to the detriment of the player experience but lets ignore this aspect. never mind that layers prevent poor experiences in key zones. but never mind that lag you’re experiencing just leave your server. stop being apart of that toxic community where there is a huge population!!! how dare you want a healthy thriving server. I wish ever server was packed as some of the mega servers with an equal amount of good guilds.
oh, and yes you are right about one thing Blizzard does not like the concept of mega servers. this is the edit. Also forgot to mention. is it possible the wow team is incorrect in this? is it a possibility? could they be wrong much like they were wrong in the implementation of all of BFA SL and Legion Legendaries? just food for thought.
Contrary to popular belief servers like Benediction were around in OG wrath. Mal’ganis for example was 99% horde and had ques in the over 9000 range with every major content patch. This is not new, if you don’t want crowded locked servers then xfer off.
Short-term detriment for long-term health of the game is a good thing.
Sure, for content that’s popular… Last time I checked, Isle of Quel’Danas was a shdookshow because it wasn’t layered, but it didn’t prevent people from playing. It just made questing take a bit longer. Now compare that to low-level zones that are split up between multiple layers, so the already tiny number of people out in the world questing and leveling are now separated from one another with no great way of communicating and forming a group.
One of these situations is a minor inconvenience. The other situation makes the organic way the game is meant to be played basically impossible.
Pretty much. The devs themselves have specifically stated this months ago.
It’s not necessarily anyone’s fault if they find themselves on a mega realm especially if they were there before the population grew to that size (I’m in that situation as I’ve been playing Grobbulus since day 1 of Classic), but that’s just where we’re at. The devs have allowed layering to destroy the experience for all of Classic when they originally promised it would be removed after a couple weeks of Classic’s launch. And now they’re finally doing what they should’ve done years ago. Discomfort is the price we’ll have to pay for that.
LMAO
Mega servers are not healthy. And it’s honestly ridiculous that you’d say that, because the entire point of this thread was to whine about how unhealthy they are, but without realizing it. “No ore. No mobs. No herbs” are literally a handful of the major issues when realms are grotesquely overpopulated. Everything you’re complaining about right now is a result of how unhealthy mega realms are for the game.
I’m not trying to be rude, but I have to say it: your post is glaringly ironic…
See, this is the kind of discussion I was hoping we’d have in this thread. And you’re not wrong to ask that question at all.
Personally, I don’t think they’re wrong about this at all, because healthy population distribution across realms is an extremely important part (perhaps even the most important) of making WoW feel like it used to. Even though removing layers can and will cause a lot of discomfort in the experience, it will force the population to gradually disperse over a greater number of realms so instead of the terrible monster servers we have, we’ll have a greater number of thriving realms to choose from, each with their own personality.
The only thing I think they might be wrong about, is that they may be underestimating how absolutely stubborn the player population is. I think that the population dispersal will probably take a long longer than they hoped, which means they’ll (the WoW team) will be feeling the pressure through complaints like this thread for an extended period of time.
I think there’s a non-zero chance that they’ll just put sharding into the game if people refuse to A: go to different realms or B: cope with the consequences of their choices. We’ve seen Blizzard take the spineless way out before (e.g., HvH battlegrounds) and I don’t have the greatest faith they’ll stick to their guns now, even though this is absolutely better for the game. I hope layering is gone forever though.
If you can’t understand how layers multiply the amount of resources available per realm and/or per person, you’re beyond the point of someone spoon-feeding you the understanding. Sorry.
I’d love for you to point out how my basic equation was incorrect other than it being too simple to fully illustrate how layers work. But I know you won’t. Classic Ziryus.
That’s what I thought. I’ll take that as an admission that you don’t comprehend the very simple ideas being discussed here. Thanks for proving me right once again. Classic trolling Ziryus.
yet, in on a large populated server that will be a long terrm detriment. and will give a poor experience. but again never mind that. Layers do not hurt the game. that person is still on the same server. if you posted in LFG trade or whatever general chat for whatever zone you’re in you can still find that person and group with them. your argument against layers is weak almost strawmanlike.
Again this is BLIZZARDS solution. and its not a solution. it isn’t. it never has been. its BLIZZARDS issue to fix by telling people to get out. it ultimately tells them they are unwilling to address the problem. we the players should not fix the problem for blizzard. why are you so willingly sucking the teet of Blizzard when they can come up with a solution that doesn’t fracture the player base. the answer should never to be leave your server. that is a bad response. again, i say this to the players its not our responsibility to accept a band aid for a gushing or gaping wound. it doesn’t fix or resolve the problem. it just gives the illusion of fixing the problem. you should be demanding that they find a way to resolve this issue. and hte reason they are giving out server transfers to other servers is because it is far more cheaper than actually having to put money back into their servers. multi-billion dollar company. they can afford to spend money on new servers.
Even non mega servers have been found on these forums complaining about the lag in key zones. this isn’t a mega server issue. so again this is a strawman.
Least we can find common ground on one thing briefly.
