Layering - Not acceptable!

From their point of view, they’re inconveniencing people at the very beginning of an open ended game. They believe they will make more money from retail players who will sub during periods they would otherwise have lapsed than they will lose from classic players who see through the lies and dissembling and decide to not play.

The problem is, they know how badly people want classic, and they will continue to push that envelope. They’re like a kid inflating a balloon, farther and farther, trying to get it as big as they can without popping it. At some point, some change will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. There’s a reason Retail has repeatedly lost more net subs during a single expansion than they even have left playing.

Brian Birmingham has been honest about everything he’s said so far. I have every reason to trust the Lead Dev for Classic.

I Trust action over words. And not every action deserves future trust.

So do I. And the person who’s been running the Classic development has come through so far, time and time again…

And not every action deserves future trust. Been down that road with experience. You only trust them After they prove each and every action. Not one or two, but every one.

So until it happens. It’s always open for it to NOT happen.

I agree with you completely.

On the other hand I think we really need to get all these layering threads compressed into one big megathread. A megathread has a much higher chance of actually getting Blizzard’s attention and hopefully a response.

They won’t be that inaccurate once classic launches…assuming they’re still around

They don’t care or they can’t recreate vanilla - these threads have been around since Nov. of last year. Take it or leave it.

I strongly agree. The simple server cap method worked for multiple expansions where the population went up consistently and the chaotic struggle made the world feel like a world and players were all the better for it. They are pretty much doing exactly what they did with modern WoW acting like an overprotective parent thinking it’s what is best when in reality it’s going to harm everyone. If layering overstays its welcome we will be extremely impacted and this decision is ridiculous as adding LFG/LFR because it’s “more convenient”.

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Vanilla release had 90 servers https //wowwiki fandom
com/wiki/Timeline_of_the_creation_of_US_realms

I agree with you, OP. Layering goes what vanilla WoW is. It takes what is supposed to be one world, and instances it into multiple Azeroth’s, dividing the world, it’s authenticity, and even putting a strain on the community as it will use/abuse the layering mechanics to their advantage in one way or another.
You’ll see people chatting about things that may not even occur on your layer at all. It will affect the economy strongly, and needless to say the immersion will be heavily damaged too as you see the machine behind the veil doing it’s thing, just for a more comfortable, technically stable experience. Layering has so many ripple effects on the whole game that cannot be ignored, and will change the game a lot by itself, but especially the longer it stays in.

WoW has already proven multiple times, and the most in vanilla, that you can have a very messy launch even for days or a week in, and still become the most successfull MMORPG of all time. People may upset for a while, and Blizzard employees might need intense relaxation yoga afterwards, but it will nevertheless be a great success in the longterm, because that original launch didn’t stop players last time, at all. It won’t do so this time either. Embrace the struggle, find your way to deal with it, no one forces you to rush and kill wolves for their buttfur right off the start. It’s not retail.

Go talk to people, fish, mine, play the AH, explore, duel… you name it. The storm will pass in about a week, especially with newer tech being able to handle more players. Layering is gonna stay for multiple weeks, worst case months, and will not be providing the classic experience.
On top of that, as the launch of classic will be very special, layering will be a part of that first start experience, and all the effects that come with it, be it on game mechanics, immersion or community, will be remembered by every player who is part of the launch and beyond.

No thanks. I’d rather have a chaotic week, and wait a bit extra or chill with leveling, than have to play some heavily altered version of what vanilla was for weeks or worst case months, just to have modern comfort and convenience as retail WoW provides, that sacrifices authenticity to rerelease classic WoW for it. It’s not worth it at all.

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Now imagine fitting 90 servers worth of people into 6 servers???

You are a clown. We were lied to multiple times as of recently.
When classic was announced, they told us there was no sharding of any sort.
A few months later, they told us it was sharding in only the starting zones temporarily.
Now we are being told that sharding is continent wide for an indefinite amount of time, only that they “want” it out by the first few weeks.
There is absolutely no reason based off of this companys track record to trust that sharding will go away after phase 1, yet people are complete smoothbrain drones who will put immediate blind faith in any change they make and shill it.

