Leeway and Layering

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
#1

Blizzard please reconsider your stance on both of these mechanics. I will try to be as brief as possible while attempting to stress how important it is to alter or remove both of these mechanics

Leeway
For those of you that don’t know about leeway, what it is, and how it works, here is a quick description: To assist melee in hitting moving targets the melee’s attack range is extended while moving, and while the melee and enemy are standing still the attack range shrinks to the normal size. This was to compensate for bad internet, bad PCs, and is something that is no longer needed today.

An excellent example that goes into much greater detail:

Layering
This has been beaten to death and I realize that so let me just state that layering is going to kill the herbalism and alchemy economy if it lasts more than a week. The amount of black lotus, dreamfoil, and other herbs people will be able to farm with the help of guildies layer hopping and inviting them will mean they will be set for the entirety of classic for flasking every raid. My solution would be to only use layering/sharding for levels 1-10, of if that’s not feasible, layering for the first week.

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Layering: The problem Nobo...Everybody saw coming
#2

Watched that vid earlier.

I honestly don’t recall this in Vanilla so I can’t say if that is indeed working as intended but HOOOOOOOO BOY hahahaha!

I’m all for authenticity but there’s a point where recreating stuff we don’t do in games development any longer thanks to better internet becomes a huge setback and design flaw with modern infrastructure.

To me in 2019, that looks flat out broke.

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#3

Wwwwwow. I thought something felt off last night…

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#4

For Leeway, gonna have to side with nochanges in this case. Keep it how it was originally. You might disagree with it, but it’s entirely possible that it was actually a good mechanic to have to help with connectivity issues and if it’s gone in current it might affect some players enjoyment without realizing it. Yeah definitely saying keep it how it was originally.

Layering sucks. It’s a bad system and there are better systems, but it’s the one we’re getting whether you like it not. I don’t like it, but I’ll deal with it so long as it goes away when they say it will. I worry about it going away though. I’m willing to risk a few months time to see if it’ll go though. Worst case scenario they decide to keep it far too long and I eventually quit as a result.

#5

Your attitude is simply defeated. This beta is meant to test and fix errors or things that don’t feel good.

Layering, Leeway, and Spell Batching all feel awful and need removed, removed, and lowered.

5 Likes
#6

That’s correct, but I’ve been defeated for a long time. I haven’t given real feedback in a long time. Because years ago back when psychic horror was released and had a travel time (because it was a poor copy paste of death coil) I reported it several times and was ignored. Then a few weeks later an arena master made a very, very similar post about the issue, was replied to by a ton of people, praised and had a blue post promising to fix it very shortly.

I don’t really give feedback anymore, just sorta give my opinion and say ‘give up’ because why try when Blizzard only listens to you if you’re top dog in some way shape or form.

#7

Have you not seen the speed at which online games operate these days? Especially in regards to player vs player vs latency vs vector accuracy?

I reaaaaaaally don’t think we need THIS much leeway, no. That would be a development/netcode problem if we do - since I’m going to assume tracking and relaying player vector data is far more accurate than it used to be.

#8

Sort of. If I’m to be perfectly honest I don’t keep track of all the games and all the practices…but I will point out that blizzard does have favor the shooter in overwatch which could be considered very similar. So does fortnite. A lot of people criticize them for it I believe.

With that said I don’t play current WoW so I don’t know how good/bad it plays out now. I was mostly just saying that if it was originally in WoW that it should probably be there to preserve it.

I get that it might be bad and I understand it might cause undesirable gameplay, but unlike a lot of others I’m not really hoping classic will be successful so I can play it for a long, long time. I’m hoping it’s successful so that they can sit down and realize all the stupid mistakes they’ve made over the years and possibly make a better game as a result. And I think that classic should be a museum piece to show how horrible, and awesome, the game was.

I’m sorry if my view seems foolish or whatever, but I just stand by them trying to be as authentic as possible. It would be really hypocritical of me to say ‘just fix this one thing’.

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#10

Aren’t leeway and layering a retail (:nauseated_face:) “feature”? I’m fine with spell batching but these last two need to go away for good…

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#11

Hmm, I really don’t remember what I just watched in that video happening in Vanilla. To be fair, I rarely played a melee class, but that just don’t look right at all.

To those who played a melee class to some extent in Vanilla, is this a bug in the video? That can’t be right.

Oh, to add on layering, yeah, it’s horrible and needs to be done away with as soon as possible.

