I guess i just havent ran across some big negative in my time back for layering.
it seems to be a hot debate.
I kinda only see one side so far.
more people in a zone.
the only negative i hear about is hypthetical
is any one or any where experiencing a negative environment? something i can duplicate and witness in game?
From an effect sense, that’s not true. CRZ got rid of the distinct world, because it brought strangers constantly to your attention. People you would see and never interact with a second time. It reduced server identity, because all of those people are from other places, so what’s the point of knowing what server you’re on.
Layering slices away some of your local server population from you (though it makes the population bigger). So while you know that everyone around you will always be on the same server, and after a few weeks, won’t be sliced away, the server identity remains.
Anyone you see is an Ongeku player and you will never see a Kataru player on your server. You might not see all the Ongeku players at once during the first week or two, but you will for the majority of your game experience.
It’s just a completely different principle, purpose, and design. Sharding and layers generate additional instances/phases of an area. CRZ would simply push you over to another realm’s single instance of a zone. It just moved you over to a realm that had more people, so your otherwise dead zone on your realm now looked lively.
Sharding generates additional instances/phases of a zone to spread a large population out among them. These shards are also mostly realm agnostic, so they essentially cross-over realms.
Layering generates additional instances/phases of continents to spread a large population out among them. These layers are not realm agnostic.
It’s called a dilemma. When you have to make a choice, and all the options are bad.
Leave it as is and get overcrowded, unplayable starting zones and long queues.
Have tons of servers, but many become underpopulated 3 months in when the BFA tourists stop playing, requiring mass mergers.
Layering, with subdivided realm populations, but gradually phased out as the BFA tourists stop playing.
They chose #3 as the least bad option.
Are you suggesting that layering will be removed at some point? Blizzard said they would remove phasing when that was the plan, but since layering has been introduced I haven’t heard any suggestion that it would be removed.
It’s a smaller version of CRZ. Your realm is your layer, the other layers on your “realm” are the members of your ‘battlegroup’.
Well… yeah…
Ion promised it would be removed within a few weeks, and every Dev mention of it has reiterated that few weeks.
Layering is purely to get us through the launch, and then it will be removed when all the tourists die off.
That’s the plan, and has always been the plan.
Blizzard has never stated that phasing would be in the game, since that’s a storytelling device, but the Sharding investigation that they mentioned is the same thing.
He was talking about sharding. Sharding is no longer the plan.
Besides which Ion lies all the time. No reason to believe that his promise about sharding transfers to being a promise about layering now that sharding is gone.
No, he was talking about Layering in the video linked in the thread Eloraell is showing you. This as at the media summit right before Classic beta dropped, and sharding changed to layering.
“… a few weeks in to a single world per realm, no sharding, none of that going forward”.
A single, layered world, perhaps?
My god pal, you are just picking around what he is saying about layering there aren’t you? Can you please go get the full context? There is even a time stamp provided.
I’m just listening to what he says rather than putting words in his mouth.
The entire quote is him talking about collapsing down all of the “worlds” the worlds are layers. Shards are not worlds, shards are zones or even sub-regions of zones.
You may be in a layered continent with 3k people, which for most intents and purposes will feel similar to an established medium pop Vanilla server.
However, if you were unfortunate to have been put in the “spillover” layer with like 50 people in the continent, then you will be in a complete ghost town, which will not change until logout or continental transfer, or partying with someone in that different layer.
/who doesn’t consider layers so will ironically show as many people being present in your ghost zone
A guest on countdown to classic (fan podcast), who deals in distributed cloud computing, had an interesting take on that. Because right now we don’t know if that’s really how it works, as in the “spill-over.” It would probably make more sense for them to actually push some people to a new layer and create a more even distribution. So suppose you approach 3k, you create a new layer, and push 1.5k over there with the other additional folks. And unless Blizzard is just pushing people for no real reason, I think that might already be happening. I was questing in the first Kobold mine after Northshire (Fargodeep)? The mob I was targeting showed up as invalid, then disappeared and a fresh set of spawns appeared around me.
Some folks I think over report how often that happens, but we could expect the occasional glitch of getting pushed to a new layer. I can’t expect the layers would approach 3k players that often though.
Also as I understand it, 3k was the number near which you would get a queue back at launch, so that would actually be more like a High pop server.
CRZ takes all the zone populations and pushes those populations into as few servers as possible.
This is done on a zone by zone basis.
Sharding ignores server and zone populations and only looks at areas (sub-zones) to instance out population congestion.
This is done on a view range by view range basis (while not technically view range that is about to scope of the size sharding covers)
Layering is based on current server populations. Spread loading populations out into as many instances of the server as needed.
This is either done on the server level, zone, or sub-zone level.
The effect of CRZ leaves many instance empty. This is bad as that is where all those resources go untouched unless people manually hop servers.
Sharding fabricate instance copies on demand. The fabrication of resources is unprovable and it’s likely Blizzard can tune those spawn without player knowledge.
Layering is a contained number of instance that will gradually scale downward to extinction. Resources are never in a state of lacking player competition. They are not fabricated on demand. They are removed on demand.
So, CRZ, sharding, and layering are all different. But, CRZ and layering impact large areas while sharding is only for small areas.
Sharding only does this in a few cases (usually a hotspot for expansion or major patch launches). Typically sharding is zone based. For instance when they introduced it initially it was actually used for the pre-Legion event invasions. As I crossed the threshold from Elwynn to Westfall, I could see players materalize around me, as I had entered a new Westfall shard with them.
Edit: And those players persisted on the zone with me, even when I temporarily lost sight of them.
You trust blizzard after BfA?
It just wouldn’t be a message board without the exaggeration.