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I hope they don’t cater to irrational people anymore than they already are.

Layering or some form of sharding will be necessary. The stress test proved that. You either need this, or hundreds of servers, most of which will be dead in a month or two. Frankly I’d be perfectly fine with a megaserver with perma layering as I described elsewhere as it would eliminate all future population issues that we’ll have with more servers, but the purists would have a stroke if that happened, so we’re getting this instead.

Mining/herbing exploits would be fairly easy to stop.

  1. Reserve someones spot on a layer for ~5 minutes after they’ve logged out and log them back into the same one if they log back in within that time.

  2. Require close proximity to move to another person’s layer if you’re invited to a group so you can’t just have level 1 alts in the starting area moving people into other layers. Who cares if someone standing by a node can invite you to come get it? They could have gotten it themselves and you can’t go back to the other layer without another person anchoring that layer as well.

  3. Live beta servers will have far fewer total layers than the ONE stress test server so there won’t be as many layers to potentially move between in the first place.

The massive impact and disastrous nature of layering is laughably overstated by irrational people.

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Exploits will be handled, I am not concerned at all.

My closed beta experience has been amazing thus far. 10/10

Edit: permanent layering is unacceptable!

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then people can contact a friend on a different layer to change layers, can’t they?

really, mining/herbing/fishing nodes, and prince nazjak and lo’grosh(30g per pacifier easily), are the only remarkable things that layer hopping can get you more of before level 45+ content
5 minutes won’t be enough for people to stop exploiting layering; though
its quite likely that someone who levels up fast will get an entire zone’s herbs and/or veins all to themselves

fishing nodes can get you a LOT of money early on, and FAST
and if you can reset the run from the northern STV pirates to booty bay twice, then you’re gonna make alot of money, and fast
for all I know, by the time you finish the third layer, the first layer might start respawning

and you’ll get a TON of thick and rugged leather and bolts of mageweave cloth and runecloth by doing it, as well as a TON of stonescale eels and green items that can be vendored and/or disenchanted

the economic effects of layering are bad, and a 5 minute layer-hopping cooldown started by grabbing any mining or fishing node wouldn’t be enough, and it wouldn’t be good for social interactions because people might often see herbalism or mining nodes or fishing nodes and want to play with their friend on another layer

honestly, at this point, id just say that causing the first layer entered by an account to be the only one that its allowed to use EVER is probably a better solution that letting the economy be even halfway ruined by layer-hopping

That would make zero sense as each layer is just effectively a separate server then.

If there are only a handful of layers per server and there are hundreds or thousands of people on each layer, it simply is not realistic that you’ll be able to monopolize the resources of multiple layers.

Resource exploits on retail have already been reduced significantly compared to how easy they were originally to exploit when sharding was first added to the game and on retail there are many more shards than there will be on one classic server since all servers share the same shard pool. Even with the much larger potential for exploits with a much larger pool, economies were not “ruined” on retail.

Blizzard lied, there’s a list for that. They changed minds, didn’t lie, just simply changed their mind.

exactly, it’d just be separate servers; the servers would become low pop as the tourists leave, and then they’d merge and stop being low-pop
people would still know who to go to to get enchants because those people aren’t tourists and would still be there after the mergers

in fact, if they were just separate servers on the realm list outright instead, then guilds and friends would still be able to play on the same server before and after the merger… and if the population of the game explodes, then they can leave the servers separate(and re-name 2/3rds of them) instead of merging them

if a single server was gonna be at the population cap with friends and parts of guilds trying to get into the server, then when theres 3 times less servers with 3 times the population cap, then friends and parts of guilds would ALSO have a hard time getting into the server and have to wait in the queue

about the only problem is the sudden influx of people that happens at one time(which solves the low population problem) and not knowing who 2/3rds of the ninja-looters are until people complain about them or you find out the hard way

and everybody would know ahead of time that the mergers are going to happen

and you couldn’t layer-hop