Honestly, I want all layering gone and more servers, but sometimes steps have to be incremental. We should petition blizzard to start this removal with layers in cities.
Imagine if you are in a group (or not) and can’t find player x to trade your deviate scale belt to, or enchant their weapon with Beastslaying!
You’d have to drop group and invite them to your group just to find them and trade with them. It’s just not a system that makes sense - especially in cities.
What do you think?
Unfortunately, layering is not sharding. Layering covers the entire continent server you’re on, so it cannot be turned on/off in specific zones.
Well call it what you want, but creating a sole layer or shard for the cities seems doable.
It does kind of suck and it’s eerie. A /who on my test server shows the cities are populated, trade chat is pretty active, but all weekend I’ve seen maybe 3 people in Org and 2 (being generous) in TB yesterday. I was hanging around fishing in TB near the AH for a few hours.
My dead retail servers that got merged had more active cities. There’s more people out questing of course, but in my personal experience the “server” outdoors is also much more dead than I was expecting.
I ran my troll hunter to Dun Morogh to snag Mangeclaw, I saw no alliance there and only 2 gnomes questing around the alliance town in Loch Modan. I was at the town gy a lot cuz dwarf guards don’t like trolls… anyway… thanks for the ez polar bear, allies 
I hate crowds, but hate dead more. Dead Layer Life kinda sucks I guess all we can do is hope it evens out when people hit level cap, or hope we land in better layers as we join groups.
Blizzard isn’t going to do anything about it. Layering and sharding is their precious baby they will forever embrace, coddle and coo over. They want us to do the same but dang that baby has got a fugly mug.
Until the server crashes because there are 10,000 people in a city.
We only have 13 servers for all of NA and SA, there are going to be a LOT more than 10k per server.
Yeah, but they won’t all be in the same city at the same time. But we are in agreement on the general point.
you expect 100s of thousands after the dust settles? i think it could be less
depends on when you define dust settling
You can party up with your friends to force the same layer, so at least there is a way to trade.
then how will you do the quest to pickpocket gamon?
yeah, it also depends somewhat on how you define players being active too
LH says they had 280k active players in the last 3 months. a pretty good number on the surface, but they are extremely loose about what they consider “active”. a lot people are only there because its free and they want to troll the un moderated chat channels