Making layering permanent in TBC was 100% the prime culprit behind the mass consolidation into megaservers, and by far one of the worst mistakes ever in classic along side the pay to win boosts.
A huge part of what made classic great was the server-community feel where you recognize all the top guilds, have opposite faction rivalries, recognize people who have made a name for themself, etc.
The only reason not to do the old server system if you for whatever reason absolutely refuse to merge servers. It took all the way until wrath for you to do it and by then the damage was already done.
The only reason any non-trivial number of vanilla enthusiasts don’t want this is they don’t trust you to take action to merge dead realms and not force the playerbase to purchase the solution. The ideal for the vast majority of vanilla fans are the old smaller communities but with the promise that the dead realms won’t be left to rot and will be merged immediately when neccessary.
servers in “true” classic were never meant to hold more than 2-3000 players across the entire server. layering is a way to keep these 10k pop servers manageable
10k pop servers do not exist without layering. We should have higher caps than the original 2.5k, but 10k+ players on a single server is ridiculous and completely counter to what many loved about original vanilla.
I can only imagine what the lag would be like with 2-3k players running around ashenvale. I’m not a big fan of layering but it does solve some key problems, like realms dying out. I’d rather have layers than free transfers every month.
Not sure how they can pull off ashenvale pvp without some sort of layering.
I actually really enjoy layering and it’s help immensely. If one area is over camped I can look to layer jump to a lesser camped area.
If one quest mob is bugged maybe it’s not bugged on the other layer.
If there was no layering there would be 500 players in elywnn forest on Nov 30 and the game would crash and no one could play it.
If I had it my way, we’d have 1 pvp and pve server per region and 200,000 player server pops. No more dead servers. No more faction imbalances. No more dead economies.
Just let us pick the names we want regardless if it’s taken. A number can just be assigned to it that’s only visible in global chats
Anti-layering players have zero meaningful understanding of all the nightmarish server population and faction balance logistical issues that were experienced by every server that existed before they had layering/sharding tech.
Wanting fully oldschool servers so we can have dozens of servers where half die in a month and a handful have multi-hour login queues for months isn’t a reasonable ask or anything the majority of players would want to experience.
I find it very telling that all the pro-layering responses are coming from retail characters, but here I go.
The fix to this is to have a system like oldschool wintergrasp. Cap the zone at 120 people, and then there is a queue.
Like I said, the solution is blizzard merging servers immediately when necessary instead of selling the solution with transfers. With the promise of necessary merges, server transfers should be prohibbitted.
Originally we were told layering would only be for starting zones, and this was frankly the only logical place to have it. But we’ve seen from history blizzard cannot be trusted after they made the idiotic decision in TBC to make it permanent when we had no layering for most of vanilla and it was fine.
Did you even play classic vanilla and TBC? The faction balance issues started in TBC when layering was made permanent. There was a few lopped realms but the vast majority were fine. TBC layering is what kicked off the mass consolidation into one-faction megaservers. History has shown layering makes faction balance issues worse, not better.
The PvP faction balance issue is solved by the faction queue.
I would rather struggle at 5fps and 1k ping than have that lame participation trophy crap where your faction gets credit for winning even while losing just because another layer got the win.
Most of the vanilla fans disagree with you. A massive part of what drew people towards demanding classic servers in the first place was the old-school small community feel. We had this in vanilla but were robbed it in TBC when layering was permanent and it had devastating consequences. Layering in TBC is why we have 1 faction servers.
Having a megaserver means there is no server-wide reputation, you don’t recognise guilds on either faction, there are no rivalries, no-one is well known or makes a name for themself, etc.
The small town feel of vanilla is a huge part of the classic feel. You are simply wrong on this.
The “classic philosophy” you are talking about only causes dead or one-sided servers. We saw this on the original 2019 release. Layering is a good solution for most of this issues.
I’ve played WoW since open beta of vanilla. I would never want to see oldschool servers without layering ever again. Maybe you played on some dead low pop server or never played real oldschool WoW at all, but real oldschool popular servers had multi-hour long queues and the other servers died and had players begging for free transfers for months.
If you allow a much larger population than the original game allowed onto a single layer, you also ruin the experience of the game because the zones are overcrowded. Even with faster spawn times it feels less like an open world MMO and more like you’re standing in a line waiting for your turn to kill the mobs.
Faction balance death happened not only in classic. It happened on the original game as well. Almost EVERY single original server lost faction balance over time. Some faster than others. You’re trying to find something to blame that isn’t the actual reason for blame. Layering doesn’t make faction balance worse.
Layering can actually significantly improve the experience of WPvP if you used a faction balancing system similar to War Mode in retail. I’d actually say zone specific sharding + faction balancing is better for WPvP.
Their proposed faction lock system is actually terrible logistically as well as it may stop friend groups from playing together if they didn’t all start at the same time.
They’d be better off offering free faction transfers to the underpopulated faction and an XP boost to level alts on the underpopulated faction than what they’re doing.
If you did no layering and combined it with their faction system you’d actually have a laughably terrible combination as servers would see a mass exodus of re-rolls off the server every time it got faction locked and groups of friends decided to re-locate.
Nonsense. You can still run into the same people if you happen to do the same kinds of things and play at the same times regularly.
For example, on Defias Pillager, which has many layers, especially early on when I played HC, I regularly ran into several people that were around my level and playing at the same time I did. Also got invited to dungeon groups from some of them multiple times.
Even in oldschool WoW, some of us also did not care what your name was or pay any attention to you at all.
Megaservers allow a servers population to be resilient to migrations away from the game so you can continue playing longer when groups of players start leaving. Oldschool servers suffered horribly from sudden migrations that ruined the game for the remaining players stuck there.
I’m confused by this statement. You know they used layering in the original 2019 release, right? So if there were dead or on-sided servers…how did layers help? It clearly didn’t.
To me the biggest solution is people need to understand it’s an mmorpg. There should be tons of players around. You should be encouraged to group up. This emphasis on solo play and segmenting the playerbase is decidedly un-Vanilla. And I don’t really want to hear about server stability. Go look at a farewell video to Nostralrius. Thousands and thousands of players crammed into a little area and the game ran fine (for most). But Blizz can’t achieve that? Nonsense.