Both have their advantages. And your explanations are a little off. Basically:
Layering is how you described sharding. Once a certain population is reached, a new “layer” is created. Sharding OTOH works in both directions. It will split high populations, but also merge low populations. It basically takes the pool of players within a set of servers and balances them out to relatively equal populations across different “shards.” The key difference is that layering can only work in a single direction because it’s server-specific. Sharding works both ways because servers are combined into a group.
As for abuse, it’s easier to abuse sharding because the way it combines low populations allows easy jumping between instances. Layering is very difficult to abuse because of a simple key fact that if there aren’t enough people, there’s only one single instance of the zone.
As for what’s better: Layering keeps you with only people from your server and the idea is seamless gameplay within your layer, and it’s something that’s only “on” when the demand for it is there. But sharding addresses the reality that dead servers are going to exist.
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Per Blizzard, layering will only last for Phase 1. So any problems or manipulation is limited. At best they will have a temporary gold and boe gear advantage. My guess is that Phase 1 will only last 1-3 months.
This doesn’t makes sense though given the way they explained layering is supposed to work.
Let me explain.
- Layers are dynamic/flexible, as has been stated by the devs. Therefore you can’t always stay and be stickied to 1 particular layer.
The only way you’d end up on the same layer all the time is if the total active population of the server stays at the ~2.5k -3k mark (the maximum number of people in one layer they accept, aka one healthy vanilla world population).
(That’s also the target they aim for when they want to remove the layers, because the world is designed to work for that ~2.5k - 3k population)
At the point of reaching and staying at the max pop mark, there’d be no need for additional layers. Therefore, you stay in the only layer left.
If the population exceeds the ~3k mark, a new layer forms, and people will be shifted around accordingly.
Hence, the layers are then dynamically adjusting the worlds active pop to demand. And you can see that transition happening in game as everyone, mobs and players poof out as layers dynamically shuffle people into their respective layers.
So! The only way it would work the way you described, would be If they were static. Your character would be put in 1 layer it would always stay in, and you’d always see the exact same characters who are also assigned to it around everytime. But they aren’t static. Therefore that can’t happen.
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If they were static, there’d be no reason to have them instead of regular servers, as they’d be just servers within a server. And they’d end up to have to do the whole merging of servers, splitting apart communities anyway because set in stone servers can’t adjust their populations on their own without manual interference.
They need them to be dynamic/automatic to allow for their proposed plan to work and for this whole thing to pay off.
Their whole point with layering is to have a system in place at launch and the first few months to manage server population issues (and big gameplay issues) while they let in way more than 1 normal servers population at launch.
They do this to keep their total open server count as low as they can, and (in theory, mind you) later on avoid having to split up realm communities because of population issues as the “tourists” supposedly will leave en masse.
But if they don’t die down as anticipated (likely), or somehow end up too low across the board (unlikely), we are met with some pretty big unanswered questions about what measures will be taken then.