Guess not.
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That’s what I’m wondering about.
according to an article:
To deal with that disparity, the company is using “layering,” which creates multiple copies of the entire game world of Azeroth to hold people in the short term.
So what’s going on here? It’s either not on or doesn’t do what they says it does.
If they come in tomorrow and say they’re upping the layering I almost grantee you in couple months they’ll be asking “are you sure you want us to turn it off? it will be like launch”
I’m really starting to think layering is just a rebranding of a retail tech so they can PR their way out of the mistake of creating servers that have to have sharding on.
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No. No, it never was. Layering was about distributing the population so zones weren’t crowded. Its continent-wide sharding. It never had anything to do with queues.
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Your right, guess not… because thats not what layering was for… It’s to reduce population density in a given zone not increase total server capacity…
But hey, gold star for trying
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So it’s just shading then. With slightly different rules?
Because it seems like if your going to have the machines to create another instance of every shard on a continent, you could hold more players.
LOL yeah right 
Ive said that months ago.
Even made a threat about it.
Nobody cared.
Just wait for the que when they disable layering. 20k?
How about 50 to 60k.
Sounds about right.
I responded to you in another thread but, there isn’t a difference from a technical perspective of spreading people into different zones and increasing available instances. They are basically the same thing.
The holding part isn’t increasing the cap, it’s simply dividing the players on the server into multiple servers.
It’s 2019. The tech exists to support 2-3x what they’re currently allowing. They were not prepared. Nothing we can do but wait.
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There is if you want to eventually remove said instances. The point is letting people move relatively smoothly through the zones and having the ability to bring the servers back down to classic levels once phase two starts and the people who aren’t dedicated move on. The question is whether they have poorly guessed how many are going to be dedicated and if the huge queues result in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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“everybody will be clustered in the starting zones, and having players so close together causes an exponential drain on server resources. In fact, the same number of players cause more server problems crammed into Northshire than they do spread across all of Elwynn Forest.”
It was never meant to alleviate queues. Stop “quoting” rumors you hear as fact.
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The exact same tech they highlighted in that interview is the solution to the queue time as well. They are the same operation from a technical perspective. You split off another instance of the server and migrate the users to that new instance. I doubt that producer is a developer. Do you know his background?
The three other people in that AMA were Executive, Senior, and Principal Software Engineers, so yeah, I think they probably gave accurate information about what their tech is capable of.
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It might also be a software issue. The original game is 15 years old, and although it’s been heavily rebuilt over the years, the legacy code is still there. I remember Blizzard talking about how even something simple as providing a larger backpack was breaking the game in new and exciting ways, and when they finally figured out how to expand it, we got a whopping 4 slots.
Ah cool beans I went and looked through it found his explination:
Some players have suggested using sharding in low level zones to address launch demand, both because we talked about that at Blizzcon, and because it’s what they’re used to from our modern expansions. Unfortunately, while modern WoW has content designed to work with sharding, WoW Classic does not. The most obvious example of incompatible content is Rexxar’s famously long patrol path
So it’s really not a technical problem it’s just they think the user experience is worsened which I can kind of see I guess. It’s just a question of whether you think the queue is worth it to make sure you’re not randomly placed in an instance where Rexxar warps across the map to a different part of his route. Tough call for me I could go either way.
Here is where the confusion is coming from. It’s a technology that apparently is needed to allow a server to have more people playing on it, but it doesn’t increase the capacity of a server to have more people playing on it.
What is the chain of events here? Because it sounds like if an area is at max capacity a new layer is created to handle more capacity.
When a layer is created is it getting it’s own addition cores and memory?
My assumption is they have a cap on the number of layers they’re creating, rather than it being an open-ended system with no cap (unless Blizzard increases it). The game right now feels like there is no layering at all though.
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In my starting zone every mob was camped by 3-5 players and it took almost an hour to complete a quest. I’d hate to see what those areas would have looked like without layering.
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That’s actually true. BUT in the end, when you take off the layering what is left has to “fit” in a single layer area. So, if you posit a 80% attrition, you still have to have room for 20% of the current population on ONE layer. So, you still can’t get TOO big or we’ll have a very crowded world (when layering’s removed) until people simply get mad and leave.