Layering Making Game Feel Dead?

[Mercymurv-crusader-strike]

50+ people in my zones, LFG and Trade going nuts, but it feels very dead wherever I go. Just makes no sense.

[Eat-living-flame]

A necessary evil, otherwise it’d be horribly laggy and everyone would be competing for spawns for hours.

I’m not sure if cities are still layered anymore, though, they were at the start.

Everyone’s also spread out, leveling. I always see 50+ people in the zones I’m in at any given point in time, but I’ve gotta run around for a bit before running into a player or three.

Players are on the move, getting it done. Not sitting around like in Phase 1, which kinda ‘ended’ quickly.

[Upright-skyfury]

Layers are the worst thing to ever happen to Classic.

Completely unacceptable for an MMORPG.

Ill take queues over layers any day. Id rather queue to play an actual game than to jump into a layered mess.

[Mercymurv-crusader-strike]

I agree. The other poster says it would be horribly laggy but I’m saying that the world feels dead, and being alive is not going to make it laggy. As for spawns they can just adjust the respawn times if it’s a problem. I’d rather compete for a kill or have a login queue to play an MMO instead of an almost single player experience personally.

[Tira-shadowstrike-au]

I did a census on Chaos bolt at 2am today. 573 people online on alliance side, but 3 layers.

That’s less than 200 people per layer. Why. If there’s less than 2,000 people online on the server, there should be 1 layer.

[Eat-living-flame]

Do you remember launch day?

Even with layers on, every starting zone was hell lol.

I get people want that “mmo-feeling” but there’s always a limit on what abuse the servers can take lol.

Even Ashenvale became a problem at times.

Season of Discovery Launch Experience

[Tira-shadowstrike-au]

Launch day, launch weekend, or hell, launch week, is fine, but after that first week, layers should be significantly cut back.

[Eat-living-flame]

I agree with that, and I think Blizzard agrees too to some extent.

Layering did get cut back, but it still exists overall.

I think they said something about layers resetting each night?

Like, if a zone is uber-populated, more layers will appear, but those layers added won’t be removed until a daily reset at the end of the night or something along those lines.

I’ll have to find it.

Edit: Found it.

Update on the Battle for Ashenvale and Layers - 12/14/2023

Greetings, Sometimes in game development you find yourselves in situations where things don’t go according to the design or plan you have in mind. In the past when we’ve hit such situations, we’ve done our best to remain transparent and take some time to explain what our intent was, what went awry, and what our next steps are. We’d very much like to carry that forward with Season of Discovery, where it’s especially important to be open and honest. Season of Discovery is, by its nature, highly …

Specifically it had to do with Battle for Ashenvale, but I’m sure it applies elsewhere too.

The devs certainly know dead layers is an issue.

@Aggrend-1483

TLDR and the path forward

The next set of changes we have on deck are:

• With a hotfix tomorrow we will no longer be dynamically retiring layers. This means that late at night or early in the morning there will be more layers than are needed and the world may feel more empty.

That’s probably why.

[Bifteki-shadowstrike-au]

meanwhile games like Fortnite, Warzone, PUBG have 100’s in the same area with no real hiccups but somehow it’s impossible for Blizzard to get things working.

Private servers patch their clients to get thousands of players with no problems.
What’s the problem Blizzard?

[Cthyllajr-westfall]

They made changes because people weren’t able to quest with the “world feeling alive”. So now you don’t see as many people in the world, but that also means its not insanely inefficient to level by questing anymore.

[Sentenzå-sargeras]

There’s a constant pull and push between layers and no-layers.

Aggressive layering sucked in p1 because you would get booted out of an ashenvale in progress. It isn’t so bad in p2 because STV is highly contingent on having a relatively lag free existence. Also, in p2 players are simply spread out in less leveling zones so you need more layers so that people can enjoy leveling.

As far as cities feeling populated… . Maybe once more people are 40 they’ll be hanging out in capital cities again.