its not really abuse to farm multiple nodes either since you are on a realm which needs double population for 2nd farmable layer to appear so that realm should have twice as many spawns to keep supply and demand at the correct level.
Also it is no where near as consistent as people claim it is.
This was regularly lambasted by far more of the player base, causing them to move away from that idea to Layering.
The issue is that the abuse mechanisms you talk about apply to sharding too, so any use of it beyond the 1-10 zones would have exactly the same effects.
Yes, but the issues would be limited to non-contested pvp zones that have fewer high value nodes ect. Sharding 1-20 has less potential impact on the economy and less impact on pvp encounters and solves the bottleneck issue with technology that Blizzard has worked with.
Blizzard’s goal with layering is to provide many realms with 3k players in them, to simulate any given realm equivalent to launch, with minimal disappearances while you play. Its a worthy goal, when we expect a huge amount of drop off in the player base in the early days.
The problem they’re likely concerned with on Sharding only the 1-10 or even only 1-20, is that people can hit 20 within 1 day played easy, and so 20 may not be high enough before the population drops off again.
I totally think it will drop off after the hype dies down, but given what we’re seeing, people may get far further into the levelling process before they quit than I had originally predicted, and if Blizzard shares that concern, layering is there to hold them for that first week or two even if they get to 20-30 zones.
Adding protections to prevent the abuse of layer hopping, to me, seems like a far better solution to the problem than the usual “Throw it all out!” kneejerk reaction.
Each of them wreck any sort of community on a realm. I just hope that Blizzard will eventually remove layering once the population dies down after the first few months.
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