They said we’ll still have queues for some servers, because they have a specific cap in mind for the number of layers, to ensure that the population does come down enough. i.e. if they expect 90% of people to quit, they can max out at 10 layers. If they expect 80% to quit, they can max out at 5 layers, and if they expect 50% to quit, they’ll have to max out at 2 layers.
But it’s an issue we had not one that Classic will create. So it doesn’t need to be solved through modern means.
ah but I see it differently. BOttlenecking a starting zone was not an issue in vanilla. It is an issue classic is creating due to its popularity. There were never that many people swarming servers all at once because people trickled in bit by bit. Even the original launch only had around 8-10 people in my starting zone on my server in the valley of trials.
I think I spent around 5 minutes on the boars and each other quests in vanilla on day 1, but when I did the beta, I spent over an hour on boars.
We will have to see how many servers they go with.
It was.
350,000 copies sold to North America with 89 servers. That averages out to ~3900 players per server. We had this issue in the first week.
VoT was packed.
Boulderfist here, it was “Low population” and green so I joined up
Did not have that problem whatsoever.
Maybe it’s become ogres smell, or the name fist in your server…either way, I enjoyed that launch on day 1 much more than spending hours on boars and scorpions in the beta. To me, that was not fun. I can enjoy the game and socialize while questing rather than sitting in one spot trying to tag and stressing.
And Silver Hand as the only RP PST server was High for months (there was no Full). We definitely had that issue on Day One especially in the most popular start zones (of which Teldrassil wasn’t really).
I imagine we’ll see the same disparities with Streamer magnets this time around too.
Because Teebu’s is a low rate drop from MC. So guilds will be giving that to people in the raid who can use it, and there won’t be All Priest runs in MC for a long time.
Semi-reasonable, but there are some party related bugs and glitches that existed back then and still exist now. I would hate to get punished because my group was disbanded and remade to fix a bug.
That guild would still have to work pretty hard to spread themselves out across the layers somehow. They mentioned wanting to keep Guilds on the same layer.
Would probably wreck the economy if layering was persisting to a point where people could farm either of these. 10 layers, and 10x the spawns? We’re going to feel the inflation issue sooner or later, but that would certainly accelerate things.
I think that overstates what an even bigger issue at launch was for questing, terrible lag and server crashes. I wasn’t stuck in Northshire for an hour or more because I couldn’t get tags, it was because I could barely play the game or get into the servers. If the network stability is improved (a goal of layering) than that problem should also be much more easily overcome.
Also keep in mind that while Classic will not have dynamic spawns, it will have the underlying code they added which bypasses a mob’s spawn timer if all the mobs of its type is killed in a certain area. This was not in at the original launch.
That seems to be my understanding as well. It’s a similar mentality as the sharding one, but meant to not make things as jarring because shards are created much more aggressively on packed zones. But the goal seems to be removing layers once we approach the end-game.
Overall I think we might be overstating the issue of layering, as long as we believe the plan the devs have laid out (and they’ve been pretty upfront so far). It’s when they change plans that we may have to be more concerned.
My main fear is that I’ll be on a layered RP realm, and all the “exciting” RP is happening on a different layer, severely crumbling my immersion, as I toil away in a vacant lonesome layer. I had visions of this when all the “cool GM spawn streamer stuff” was happening on a different layer during Stress Test.
But how would you know if you aren’t there?
Chat channels aren’t layered and often you’ll hear about stuff going on.
Has anyone discussed this yet, any thoughts?
This is probably one of the significant arguments against layering, but hopefully the first few weeks is fast enough to not be an issue.
I think either of these ideas should apply to chest spawns as well.
There was a point during the stress test when they put a server message that they were going to test collapsing layers and I was actually making my way to loot a chest at a camp and I guess “layered” and there was another chest spawned and that happened to me about 3-5 times over a 30-60min period and I looted a chest at the same camp from each layer I went to.
But multiplying respawn times would fix this. Say we have 3 layers. BL is a one hour respawn, so make it 3 hours. Yes, there are still 3 layers it is spawning on, but you are still only averaging one spawn per hour.
People will be hitting 50+ before the first week, and able to start farming this stuff. I honestly expect most realms to be down to just 2 layers by the end of the first week though, assuming they are going with 3 layers per realm.
Funny, I had forgotten that Teebu’s wasn’t a world drop. Edgemaster’s Handguards is a better example, I suppose.
This was my first thought when I learned of layering and I thought layering would persist through on those servers that didn’t experience population drop offs but it seems that after Phase 1 a server queue is what we’ll get and I’m perfectly fine with that.
Still, the actual number of them in the ‘first few weeks’ won’t be terribly high.
I don’t see world drops being much of an issue. At the higher levels needed to get these things, players will be spread out enough that having 2-3 layers of extra mobs isn’t going to have a big impact on players getting more world drops. The idea behind layering is that you will have a servers worth of players that actually play vanilla, and 2 servers worth of tourists that will mostly quit long before even making it to lv30, The two servers worth of tourists won’t be getting high enough level to get things like edgemasters.
I like your suggestions and would add
Cannot switch layers while in combat or dead
Here’s a thought to solve the only real problem in that list.
Nodes are shared across layer. So if someone loots it, it starts a despawn timer for all other layers. Just to prevent it ghosting you because you didn’t see someone in another layer coming up to grab it.
I believe teebu’s was a world drop, just that it was from level 61+ mobs only so there were mobs inside instances than out that had a chance to drop it.
As for resource exploiting with layer hopping, for me I dont see it as a huge concern. While I’m sure a few people will get a few extra this way if the layers behave as their own worlds the current spawn locations between layers dont have to ever match up. That would mean people will have to still run their resource route in the next layer to find where the current spawns in that layer are.
There will also be more people competing and using the resources with so many extra people around. If they let a greater number of people onto the server at once, there will also be way more quick levelers on the server, not just more people who will quit at 20 so all in all it should not be that different from a server where non of the early quitters show up in the first place.
Well, the dead is essentially prevented by the fact that you have to enter an Inn or City. And if you’re getting into an Inn or City, there’s a relatively good chance you’re not in combat.
This would cause skill ups to be 10x or (whatever Layer times) slower than they otherwise would be because everyone competing for that node would not find one.
The spawn locations are fixed and known across every server. Which ones are spawned is a matter of randomness, but that’s precisely why people would layer hop. To check a given location 5 times.
Per layer, not really.