To keep it simple the Layering process in Forever feels not great at the moment.
On the first night I could be in one layer for maybe 5 minutes before getting the notification I’m going to be moved. Which fine, it was busy and I was always dropped into a relatively less populated area.
Last night and today, I would see the pop up less frequently, however, it consistently popped the moment I made my way into a quest area that had only a couple others around. Which is great, not that many people. I’d get phased and put into a layer that was significantly more crowded and what was a field of enemies in front of me is now a pile of corpses and 20 other people scrambling for mob tags.
I understand the system at play that usually means the layer I was on become empty enough that it migrated everyone remaining to another one so it could close out the layer and move the resources elsewhere. But it feels like trash to run up to an area for a quest, see a ton of enemies only to watch it fade away against your will.
Also, something was odd with grouping up in the world causing you to jump layers as soon as you form a party. On more than one instance tonight, while fighting a named quest mob, someone would run up, id invite them or theyd invite me to share the tag but it would automatically just move us into a different phase and the quest mob just disappeared forcing us to wait for it to respawn in the new layer.
The suggestion, give us the agency to move layers if we want at will. If I’m on one layer, and its super crowded or I get automatically phased into a crowded layer and I dont really want to be, give us to option to move to a less populated one rather than only being forced for whatever limits are in place are met.
Earlier today I phased like 3 times in 5-6 minutes. I clicked to go now thinking I’d get it over with, just it happened 3 times in a row. Also I was attacking the messenger, and got phased when I had him almost dead. Had to wait again…
It doesn’t feel very wow at all. I can’t remember a time in history of WoW that I’ve ever experienced anything like this, not even in retail. It’s absurd.
Agreed, but it especially feels antithetical to the Classic they say they wan to provide where you see familiar faces in the world. I’ve had a lot of particulularly bad experiences with layering. Constantly moving me out of layers with rain into layers without. I’ll be talking to people in the world in say, and suddenly I or they will drop group and be moved layers. I was talking to someone on the Zeppelin just last night and when we zoned, they were gone. I’ll be questing alongside someone for ten minutes and suddenly they are gone. The world feels more impermanent than ever, with people coming and going like ghosts, and disappearing practically mid-sentence. It’s terrible.
Yeah, it blows for sure. They need to just make layers far more sticky. There is no reason to have people jumping constantly. It’s the most immersion killing thing ever.
The game simply doesn’t work on servers with more than like 1500 active players. The fact they keep trying to push it is insane. Every complaint about the Vanilla game since 2019 has had either mega servers or streamers as the root cause.
I think they should just make the layer swapping entirely manual. Go to a major city and interact with a special object or NPC to get the option to change to a different layer. In effect the layers would be sub-realms (they could even be named like realms). Not only would that solve the issues that happen trying to quest while being randomly moved between layers, it would also add player agency to creating communities where you see the same people over and over again.
It would help if they layered more to start with, so there wasn’t a need to keep doing it. Several of the early quests zones (actually almost all) are overpopulated. This means a lot of standing around waiting to complete quests. Not a good use of time in my opinion.
My personal hot take; I WANT to be in overcrowded zones!! I WANT to see hundreds of players out in the world, where we can all figure out if we’re going to play nice or fight over quest completions.
I hate how isolated the world feels with “layers”.
My only complaint on this is the respawns! I can barely sit down to drink and eat! Just when I am done killing, it phases and it’s like deja vu … but I die because I have no more mana.
I get on paper why they did this but in practice right now it doesnt work as intended. Clear cave check…get phased check…clear cave again. Once you in an instance or layer you should stay and maybe a drop down of the different instances that if you want to join a friend you can. Sort of like Lost Ark did before it died. To me that would be decent compromise.
I feel exactly the same! I don’t care about having to fight for mobs to kill. I’d rather have more people running around.
And THAT is why they need to add a setting to the Options menu for Layer Population. Let people choose if they want to be in Light, Medium, or Heavily populated shards. If people are looking for an active world pvp experience (if they are on pvp ruleset) then let them choose Heavy. If they are questing and don’t want to be in a crowd of players then let them choose Light. And set the default as Medium so if they have no preference then it operates normally.
this is not normal or good