Is layering good or bad? Answer here

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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So now we know…

Classic will have “layering” not “sharding” or “CRZ”.

We knew that cross realm zoning was off the table. That is where a player would be randomly transported to other server shards when moving through the world.

We now know that sharding will not happen. Sharding is shifting from “shard” to “shard” as you move throughout the world. It was speculated that as you moved from zone to zone, area to area, players on the same server would be transfered to various shards of the SAME server.

Instead, we will have “layering”. Layering is sharding…on the whole continent with a larger pool of players (apparently?). There are 2 continents in Classic WoW. So each continent will be sharded into multiple shards on the same server.

Pros

  • Better opportunity to tag mobs and clear content
  • Players looking to “try out” Classic and then quit will not negatively impact the population of a server in the long term
  • Que time will be dramatically lowered if not totally eliminated

Cons

  • Opens the flood gates for abuse (Rare mobs, speed leveling, avoiding PvP, etc)
  • Destroys server immersion
  • Creates strange gameplay experiences
  • Massively modifies the economy
  • Allows a small group of players who are smart to gain a significant advantage over the rest of the server
  • Many more, literally unknowable how many ways players will conjure up to manipulate this system

Detailed Concerns

Even if this system lasts a couple of weeks it will still have horrifying results on the economy, leveling, and the general atmosphere in game. Players who are not familiar with WoW Classic may not understand why, let me explain…

Economy

Players who speed rush to 60 can do so within a week. The intention of Blizzard is to bypass the initial burst of players squashed into the first few zones and testing out the game. This “phase” will no doubt last at least a few weeks to a month.

This means that several players will have multiple weeks in high level zones with MULTIPLE shards to swap between. All a player has to do is abuse party invites to swap between however many shards there are of the continent. This means that a player can perform a farming loop in Un’goro for rich thorium, swap shards, and then do it again with fresh spawns. This is UNBELIEVABLY broken.

If there are 3 shards then you have 3 times as many arcane crystals, devilsaur leather, dreamfoil, black lotus, etc… This is simply a disaster. A small pool of players will be able to DOMINATE the economy and hoard up materials at a rate that the rest of the server will never be able to once the sharding is turned off.

Leveling

The starter zones will be packed in every shard, let’s face it. After that is another story. For players who get out ahead…flipping over to another “layer” AKA “shard” gain a significant advantage and access another broken element to this horrific system.

Imagine being a mage at a gnoll camp in the mid 20s in Wetlands. You clear that juicy camp and now must wait 5 minutes to do it again or move to a less than perfect camp. BUT WAIT…JUST SHARD OVER VIA PARTY INVITE OR RELOG! With the click of a button that gnoll camp respawns and you have a ridiculously fast aoe grinding method. The ability to exploit this is obvious and the negative effects are unknowable.

The entire leveling process will be a mess of party invite shard hopping trying to get the quest mobs you want. Did you get out tagged by a moonfire druid? Who cares, shard hop and get your named mob. This is incredibly bad for the game and some players will exploit this to gain a significant level advantage over others.

General Atmosphere

One of the coolest things in Vanilla is leveling up alongside your server. You will see players die to a blackrock orc as a low level warrior later be a fully epic MC tank. Not now. Now you will see a select part of your server as you level inconsistently.

This is just one of many negative effects of “layering” AKA “sharding on a larger scale”. What about chat channels? Will you not be able to talk to 2/3rds of the server? Will you be able to talk to the whole server but only see 1/3rd of it? I mean… There is no good answer to this. What a disaster!

ETC…

There are SO many other ways to exploit and abuse this system. Rare pet farming on your hunter? Shard over to get brokentooth! Shard over to get Lupos (postnerf still different model)! Shard over to get bangalash! Shard over to get your named! Shard over to get your rare spawn! Shard over to see if the vendor has the rare recipe!

Better yet… gold farmers and keen veterans will know what to shard over and get. Scope recipe at booty bay…shard over a few times (layer over…big difference!? not) and collect 2-3 of them and sell them on the auction house for 2-3x the profit you normally would have gotten.

