If you completely remove layering right now we’ll get skyrocketed Q’s and that might motivate some more people to move to your dead servers that you, for some weird reason, opened up with limited transfers to thinking that you’d get 10k people to move. You’re going to have to bully some people or provide some sort of incentive or you’re going to end up merging those new servers a LOT sooner than you want to.
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No we wouldn’t, that’s not how layering works. The queues are for the entire realm, not specific layers.
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Layers are copies of the entire map. They use layers to increase the current “in game” population without crowding the map. So yes, removing layers would in fact increase the queues. Layering is being used to specifically let more people play at once, then they shrink the layers as the population on a server starts to dwindle.
Let’s say each layer has 2500 players. (That’s about what the map and spawners are built to support.
Now let’s say they have 3 layers going, so that’s 7,500 players online, and the excess goes to queue.
They remove layering, and subsequently have to reduce the in game allowance to 2500 players. This means the other 5,000 would be added to the queue list.
That’s exactly how layering works. It allows more people online, so that zones aren’t overcrowded, by making multiple “instances” of the world map.
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That’s so incredibly wrong that I don’t know where to start explaining it to you.
Layering does not affect the total allowable population of a realm. I’ll try with some arbitrary numbers to help you.
Let’s say a single realm can hold 10,000 players. Lets also say this realm has 4 layers of 2500 players each. The queue doesn’t begin until the 10001st person logs in.
Now, blizzard decides to reduce the layers of this hypothetical realm to 2. Now each layer has the ability to hold 5000 people, making the layer seem more crowded. The realm can still only hold 10000 people, and the queue begins at 10001.
At the next reduction, there is only 1 layer, and it has the ability to hold 10000 players. The queue still begins at 10001.
The bottleneck is the realm capacity, not the layer capacity. Layer capacity is artificial.
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true, but when less people can get into the game at one time, due to layers being gone, you will have longer queues.
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yes it does.
except this isn’t true at all. layering is not sharding. people did not want sharding, because they wanted to see people in the world, so blizzard decided to use layering, a new system where you see an entire realms population worth of people.
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I give up. You don’t seem to understand. Enjoy being wrong.
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That’s not how layers work. Let’s use your numbers and assume a layer is 2500 players. If all layers were removed, we wouldn’t suddenly get a mega-private-server. We would get a realm with a cap of 2500 and queues starting at 2501.
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except you are the one being wrong. blizzard has explained it in interviews. it is not sharding to split up the population of the server into manageable bites. if that was the case people wouldn’t be complaining about too many people in a zone to do something.
layering is just extra copies of the same server, supporting an additional servers worth of people.
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Layering is effectively a session-permanent sharding. Sharding will dynamically change your layers on the spot depending on population in an area. In Classic, you get sent to a layer (or shard if you like) but it never changes unless you force it to with a group invite or something.
I think the reason we suddenly see queues popping up has more to do with the fact they increased total population to temporarily sustain more than 10000 players and are just now bringing it back down to 10000.
You basically made my point for me. When they reduce layers they HAVE to reduce realm capacity. This is not a restriction of the technology but a restriction of the world map and spawners. Now, could they increase layer size and ramp up spawn timers? Sure… but that would be horrific in so many ways that I can’t be bothered to explain them all to you.
Assuming Blizzard has any common sense at all, which I think they do, reducing layers means needing to reduce realm population due to the maps and spawners restrictions. Sure, you could have 10,000 people on a single layer, but that require some pretty big dynamic changes to the games dynamics. You’d have to reduce spawn times to low or instant, and that means mobs, nodes, killed NPCs, etc… otherwise the game experience of tens of thousands across all servers would be horribly disrupted.
I’m not saying that lowering layers lowers realm pops. With today’s tech they can host 30,000 people on a single realm. But what I’m saying is they’d be forced to reduce the realm pop, or make bad changes to gameplay, like instant respawn timers.
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Ok. I apologize for being crass. I’m going to try to explain this a bit better.
Layering does not affect the total allowable population of the realm. You are correct in saying that a single layer is an instance of the whole of Azeroth. What you are incorrect in believing is that layers have population caps. Those caps are artificial. If a realm can hold 10000 people, it can hold 10000 people regardless of how many layers are holding those 10000.
Layering is not sharding, and I was explaining layering, not sharding. sharding is creating instances of specific areas, let’s say Northshire Abbey, and then when you leave that area, you are returned to the main/non sharded area. That is not what is happening.
The only reason layering was implemented was to reduce the visible population in an area and make it easier to quest through the early zones. It in no way whatsoever affects the total allowable population of a realm. I know I’ve seen articles explaining this. Let me see if I can find them.
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CITE YOUR SOURCES, folks.
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The population of a server is a pie. You can split the pie in as many pieces as you want, each piece being a layer. If Blizzard ‘removes layers’ it simply means they split the pie in fewer pieces.
15000 players want to play on a 10000 population cap server.
4 layers : each layer holds 2500 players and there’s a 5000 queue to enter the server.
3 layers : each layer holds 3333 players and there’s a 5000 queue to enter the server.
2 layers : each layer holds 5000 players and there’s a 5000 queue to enter the server.
1 layer : 10000 players and there’s a 5000 queue to enter the server.
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If this is true why did Blizzard market layering as a solution to absurd queues? They’d said in multiple interviews that without layering queue times would be absurd, and the layering system was implemented mostly as a way to prevent that. Of course it was also to help with population density in lower level zones, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive in this case.
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No they sold layers as a way to prevent overcrowding during the initial leveling phase.
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When did they advertise layers this way? I’ve certainly not seen it. All I’ve seen them say about layers is that it reduces overcrowding and competition for resources.
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By allowing more people on the map than it was originally designed for. By that logic we can only conclude that reduced layers would force them to reduce the allowable online population.
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oh i agree that layering is “basically sharding” on a bigger scale. doesn’t change the fact that its artificially increasing how many people a server holds and thus if layering goes away server queues will increase.
except it does. blizzard has said this. why do you think they are using layering?
in there own words - to maintain a healthy realm population after the tourists leave.
in other words, servers are holding more people then they normally could right now, and when the tourists leave, you will have normal population sizes.
FALSE. blizzards own words were they were using it to maintain healthy realm pops after the tourists leave.
false.
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no they didn’t. they never said this. if they wanted this, they would have used sharding.
they are using layering to maintain healthy realm pops after tourists bail.
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