Back before we had layers in the old vanilla days it was already hard to get your hands on a Black Lotus, Thorium veins being a bit easier.
But now that we have reduced/eliminated layering especially in higher level zones, in these areas it is really hard to find thorium as you are competing with way more players than you would have been in vanilla with the spawn rates not being changed.
And it is basically impossible to find a Black Lotus unless you are with a group of herbalists who know the spawn timers and are helping each other find the Lotus.
The same amount of Thorium and Black lotus for servers with 5X the population and a lot less casual gamers, things are going to get out of hand and they already have.(to give you an example of how nutty this is, when I switched a profession to enchanting on Thursday it cost me more to make my arcanite rod than it did to buy all the mats to get 300 enchanting)
Since the layering patch Black Lotus, Thorium Bars and Arcane crystals have all gone up over 25% in price in the AH and the supply for them was reduced by over half.
The majority of players haven’t even hit 60 yet and we are having problems with the stocks of consumables. Something is going to have to be done.
Maybe giving higher level zones their own layering system? Like for example you have to be in the same zone as the person inviting you to get in their layer that would let people still quest together in these zones and prevent 60’s abusing layering by getting randoms to invite them.
These zones weren’t designed to have 100’s of people farming them at the same time like some of the lowbie zones were.
As well there are way more casual/weekend players raiding these days then there were back in Vanilla and they will be looking for consumables, not to mention most of these people wont have time to farm their own consumables for raids putting more of a strain on the economy.
I don’t have other ideas for how to fix this really other than bringing layering back in high level zones specific to that zone as I don’t know exactly how the layering system works. I just wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention and see if anyone else agrees and also sees this becoming a problem and can help me bring it to blizzards attention.
9 Likes
#NOCHANGES is clearly invalidated by the fact that there are, by Blizzard’s own statement, a hugely larger numbers of players on a single server than vanilla so there are proportionately that larger number of players fighting over the vanilla number of nodes.
Clearly that’s a HUGE CHANGE which if the #NOCHANGES supporters ignore it simply makes them look stupid.
12 Likes
Its not even nodes people are having problems with, for example the spellbinders in WPL that drop crusader enchant, 5-10 people farming 6 mobs at once, you get maybe 1-2 kills every 3-5 minutes if you arent in a constant battle with the opposite faction and have a 10 minute run back to your body.
According to the blue posts, this is not how layering works (however it is how sharding works). Layering is continent-wide, not per-zone.
2 Likes
I know how it works thats why I suggested making the layering zone specific for some zones rather than server wide. The server wide layering makes it that sometimes there are only one or two layers and with 5X the people that doesnt add up.
yea, #nochanges really doesnt apply here. vanilla spawn rates assumed a concurrent player server cap of 3500 players. classic server caps are MANY magnitudes larger. Somethings gotta give, here.
9 Likes
So you want high level zones sharded.
i think adjusting spawn rates given the mega-server sizes compared to the vanilla cap of 3500 would be sufficient.
2 Likes
3500? Try 3000 at the most. But that doesnt matter. You got layering.
Resources are meant to be a competition. It encourages teamwork with your guildmates, working with friends and trading with other members of the community.
It’s not meant for everyone to be able to get all the rare materials to slap in the auction house. To me it sounds like it’s working fine.
10 Likes
You already have layering. If there is 7k people online you have 3 layers. Which means 3 times the resources. Which means you already have your equalizer
2 Likes
Nah, vanilla server cap was confirmed a LONG while back to have been 3500 players. Layering isnt really a solution to this, as they will be gone entirely come phase 2.
I think one of the first few things you said was incorrect.
“Sharding” was supposed to be math calculated by region
“Layering” is math calculated by all of Azeroth
So therefore, if there’s 6 layers in Duskwood, there’s 6 layers in Azshera.
So the 20k people we have playing on a server, divided by 6 layers, means there’s effectively 3.3k people that you’re playing with.
So hypothetically, if this was the same WoW that we had in 2006, the experience is the same cause those servers also had ~3k people at once. So the competition for resources hasn’t changed at all (assuming they’ve fixed the layering exploits by now)
If I re-read what you just said in the first few sentences (I didn’t read the rest) then your logic doesn’t make sense actually. Not sure what you were trying to say
It’s more a suggestion than what I want. Im no computer whiz I just see a huge problem is coming and want to make sure there’s a solution.
Going to need a source backing that up.
And once layering is gone youre going to have vanilla population caps, so why would you need adjusted spawn rates?
High-pop server people problems.
There isnt a huge issue coming. When layering is removed the world isnt going to keep having 7k or 10k online. You’ll have whatever the vanilla caps were.