So what really is the difference here. The only difference i can tell is that now it feels like the enemies phase between… uh layers i guess.
If someone could give a better explanation than “Layering is just better than phasing” I’d really appreciate that.
Edit:
Just scroll down one more.
The best example from the Developer Interviews is when people run from one start zone to another.
Leaving Valley of Trials and into Durotar, you notice someone else doing the same. While not grouping up, you continue to run north to the Zeppelin together.
You get on the Zeppelin together and then appear in Tirisfal Glades together. You jump off the Zeppelin, and both head towards Deathknell dodging or outrunning level 8 mobs and finally reach the entry to Deathknell. As you step across the threshold together, neither of you disappears, and as you meet up with friends already there, you continue to see each other battling mobs in the zone.
Two people in the same layer should never see the other disappear when standing in the same place. With Sharding, each time you transition zones, there’s a chance you will not be on the same shard.
Its funny you used a horde analogy and I used an alliance one given the cirumstances.
The Elwynn to Dun Morogh one is too easy.
I like the journey yours takes us on.
From what I got from the Interviews, that’s the key reason why they didn’t want to go with standard sharding in starters. Simply because the feeling of “world” would be broken for anyone who left their shard.
Guess layering is work in progress, let’s hope they can get it to work, because alternatives suck even more.
Its worth mentioning that after the opening weeks when a servers population is spread out across the entire world, the devs want to do away with layering entirely.
Yeah essentially “One Layer” being the single world instance.
I thought Phasing was different from Sharding. Phasing is basically layering isnt it?
Sharding was about merging servers or something, thats what i thought while phasing was about keeping you on your server but showing you different things like from Quests and what not
Phasing isn’t (or shouldn’t be) part of it at all. Phasing is where two versions of a zone are overlaid, but depending on what part of a quest chain or event you’re at, is to which one you get put in. Phasing is designed to change the appearance of the area etc rather than load shedding.
Sharding is a zone level duplication of the instance so that resources aren’t over-stressed by too many people at once. Different zones can have different numbers of shards in them due to density of characters.
Layering is world level duplication of an instance so that any given layer only has a certain number of people in it across the entire world.
Think of it as Layering is basically Sharding the entire world instead of zone by zone.
so couldn’t they just use the phasing tech instead of creating something new? or are they just renaming it.
Layering is just sharding with a continent wide boundary.
It’s important to note that it doesn’t seem to be working as intended currently in beta. Sometimes you phase mid combat with a mob, which is not supposed to happen with the way they describe layering.
Also, currently in beta there seem to be some bugs/issues where you end up in a shard/layer with people from the other beta servers. IE: you run into PvE server players even when playing on the PvP server or currently people were seeing players from the stress test server in the same zones as players from the other servers.
None of the quests in vanilla were build with phases. They would have to manually rebuild each quest and every area in every zone to support phasing.
Phasing is a part of questing.
But couldn’t they just tweak phasing to make it work for the first weeks since they are planing on scrapping the system later anyway. Especially if its only suppose to be in the starter areas.
it wouldn’t even have to involve quests, it would be like how they describe Layers, you just make a phase that holds X amount of players
You must be confusing phasing and sharding. Very different systems.
They’re virtually the same, you phase between shards.
You can also phase between layers, but if they get the system right, only when invited to group, unlike with sharding where you can phase by entering another shard area.
Layering is like having 3 sub-servers in each server. Except you can swap between them by changing groups.
Before Phase 2 begins, the 3 sub-servers merge into one server. Lots of players will quit before phase 2 so this prevents Blizzard needing to offer realm transfers between a bunch of separate servers.
It was an idea proposed by the community in place of sharding. Layering is a good idea.
No, they are not the same thing. Phasing changes the scene.