Question about realm pop and layering?

so from what i understand those high/full servers that have between 20 to 30,000 players on each faction will have there queue time increase once layering is turned off? so does that mean a high realm that doesn’t have a queue now, will have one once layering is turned off? I was thinking of re rolling on hearthseeker to save me from this issue. Please correct me if i’m wrong

Queue times and layering are unrelated. A server can have a maximum amount of people on it at any given time. If you exceed that max, the players begin being placed into a queue, waiting for the total number of players on the server to go back down.

Layering splits the amount of people you see when you’re logged into the server. It effectively creates an instance of the entire continent, much like zoning into a dungeon instance. When layering is turned off, the only difference will be that you will always see everyone on the server if you’re in the same spot.

As a side note, I think layering is being phased out as we speak now that players have dispersed more throughout the zones.

They’re going to have to drop the max population as layers are phased out in order to have vanilla-like server sizes, so they are indirectly related. 8-20k servers would be more akin to a private server experience, and that’s not what Blizzard has been shooting for.

So if right now there are 20k players able to play on a server and they drop layering/reduce maximums, the queue times are going to jump significantly.

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Maybe someone more in the know will clarify, but wasn’t there a Blue post that implied that queues would be impacted by the removal of layering. I understood that as the reason as to why they would open up transfers off of servers that were high but didn’t really have queue problems.

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Blizzard disagrees with you.
The entire point of layering is to let more people play on less servers. And they said they expect severe queues when layering is removed.

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Can you give a link to that? I’m legitimately curious because everything I’ve seen from the blues on layering says otherwise, unless like someone said above me they reduce the realm caps when they remove layering.

False. Layers have a maximum online cap, not the realm.

If Blizz offers a transfer and reduces the size by 1 layer but nobody leaves, that layer of players will then have to find room on the remaining layers or suffer a queue.

It’s why when the first round of xfers happened many players went from seeing barely anyone in their layer to suddenly seeing a while bunch of folks and queue times went up since you went from shoving (random numbers inc) 10k people across 5 layers to 10k across 4 or 3 layers.

There is an ONLINE cap which is only limited by the number of layers, each their own full sized Vanilla ONLINE cap. This is why we see offline queues of 20k early on - so far we haven’t reached an offline cap.

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exactly thats what i was referring to. Queue times are not going up due to layering but once turned off server cap will be reduced.

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Did you come to believe realm caps of (20k for example) would still be in effect after laying is removed?

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SURPRISE BUd HAHAH

Ok, you’re right. That definitely implies they’re gonna drop realm caps as they reduce layers. Gonna be a bad day on the mega servers when they flip that final switch.

come to hearthseeker