Bottom line

If you can’t see how this inflates the economy and dramatically effects the game you simply do not understand the game.

Blizzard knows this. This is why they say “only a month” or “only Phase 1” (speculation). They also know that many players won’t wait in que to play, therefore they lose money. They know the inability to tag a mob will discourage some and cause them to quit, therefore they lose money. $$$ is all that matters here folks, they are a business after all.

Any possible solution?

“Layering” aka “nerfed sharding” cannot last long at all. It will be abused and it is an abomination of an addition to this game. If it is to be added at all, it must only last a few days.

For every day this system is in place, a neckbeard is collecting 3x + the materials and destroying the economy.

For every day this system is in place, a neckbeard is leveling an alt by aoe grind shard hopping at 3x + the pace of normal players from thenceforth after.

The more I think about this… the more I cringe. Surely Blizzard knows these things…right?

TLDR: Layering is an abomination, will be abused, and will innevitably destroy the gameplay experience. It is not without its benefits and from a business perspective I can see why they did this. There is a tought decision to be made by Blizzard and I believe this system should only last a few days if that to avoid all of the issues and exploits.

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  • Players who encounter someone will be able to move around the world and keep encountering that person (unless one of them groups up with other friends) without 10,000 other people in the way.
  • Limitations or timeouts on layer swapping can be incorporated to prevent abuse.
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There is no viable tway to limit layer swapping. I understand you want to whiteknight “Eloraell” but common sense destroys your response… I am sorry.

  • They stated that you get a new shard by logging or player invites/party change. Are you saying that players moving throughout the world will NEVER log off or party up? Did you ever play Vanilla wow? You party all the time for dungeons or quests. You will log off. Get real dude.

  • How can you limit partying? How can you time out layer swapping without negatively effecting gameplay further? It is unreasonable and impossible! They could not impliment a timeout without making it where people can’t play with friends or guildies unintentionally. This won’t happen.

Your response is so bankrupt of common sense or depth. It seems like you came in, glanced at a few sentences, and said what you already knew you wanted to. You have YOUR idea of fixes, which are stupid and impossible. I am sorry, I don’t know another way to state this. Facts are against you.

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  • Require that people wait 20s while seated before swapping. Avoids PVP dodging.
  • Require that people find an Inn or Sanctuary before swapping.
  • Prevent people from joining a group on a different layer if they’ve already entered X number of groups in the last Y minutes.
  • Parties are only 5 people. Raids are max 40.

These are all limitations. And they can extend them further by ensuring that while a group can all be together, the layer that they end up on when they group up is taken from all the possible layers they’re drawn from, meaning they can’t group to get a rare mob, because it may drag the other group member to their layer.

There’s plenty of easy fixes to avoid these situations if you stop trying to poison every suggestion. Your opinions are not facts.

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Honestly I think if it helps to prevent dead servers from happening a couple months and it is done by phase 2 it might just be as beneficial as they are claiming. Goofy congestion and server populations for launch vs not having anyone to run strat with after BWL is released feels worth it to me.

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Hey Polack, did you read my post at all?

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Yeah, I don’t view it as an abomination. I have been on servers where the population left or grew disinterested and rerolled.

Economics are determined by the player base. If there are too many goods available for purchase it will drive prices down. Meaning that those that abuse the system will either have to stash the goods they exploit or sell them at lower prices to be competitive with others abusing the system. Meaning that it might take longer to get your epic mount but having raid consumables will be more affordable. By the time layering is phased out there will be less resources available and so the prices will be driven back up and level out to a new normal. Does that ruin an economy? That’s an opinion, eventually those things work themselves out based on the supply and demand.

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This all boils down to how many layers will exist at a time. This also depends on how many servers are active, which then asks the question whats the cap on layers for a server.

If there’s enough servers, layering will only occur on high population realms, most the others won’t see any layering at all.

If there’s a cap of 4-5 layers on a server, you’re server is going to be crawling with people so each layer will have more then enough people to compete against.

It won’t affect the economy as much because a server with 10k people has way more buyers and sellers, limiting that server to the same materials as a server with 500 people doesn’t make too much sense either unless you’re a fan of hyper inflation.