I do. i think they are entirely wrong. I would love to have everyone be a part of benediction that wanted to be on this server. But i do not want queue times to play on my server, i don’t want my experience to be laggy when i’m in key zones.
but the biggest problem with you wanting healthy population distrubted across realms is never going to happen. like ever. won’t happen. can’t happen. because once they lift the locks on some of these locked servers. you will see people throw money at leaving their server. this is why above all the issues that we could talk about with anything to relating to this current iteration of wrath plus at this point. server transfers and soon to be faction transfers are incredibly toxic to this idea you have proposed. it will make it oh so too easy to abandon your server, get offered a spot on else on the horde faction? 25 bucks and you’re gone. no consequences only thing lost is maybe an hour or two of play to abandon your old server, faction or both. lets not forget about name changes.
again, the players have spoken they do not want to disperse they don’t want what blizzard wants for them. blizzard has said we want you to play in this 4x4 sand box. the players have rejected this and found swingsets as well. regardless of whether that creates large servers or not. Blizzard has been rejected. they need to stop trying to get players to play the way they want. look at retail there are like 6 key servers for retail. Hyjal, Area-52, Illidan, Stormrage, proudmoore, and Sargeras. these are the servers i remember. on horde they seem to be the same proudmoore seems to be the same. nice fat and huge. players have rejected being stranded on a server they dislike for a vastly more populated server. i’ve left servers that have died because the top guilds abandoned the servers i was on. again faction and server transfers are cancerous to the health of servers. especially since they made guild transfers.
Sharding should have never happened in retail and should not wrath plus. Sharding is far more annoying that layers are. in a singular hour, i had jumped between 4 different shards in retail. least when with layers only time i hoped a layer was when i joined a group for a quest or dungeon. again blizzard doesn’t want to come up with legitimate solutions. stop enabling them with poor decisions and solutions. push back. they are unwilling at this point. not incapable.
Layers were never meant to be permanent. Layers were simply only implemented during prepatch to ensure the servers could better handle the influx of players. Servers no longer have enough players in a single area to warrant having layers, and thus layers are being cut and removed. Of course you’ll feel those effects when on a megaserver. While I understand you rolled there from day 1 based on what you said in the comments, the sad reality is, it doesn’t matter. You’re still on a megaserver. Welcome to the reality of being on a megaserver.
Well, we actually have yet to see the effects of this long-term. This is literally the very first time Blizzard has ever taken such a hard stance on player freedom when it comes to the realms they play on. No one could say with any certainty how exactly this will turn out.
However, what we can observe is that the short-term effects align perfectly with Blizzard’s long-term goals. We’ve already seen the next-biggest servers after the locked ones have an influx of player population. And when those servers become too full, all of the player population trickling down will move on to the next largest servers. People transferring away from the largest servers or simply quitting is a factual, constant phenomenon. The only difference now is that those players being subtracted from the population cannot be replaced. The dispersal is already happening.
Incorrect.
Except not everyone uses those global channels. Not to mention, LFG chat or custom channels are the only means of communicating cross-layer when you’re out questing. One of the most important parts of having access to other players is the ability to be physically near them. A lot of the interactions that happen while questing are as simple as buffing random people who pass you by, maybe throwing a heal or helping someone finish a mob if they’re going to die. Not all of these interactions are exclusive to groups or situations where you have to whisper people and coordinate.
But also, one of the most common ways to find people to group with is to either see them in the world, or LFM in /1. Layers remove that aspect of the game almost entirely when we’re talking about zones that aren’t decently populated.
Either way, WoW was designed to garner those kinds of interactions, not hinder them. Old Blizzard is rolling in its desecrated grave over that one.
And they get to choose. Not us. Also, layers were Blizzard’s solution as well, and it clearly didn’t result in the outcome they wanted. Thank god they’ve come to their senses.
They already did try to address the problem by slapping a bandaid on it. And it caused more harm than good. And we the players don’t really need to do anything in this situation. As I said before, there’s a constant exchange of players coming and going. Locking servers simply removes the element of new players replacing the ones that go. The population dispersal isn’t going to require some kind of coordinated effort on our parts. We just need to sit back and watch it happen.
lol
I don’t disagree that it shouldn’t have to be the solution, but again, this is just the reality of where we’re at. They didn’t lock servers much sooner and instead of stopping mega realms from emerging, they literally propped them up! No matter what they do now, there will be discomfort. Layers are bad and having to leave your server is bad. There is no other option that actually agrees with WoW’s design, except maybe sharding, which I say very begrudgingly.
If you dislike being stuck with only two bad options, you can thank all the people who whined non-stop about queue times. I 1,000,000,000,000% guarantee you they’re getting rid of mega servers because of all the queue time backlash.
They did. I’ve been asking them to remove layers since Classic’s launch was over, and it seems like they’re finally doing it.
What does that even mean? I think you misunderstand the problem.
That should give you some concept of how insanely overpopulated mega servers actually are. It is absolutely unfathomably insane to have more than 10,000 active players on a single faction.
What many people call “dead” servers are basically exactly the kind of populations the game was meant to operate with on a single realm. Back in the day when Wow-progress tracked character population, 10,000+ (total, not just for one faction) was considered an absolutely gigantic realm.
Yeah… I don’t think you understand what a strawman is. I’d love to hear how you think anything I’ve said is a “strawman”…
Queue times are exacerbated by layering.
Layering does help with server performance degradation.
Queue times or Lag. Pick one. You can’t get rid of both.
Sharding blows, but it’s a better solution than layering.
just because you say its incorrect doesn’t make it incorrect. i dub thee with the one and only. You are fake news.
you’re not wrong, but in this climate that is an excuse.
yes they do. but we ultimately get to tell them go f yourself if the solution is trash. and we should be constantly pushing back on them. just accepting whatever they say is how we got things like wod, LFR, LFR legendaries, SL, and BFA. they didn’t listen to us. if we are not persistent we will never get what we want.
I hope layering is gone forever though.
