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…
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.
Thanks for the blue post. I think many people will feel better knowing for sure that the situation is being monitored and is not as dire as many people are assuming.
This is good to hear that you all are watching and monitoring this and that it’s not as bad as some are saying. I know I was personally getting concerned that if these things were true, it could be the games downfall.
Thank you for the assurance. Can you please take an explicit stance that this behavior is indeed exploitation and a violation of TOS? I know you used the word “exploitable”, but people twist words. There should be consequences for using this in an unintended way to gain advantages over other players, even if it isn’t to the degree that some have claimed.
Very happy to hear this, the complaining felt a little much. However, the small number of folks who have exploited this and the raid experience bug have put a shadow on an otherwise pretty fun start to Classic.
It would be nice to see this get addressed.
From a legacy gamer standpoint (I’ve played MMOs since the late 90s), even small numbers of players exploiting known bugs can ruin the fun for a chunk of the population. Also, my experience from beta testing MMOs for the last 20 years is that “known internet personalities” (streamers), and high profile guilds are poor testers and tend to keep bugs that will benefit them to themselves. The beta test for Classic made this “classic” mistake in focusing on their involvement over effective bug detection and testing.
The hype train is needed, but so is a solid gaming experience. For the most part Classic has been amazing, but something to keep in mind in the future.