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Going through your suggested layer swapping limitations…

  • They are not going to make people essentially log out to swap shards. It simply is not going to happen. Would it stop pvp dodging? yes. Will they do this? I don’t see it.
  • They aren’t going to make people go to inns or cities to swap layers. It would be incredibly problematic for real world gameplay. it would destroy playing with friends or guildies out in the world. They won’t do this.
  • This solution, “x” groups in a time frame", is a bandaid and fixes nothing. it still allows someone 2-3 shards of farming.
  • No idea what party size and raid size matters.

Your first 2 limitations are unreasonable and will never happen. There is no rational way to limit this. It is obvious for people who are critical thinkers and have played the game long enough to realize the issues that are brought about by this. You clearly have an agenda to argue, which is fine. Your argument is just bad.

I am sorry for being forceful and direct, but I feel like you ignored every point I made in my post and spouted off your predetermined opinion. Very disrespectful, not engaging, not intelligent, but only lazy and stupid. You must like retail wow.

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I don’t really care if a few neckbeards gain a monetary advantage by doing all that work when layering is around, good for them.

All your fears and downsides are countered by the long term healthy server population point and personally I think these fears of yours are greatly overstated anyway.

I think layering is a brilliant solution to a real problem and will work fantastically.
The downsides it will cause are minor and nowhere near as dramatic as you paint them to be.

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Your post make it seem like each server will have multiple layers to abuse. It will require a lot of active players until a new layer is formed. If you and your friends get on a small server, guess what, no layers. Larger servers will have way more people, competition will still be rampant.

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This all boils down to how many layers will exist at a time. This also depends on how many servers are active, which then asks the question whats the cap on layers for a server.

They stated they don’t want 35 servers. That is not many servers. Further, even 2 shards is too much. 2x the rich thorium farms, 2x the devilsaur, 2x the tidal charm drops, 2x the rare pets, etc…

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Yes but that server will have twice the buyers too. Farming 10 Arcane crystals on a high pop server will mean they usually sell faster and for less. Farming 10 Arcane Crystals on a backwater server means they take longer to sell and sell for more.

If they didn’t have duplicate materials I would find the smallest server, load up on all the stuff to sell then xfer to the highest realm and profit.

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Why not? Your opinions are not facts.

If you’re going to group up to quest… you’re starting in an Inn. Its not that hard. Are you so instant gratification you can’t handle that? Then Classic is not for you.

And it fixes the rare spawn jumping from layer to layer.

40 is not 3000.

No, I specifically addressed the fact that you dismissed the viable and reasonable methods because you have already decided that you’re right and no comment will affect that.

If you don’t like Layering, don’t play till Phase 2. Its a simple solution to what appears to be a life threatening problem for you. Don’t get angry, get even. Don’t give evil Blizzard your sub, just wait till it all goes away.

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Your response is you don’t care that it dramatically effects gameplay and destroys the economy. You don’t care that a select group of players (many actually) will break the game by hoarding up inordinate amounts of rare materials and gold. You don’t care that some people will not have to worry about items, enchants, or materials for the entirety of the game. It is all okay to you…cuz there is enough people to play with?

What can I say? I am speechless here…

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We had a good layers exploit thread going but mods deleted it. So much for discussion!

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Blizzard knows people will try to exploit layering.
They will have measures to counter it.

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I can’t tell if you really believe the things you type or if you just type what you THINK refutes the argument I make.

You do realize that players want to join groups for quests at other locations than inns, right? You do realize that travel time is a real thing in Vanilla right? You do realize that tagging named mobs is a big deal expecially early in leveling, right? You do realize that running to an inn or city to join a group every time for a quest is literally the dumbest and most unlikely thing that anybody would thin of implimenting into WoW Classic, right?

I simply am not wasting anymore time responding to someone who clearly is either trolling or white-knighting their tail off.

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It will have a minor impact on the economy and they will have a few times more resources during the early weeks of Classic.

It’s not going to be nearly as dramatic as you think it is.

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A few threads have “disappeared”