So many posts here on how were stuck with the abuse caused by unregulated layer switching because layering needs to exist. These are two separate issues.
Layering itself is fine; the problem is that switching layers is too easy. There needs to be either a longer cooldown or a requirement of being in the same zone/area as the leader to switch layers.
eq put 5 min cooldown on their pick timers.
a pick in eq tlp is another instance of the zone open at the same time as the original with all the same creatures in it (except raid bosses).
Yes, the eq approach had both a cooldown and a zone requirement. You had to be in that specific zone to switch picks/layers. Wow would benefit from this combined approach - cooldown and requiring you to be in the same zone as the leader
My server’s economy is ruined because of it. rare crafting paterns have no value because each individual layer has its own vendor for every pattern. Rare spawns are getting farmed HARD too. Herbs as well.
Layering is ruining the economy and blizzard needs to remove it ASAP.
There’s too much gold, and too many items getting added to the economy, and scarcity isn’t part of the equation at all.
it’s not just layering though, it’s the sheer amount of people on each server. i’m sure more than a few people thought it’d be a good idea to do 2 gathering skills.
The moment Joker abused layering for world first 60 cheatingly, I knew this would all happen. It’s come full circle.
I mean I’m sitting on a half dozen 6 hour respawn patterns on a server that has a que at primetime.
This is exactly what EQ did on their TLP servers after a bit… 15 min CD… stopped it pretty much cold.
Every classic guide video ever suggested to pick 2 gathering skills…now look the mess we got in.
yeah, the main problem is just how easy it is to swap layers. i think the best thing to do is for them to implement both a cooldown as well as limit the number of times you can manually swap layers (by joining a party of someone not on your layer). maybe make it so you can only manually change layers once every 5 minutes and can only swap layers manually 5 times an hour.
this not only limits the amount of times you can layer swap yourself, but also encourages you to not constantly join groups and then immediately leave after finishing that quest part (especially if said quest is a chain) and reinforces the community a bit more (can’t count the number of times people would invite me or join my group, kill the couple mobs they need, then dip out only to invite/join me again 5 minutes later on step 2 of said quest)
i dont know if the numbers i’m about to state are correct. they were merely stated elsewhere on the forums (so likely not correct), but i saw something like 15k folks avg per server today vs back in the real vanwow days it was closer to 3k.
so you got 5 times the people, on the same server, more familiar with the now than then — it’s a contributing factor to the AH prices and stuff. it’s not all layering exploiting imo, although, i will agree there is definitely some skewedness being made from layering farming, but gotta wait on the big B to do something or not at this point. Gotta keep on trucking, farming them ogres, getting that fancy silk.
This is the point though. Layering is necessary. Being able to switch layers so easily and in an unregulated manner is not necessary to maintain the stability, and is the source of the exploits
i don’t disagree
I cant even imagine playing on non layered servers right now. There are already a ton of people pretty much everywhere, get rid of layers, and you have 5x or 10x more people in the same zones, it would be a nightmare.
That said, the exploitation of the layering system should be fixed.
That that said, i think i am now involved in this kind of conversation on this topic in like 4 different threads lol
There should be absolutely no way to switch layers PERIOD! If your in a guild then your stuck in that guild layer even if you switch to another guild, this is the way it should of been enforced from the start, now its too late, we got people at the gold cap already…
just remove layering
most servers are old enough that most people are doing dungeon farming anyways
I feel like there is a happy medium between no layer switching at all and being able to layer switch whenever you want
Video guides, youtube and twitch are the biggest problem with mmorpgs currently. People used to have to screw up and get lost before people made videos for even the most mundane things.
The same zone requirement I agree with, they did the same thing with sharding in retail. A cooldown however, is a really bad idea. This would just make life harder for people making legit groups for things.
We’ve been monitoring players’ use of layers, and we agree that we should add a delay between subsequent layer transfers. Under the hood we have all the controls I talked about in the Reddit AMA before launch, a few secret weapons we haven’t discussed publicly, and we’re working on deploying some additional controls to further restrain layering from being exploitable.
However, we also want to assure you that the issue is a much smaller problem than some people are claiming. We’ve been closely monitoring the effect layering is having on economies and other aspects of the game, and many of the stories we see posted are wildly inaccurate. We’ve seen screenshots of banks full of rare crafting materials, which we’ve investigated and proved false.
Another popular theory is that you can determine your current layer by doing a /who in a capital city, and comparing the results against the /who your friend does. That doesn’t work because /who returns results from the entire realm, not just from your layer, and if the result set is too large it truncates the results before sorting them. This means every player gets different results, but those differences in result set have nothing to do with which layer you’re on. This has led some people to claim that they’ve discovered dozens of layers per realm, but that claim is completely false.
All realms have a single-digit number of layers. Most of them have a low single-digit number.
Rest assured that there are not people running around with banks full of (Thorium) Arcane Crystals or Black Lotus.