I disagree completely. Elwynn is a big area. Easily capable of handling 1000 players. My first stress test experience was in Deathknell with a few hundred players competing over quests. Good luck tagging the 6 or so Rattlecage skeletons. And the result? The most fun I’ve had in an mmorpg since Vanilla. I didn’t give a damn about trying to tag mobs. I made three friends and laughed for 2 hours. THAT is the experience Classic needs to promote. To paraphrase Kevin Jordan: once you begin to focus on maximizing your time spent, fun no longer matters. It’s the experience that matters, not efficiency. Players need to make that adjustment.
4 Likes
They should be encouraged to group. It isn’t the same thing as being compelled to group.
There should be considerable competition over mob spawns during launch, enough so that people find it beneficial to group rather than try to solo it themselves.
But you’re talking about the difference between “a few dozen” in the newbie starting area vs “a few hundred” in the same place. The former is more conducive to game play and player interaction in general. The latter is more conducive to player despair and their simply logging out.
A “couple dozen” players in the starting zone on the other hand is too far in the other direction, and basically providing no incentive to group at all.
1 Like
General chat in Beta is a Zone/Server wide chat, not a layer specific chat.
It’s been used by myself and others to layer hop.
If general chat was layer specific, using it to layer hop wouldn’t work.
The conspiracy theorists are out in full force today!
Saying that 99% of players will be using such exploits is though.
2 Likes
You’re forgiving, I would make it 1 hr.
If whatever metrics they have indicate doing so won’t cause any problems. Presumably they would collapse one layer into another at that point. All players in that collapsed layer would then remain there for so long as they either remain logged in, or don’t do something to cause them to leave it(enter an instanced dungeon, change continents, join a group led by someone on yet another layer, etc).
The “layer merge” scenario would be understandably frustrating for the player who suddenly has their world change around them in the blink of an eye. But those events should be comparatively few and far between, only likely to be seen once a day, if that. Unless somebody is doing an endurance marathon session, in which case all bets are off. But those players are outliers in their own right to start with, so their ability to encounter “outlier conditions” are going to be a bit more pronounced than what most players would ever see.
“Should only be seen ‘once per play session’ at worst” when “typical play session” is considered to be 2 to 3 hours(for example) opens up all kinds of doors for complaints about “WTF? You said I should only be seeing this once per day at most!” While they conveniently ignore that their “play session” lasted for 12+ hours.
From how blizzard has described their implementation of layering, the only time you should be “forced” into a new/different layer is in the “collapse” scenario. If they spawn a new layer, they’ll be doing that with people trying to log in for the first time that play session. So you shouldn’t be encountering a scenario where suddenly half the people in your zone “get snapped” into a different layer.
1 Like
Actually I think that 1 person is in queue until enough other people turn up to make a lightly populated layer.
1 Like
You’re both right? From my understanding it’s going to attempt to “load balance” you, which means it’s going to try to place you in the lowest population layer. Which may be the last one you were in.
Except there are (unsubstantiated?) claims that it will try to preferentially place you in whatever layer most of the people on your friends list/in your guild is on… Assuming “there is room” available on that layer for you to do so.
As long as layering is gone after a week or so, I can probably live with it.
1 Like
I read 127 responses, and I have a question:
How does this cooldown work?
Is it:
a) Join group, switch layers, join another group, have to wait X minutes before I can go to their layer?
or
b) Join group, have to wait X minutes before I switch to their layer
Implementation matters. One is easily exploited for half the situations, the other is simply an annoying delay that doesn’t really solve the problem.
2 Likes
Community: LAYERING WILL DESTROY THE COMMUNITY
Also Community: We need CRBGs so I don’t have to wait in queue
3 Likes
What happens if you automatically get moved to a new layer, then you want to go play with friend or guildmate?
How about when you get moved from a layer to a new one and don’t get a rare spawn or node because you were moved? That’s still a problem.
How does wpvp dodging work still? Like how does a cooldown really prevent whole guilds from dodging wpvp? They can still hop once.
Can players on different layers or with cooldowns enter dungeons or raids together? Can they even group up?
2 Likes
Seems it’ll be in as long as necessary, which will most certainly be more than one week. It will probably last until phase 2, which Blizzard said it would be removed by.
It should not adversely affect regular players.
Eliminating or making exploitation difficulty is a good thing tho…
1 Like
I feel that 15 minutes is enough to drastically reduce the amount of exploitation.
Haven’t heard anything official by Blizzard, but I believe you because I want this to be true. Not a bad fix. We are getting it, hopefully very temporarily, so, at least they are trying to make it better. Thanks Blizz.
rofl. Why are you even in this forum, go play bfa.
6 Likes
You’re misapplying what he said. Mark Kern can also be invoked on this as well.
What Kevin Jordan was talking about was “egg timer gameplay” where people specifically log in at a set time, perform a set task, and log out again, because that is the most effective means of playing the game. (Which was a nice shot at daily and world quests as well, IMO)
He was talking more about “scheduled gameplay” as a means of character progression. If you go further with the paraphrase as I recall, it essentially, “When players start logging in at set times to perform specific tasks, at specific intervals, the game has ceased to become fun, and has instead become a job.”
How you’re trying to make that relevant to the matter of having to spend 2 hours on a quest which should have been able to be completed in 5 minutes is I guess a matter for yourself to resolve.
Mark Kern, another Classic Dev, seems to be very much of the mindset that those quests shouldn’t be taking 2 hours to complete. If it’s taking players that long, Blizzard has failed, without respect to which method or methods they use.
I’m pretty sure even Kevin Jordan would agree on that much.