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#12

I appreciate your position, but there’s already a lot that has been altered without an explanation so the precedent is there for some technical updates.

I honestly hadn’t even considered things like batching or leeway when it comes to needing these for netcode to help cover up any latency issues. There’s always going to be a bit of padding offered to a lot of stuff in both online modes and offline modes in games like, say, jump forgiveness in platformers. Allowing a few ms of time where jumping can still be performed after running off of an edge to help compensate for video latency on monitors and TVs. This was even a thing in SMB on the NES and is used by speedrunners. So padding is definitely a thing that gets implemented.

I understand the necessity for something like this in 2004, especially considering the scope and how “servers” worked back then, but not today.

Today we can increase ping rates between players in close proximity so players closer to one another share vector data more often to update position, action data, etc. For example maybe 20 updates per second for players far away is enough but when in close range increase that to 30, 40, etc so players get more relevant position data.

Truthfully the game itself has been improved on a technical level with newer rendering standards, DX, support for more resolutions, framerates, etc - to me this falls under the same hammer.

There’s no reason to keep this stuff so wide, same with batching. There’s no reason why you should eat a warrior’s charge if your poly went off before the charge command was received but both were delayed to the same batch. It removes high end play and makes faster reaction times less important.

If it were me the only upgrades Classic would get are technical and not updates like we’ve seen in other areas.

In 2019, people are used to more responsive games - especially online. Just my .02

#13

I’ll give you that this leeway thing does look very odd. But if it was in the original game, like spell batching for example, then i wouldn’t wanna see it gone.

Layering of course is a whole different story. Nothing it does was ever present in Vanilla, and the little good it does is outshadowed by the fact that it not only changes the game, but harms it’s whole game design philosophy and is only a shortterm fix to potential server population issues.

It’s very bluntly put, completely out of place and has to be avoided at all costs to allow Classic to draw people in from the get go, and be a longterm success. (there’s alternatives that allow classic to stay classic, and adress server issues without any layering)

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#14

I don’t think layer hopping is going to be as big of a problem as people make it out to be. I think by the time the first groups of players start hitting 60, most servers will be down to just 2 layers. Hopping to another layer after running around herbing your layer does not mean that the new layer will have all of it’s herbs up. Pretty good chance there will be someone there farming it as well.

Layering is a problem, but not because of layer hopping. Essentially, Blizzard is acknowledging that most people will quit Classic within a month or so, and only a single realms worth of players that start will stick around long term. Layering divides these actual players among multiple layers. Say we are down to 2 layers and we have 300 players all lv55+. Instead of those 300 players competing for resources on a single server, you have 150 players each on a separate layer with its own resources.

Like it or not, layer is necessary in order to deal with retail tourists. Blizzard has stated they aren’t going to open hundreds of servers that would all die and need to be merged, so the alternative is 12 hour long queues to get in. I have heard it suggested that they lock you to a layer, or limit which layer you can herb/mine in, but this doesn’t fix the problem. By doing either of those you still have a single servers worth of players diluted by tourists and spread out among multiple layers.

I think the best solution would be to multiply the respawn time on high level herb/mine nodes and devilsaurs by the number of layers. This would even everything out.

#15

I had some what I think would be layering issues today. Mobs were winking in and out of existence. It’s just weird.

#16

Oh god laying. It ruining my classic feel. lololololol. Who cares if they have this or sharding. You getting a classic version of WoW but slight updated. Will it play any different, no. Are monster hard to kill, yes. is it retail, no. Get over yourself and enjoy yourself.

If it a bug then it should be fix.

#17

50-100% increased ranged for melee is the death of the hunter class in pvp which is already bottom tier in pve

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#18

Except you can get 300/300 herbalism at level 35, so anyone who wants to exploit layering can head to burning steppes, or epl, or winterspring, at level 35 and layer hop to black lotus. You can get to level 35 within 24 hours of the realms going live with 300 herbalism if that was your goal.

#19

I have to ask, given the sudden appearance of this “issue” with multiple threads: did a streamer blurt it out and the groupies now go forth to spread the word or something?

#20

Great…

Another buzzword that kids are going to start throwing around with no understanding of what it actually means or is.

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#21

The black lotus farm is something people in the “unregistered servers” have talked about privately for a while now. I didn’t think it was going to be as lucrative as they seemed to believe but after watching streams and participating in the stress tests I realized it’s going to be a problem.