Just wanted to come back to comment on this. Temporarily assumes that there’s some trigger that would make layering turn back off. Raise the population cap, get rid of excessive queues, and there’s no impetus for the population to decrease. This isn’t a flood of tourists who will quit in a few weeks or a month. This is existing realms with active players, both ones that rolled originally, ones that rerolled, and ones that transferred in wanting ‘high’ population.
Realistically, do you see a way that the population is going to decrease (and stay small enough) before the AQ event?
(EDIT: Yes, I get the COVID quarantine increases how many hours people play, and the end of the quarantine will reduce that. But the population growth from transfers, such as Incendius saw, is a non-quarantine issue that will occur regularly because people will decide servers are dead or imbalanced, people will pay to move where the grass looks greener. This is the completely predictable long-term consequence of paid realm transfers.)
How would turn-ins for that be handled if people were on different layers, layers that may or may not exist the next time someone logs in? Or the gate opening. That’s just about guaranteed to be a swarm of people. Layer that?
If Blizzard does add layering, have they really looked hard at:
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How would world bosses be handled? Turning off Layering before Kazzak was a big deal. Do realms that get layering now get two Kazzaks and two Azuregos, or do ‘half’ the players not even know he pops or feel forced to gimmick layer-hopping?
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How would world buffs work? Ony, Rend, Nef. Do people have to gimmick layer-hopping to get their buffs, or will they somehow be global across all layers?
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How will the multiplication of ‘rare’ resources be handled? Will we go right back to gimmicky layer-hopping for multiple Black Lotus spawns?