The vanilla experience is not only 1.12 class design, dungeons, and raids. the main experience is built by the community, something retail is completely missing, and will also be missing from classic as long as layering exists.
It exists during the shortest lifespan because they are expecting most players to quit by then. that means most players will never get to experience the vanilla experience, they will experience classic with layer, which is retail with 1.12 balance.
It answers what they want while making it affect the playerbase as little as they can make it. Yes there is an element of a difference. But they make that difference gone after a given amount of time. You will get your non-layered servers. They just won’t be at launch.
the concern I and others have is potential lasting effects, that while may not last forever would certainly leave a lingering taste for some time after it’s gone, to go back to the previous metaphor it’s like you had a glass of strawberry milk but when you got to the last quarter of it, you filled it with more milk, it no longer tastes just like strawberry milk, it’s flavored kind of like it but it is mostly gone, and just repeating that process. Eventually yeah it’ll be the same as any glass of regular milk, but not everyone wants to go through that awkward aftertaste.
Cause clearly Vanilla Experience is based purely on “the content”. You are playing Classic, not Vanilla. It will never be Vanilla even if it replicated every facet of it. Things are too different in this day and age. As you said, the experience comes from the community. I don’t see the aspect of community going away in Classic.
Then don’t play until phase 2. You never have to have that bitter taste.
you can’t build a community when tens of thousands of players are hopping in and out of the world to different worlds.
the vanilla experience has a smaller number of players all in the same world.
classic cannot come close to replicating vanilla with layers, and most players will quit (likely because of layers) before layers are gone and a real vanilla experience can begin
They don’t just hop in and out. There are conditions set in how it will occur. Players don’t just randomly jump from layer to layer. The players have an element of control when it comes to jumping layers. Blizz is using bandaids to limit exploitation based on the fact that players have the capability to make these decisions. All players on the server exist and thus you are able to interact with them. Interaction in any form leads to community.
I messed up? You just stated that thee servers wont be full of committed players. It seems you are agreeing with me that they will suffer the same attrition layered servers will. The difference is that layered servers end up with a stable server population. This idea of yours ends with a server peaking at around 500 players. That is far worse for the economy and not enough players to even have a community.
This is entirely correct. Most of us, most of the time, won’t notice layering. It isn’t nearly as visible and annoying as sharding. Besides it will be fully gone by Phase 2 if not sooner.
but it doesn’t fit muh narrative and isn’t as feared if it doesn’t completely ruin everything about the vanilla experience.
To be fair there is elements where it is noticeable. I have seen feedback where players feel like the world is empty. Blizz will use that feedback to improve on it. To give the best experience they can try and give.
The feedback is coming from stress test realms. Those realms and the stress tests were setup to test layering. Layering is a new concept and Blizzard is working on how to best implement it. To extrapolate how it worked in testing to the production game two months from now is a fallacy.
Pretty much my point. They are improving it, but that does not mean the testing experience did not matter. Its because of the testing experience that it can improve after all.
It has too. First stress test I had dozens of layer shifts mid combat. Don’t recall a single one since.
Of course. It needs testing and tweaking to make it as unobtrusive as possible.
This isn’t aimed at you at all. But many on the forum are crying the sky is falling because of something they saw or heard about during the stress tests. They seem to have no understand what the testing was for.
but but but on the beta… this guy hopped layers and farmed some nodes/chest.
I haven’t gotten a purposeful layer hop to go off without a hitch on any stress test. Really starting to think it has more to do with pop of beta than anything.
it doesn’t matter the conditions, they can do it so they will. if you hop worlds half the time you join a group for a quest which is often, and everyone else in the world is doing the same thing, the playerbase will always be way too mixed up across multiple dimensions to form and kind of world community.
no, that’s not how it works.
all players on a different realm also exist, and you can interact by rerolling a new character on their realm. therefore all realms share the same community no matter what? no.
you can’t interact with players unless they’re on your layer, and the people on your layer are constantly changing, that does not lead to community
No, I am sure they understood. At least most of them. There is just entitlement wafting in the air. I almost made a Southpark reference, but that would be smug.
That’s not true though. Conversing is interacting. You can always participate in chat, chats are server wide not layer.
You sure you know how Layering works? Cause last I checked you can still communicate with people over layers and they have an affect on the AH and so forth. You have the capability to interact with all layers in some form.