There are. I’ve raised them myself.
“OMG LAYERING WILL DESTROY THE GAME! REMOVE IT NOW!” is whining.
Clearly, you think it’s a good idea, despite the many issues. Others don’t.
People who want this game have been already been insulted, ridiculed, shouted down, etc. for many years now. That tactic hasn’t worked so far. It’s probably not going to work now either.
In the grand scheme of things, sure its an advantage to those that use layer hopping to do stuff like being able to farm multiple layers resource nodes (rich thorium -> arcane crystals, black lotus etc), rarespawns (silver elites, named quest mobs etc), treasure chests (gurubashi and world chests lots of world boes).
This will provide an economic advantage but all in all its not that big of a deal. The type of people who will be doing this are the type of people who will be miles ahead regardless, your plevers and no lifers. The average player will not suffer (and may even benefit by all the extra supply side resources forcing down prices).
I would think the proper time for this would be after launch. Not stress test.
Launching the game with game-breaking issues and no communication on their plans doesn’t sound like a good idea.
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They’ve communicated their plans. You just don’t like what they’ve said, so you’re pretending they haven’t until they say what you want them to say.
Blizzard saying anything further would be pointless.
I’m fine with what they initially said, but nothing shows they are following through with that. They’ve been packpeddling on what they initially said and people are asking for clarification which they haven’t given.
They said each layer would contain a realms worth but people are being split into even more layers based on a zone being overpopulated (sharding) while still being accessible to other zones people to even further abuse duplication and player separation. They also keep pushing back the few weeks to “end of phase 1”.
They also haven’t commented on what happens to high pop servers which absolutely won’t meet this end of phase 1 quota. Essentially they are going to make the servers even worse than they had been if they started with no layering because they made a promise they can’t deliver on.
No it doesn’t. Fortunately, testing isn’t done yet. Also, the layers have been forced, which is how people have been able to hop layers. We know as much that retail won’t work this way.
I hope you’re right. I think it’s good that people keep bringing it up because you’re either right and they fix it anyway or they communicate more and fix something unintended.
This is beta and we should be announcing the problems. There are lots of problems on top of this (unintentionally phasing outside of grouping) that are happening so it’s good to keep addressing them.
I think the beta testers are starting to feel the “feedback gap” as well.
I follow a few streamers and chat comments on a bug (he was playing a hunter, which was becoming frustrating) and the streamer just shrugged and said “all the bugs you see have already been submitted”.
I don’t know how long it takes to adjust things, but I suspect in attempting to add in “vanilla batch feelz” they broke pets classes.
My god these blizzard apologists are going full ostrich head in the sand lately… does any of them read or watch beta feedback… layering is the opposite of unnoticeable.
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Which you will, even with layering, you just won’t always see them. The secret is: You wouldn’t always see them without layering too.
Some hunter pet bugs were reported as fixed today. So here’s to hoping more will come.
Eh, depends on how hard you look for it. I obviously noticed it in the first stress test. That was the only one where I had a layer shift mid combat (had multiples). Kinda noticed it in the last one when I hardly saw anyone but I’ll be honest I don’t really care about that. Whether I see people or not matters to me little as long as I can group when needed, which I was able to every time I wanted to.
I know, I know, it’s an MMORPG how can you not care about seeing people. I think it’s cause in my first MMO seeing someone you didn’t know pop up on your screen generally wasn’t a good thing. So I liked not seeing anyone and became quite accustomed to it as I would try to avoid randos.
I don’t like layering but i can see the benefit of it but i don’t trust Blizzard as i look at retail with crz, sharding etc and i don’t want classic to turn out like BfA.(it’s one of the main reasons why i quit retail, screw crz and sharding)
I’m scared they will use it again with the gates of AQ40, or the likes of Naxx opening etc or when a lot of people log in and cannot handle the load. Another down side is how long will it be on for? If it’s longer than say 2 weeks then that is more than enough time for people to abuse it and it will affect the economy.
Then there is also the warts and all which layering goes against this rule, vanilla never had any crz, sharding in the open world, it only had CRBGs.
Playing the stress test made me realize even more how the cross realm zones and sharding have killed retail with its sense of community feel and game play that comes with not having these systems shoved down your throat and it’s another big thing missing from retail.
Absolutely it will have started developing. Friends lists build pretty easy. Youll find yourself running the leveling dungeons with a good core of people and start recognizing names all over.
Of course, no one knows how long layering will exist yet. But the community will be unfolding.
To put it mildly:
Layering is like breaking the fourth wall.
It’s disturbing to the illusion of a real world- one where what you see is exactly what you get. Players shouldn’t know what goes on ‘under the hood’ or behind the curtains. This illusion that they are in a world is broken by anything that seems weird–namely phasing, sharding, and layering–because let’s face it–they are. We don’t have that stuff IRL.
It’s a nagging reminder that the game you’re playing has a couple of… hacks
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The buggy implementation they are working on fixing is. And I’ve been pushing for fixes to exploits.
But like any software project, if you release an elegant solution with broken code, it’s broken. That’s why we have Beta and why they’re working to fix it right now.
Imagine that you are just about to loot the Gurubashi Arena Chest, being locked in a battle with the final opponent seconds away from death, then an entire raid of 40 people begin to layer in, stealing your rightfully earned chest, by cheating the system. Feelsbadman ![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
community can be established as soon as everybody hits level 10 tbqh.