Did they remove the warning system they said would be in the game? I have not seen it pop up since the first week of beta.
Layering should not immediately move you when you leave a group. This could put you in a dangerous spot you were not ready for. Also it takes you away from players you were just playing with. That seems to go against wanting the world to feel active.
I mean just a suggestion…before you leave a group you could, and I know this is a wild thought, move to a safer location. Hope that helps.
I think that was only for the beta in the beginning because then people would know when it was sharding them. Also its best not to use the term layer. It’s not really a layer. It’s a shard. Layers used to be consistent across zones. Now ever zone has a mess of shards.
We might see a better pve implementation of sharding where moving zone lines with your group won’t spread you across shared everytime you cross a zone line.
I would not expect to see any improvements in balanced shards between horde/alliance or world pvp fuctioning even decently well before launch. I can pretty much gaurentee that cross zone borders will continue to shard parties unpredictably so camping zone lines is going to be the meta on PVP servers. They just don’t have the time to fix such a complex system and the other massive game breaking bugs in the time before launch.
They know this too because it is why they didn’t set a date for hardcore. They fully expect the sharding system to be terrible for a large chunk of the game in the first 6 months to a year.
The fundamental problem here is, I can invite 2 people standing next to me and sometimes them joining my group moves then to a different shard. Or moves all 3 of us to a different shard then the one we were all standing on. Then if someone DC’s or leaves party it can randomly phase everyone in the party to a different shard. This is still happening right now in the beta.
They said in the WoW Forever Podcast that this was a massive issue and they were looking into it - I’m sure it’s not something that can just be fixed easily and will take some effort to fix. I would suspect it would be fixed before launch if not shortly after.
There’s more problems than that.
When you relog you will more often than not end up in a different layer, at least in my experience, and you can only fix it by leaving the group, which will also layer other group members.
Sometimes inviting people still layers the whole group. Inviting someone for a quest mob is always a gamble. Even though it got better since the start.
Often you just group up for a few mobs. Disbanding that very temporary group should not layer everyone for no reason.
This isn’t about being safe when it happens, it should simply not happen because it feels broken.
I have noticed that I no longer get the pop up in the middle of my screen, but I do get the little box on the left hand side above my chat that you previously saw if you delayed your layer transfer.
This happened the other day to me and my friends. We were all in group 3 of them got to RFk while I was still traveling and where standing near the stone waiting semi afk it literally just randomly put them all on different layers not only from me but from each other and no changes to group were made and none of them were really moving.
Since day 1, I’ve only seen the box about 40% of the time you get layered.
since the first day of beta the only times I haven’t seen the box is when transitioning between zones or joining/leaving a group. weird how it’s inconsistent between people.
That was just an example. Instead of just shutting down the conversation, maybe we should acknowledge it’s a problem and talk about it. Because it’s beta. Hope that helps.
Layering isn’t a bad thing. There I said it. I don’t care about the random chance I miss out on some rare mob I probably wasnt going to kill anyways. I don’t care if I leave a group and they vanish because we werent buddies…they were people I used to knock an objective out with or a dungeon with. Why do I care if they poof vanish into the atmosphere? Here’s what I do care about. Running around in a world with 28 people in the entirety of the crossroads while im trying to knock out group quests or dungeons. I care about 60 people being online on my server when it’s raid time. Layering solves those issues. So if I all it takes is me moving to a safe location before I leave a group to reap the benefits that layering offers then I’m down to do that.
I wanted to swap to a higher level character cuz westfall was being attacked but naturally when I get there I am not in the same layer as the attackers anymore.
I’m not saying Layering needs to go away or is bad. I’m saying it has issues in the current beta.
Like this, that is a problem. And how do you know which layer you need to be on.