The economy on a large population server is pretty hard to ‘destroy’. WoD didn’t destroy the economy in retail and it created millions of gold out of thin air.
Your solution would create more problems than it would solve.
Oops, you’re right, that was to the wrong person. You’re right in that they’re not going to add more layers, because that’s going to totally bite them in the butt when the time comes to remove them if we don’t have the player drop off.
I’m stuck in a login queue, so no.
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Yes, while we are at it, make the game FFA so we can all battle each other for control over a single mob we get to kill every 20 minutes because spawn rates aren’t fast enough. 
With the already increased server caps, phase 2 will be interesting.
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I don’t know what you are getting at. Blizzard has said repeatedly they will NOT continue to add new layers. That’s why servers like Herod have the same queue since launch day minus the trickle for new servers and the one day they increased the HARD CAP LIMIT. They said that the hard cap limit was what affected how many people could get on the server and that limit is based on having only one layer.
The number of layers is based on how crowded the zones are and are there to alleviate the overcrowding. They made the continent wide but it’s meaningless only really so you keep seeing the same people as you level for the first few weeks. However, they can never add more layers than the hardcap can support because eventually it has to go down to a single layer. If they removed all the layers tomorrow, based on Blizzard’s comments, the queues would not go up at all. We would all just be one layer. Because of this, they did not create big 100k super servers. They only added as many layers as they could handle after removing them.
They also said they could easily add infinite layers to these crowded servers and remove the queue instantly but they wouldn’t be able to merge it down to a single server. Further proving that it’s being handled the way I said it is.
All the people saying there’s a maximum amount of people on a single server, that’s a very 2004 way of thinking. There’s a multitude of reasons why that isn’t true. Activision hasn’t released how they’re doing layering. Hyper-convergence is one example of how they could be doing it.
The only maximum per layer (eventually drawing down to a single layer) that matters is by preference of developers. The layers themselves are probably attempting to mimic the original server size.
A little light reading…
en.wikipedia(dot)org/wiki/Hyper-converged_infrastructure
networkworld(dot)com/article/3207567/what-is-hyperconvergence.html
Literally everyone? I’m not.
a hard cap is a hard cap because there’s nothing you can do to go past it. they already increased the cap once, that means it’s a soft cap, they can increase it as much as they want but for reasons they choose not to.
those reasons are because they’re estimating the size of the playerbase a year from now, they think there will be like 20 healthy vanilla-sized realms.
if they thought that after everybody quit there would only be enough for 1 healthy realm leftover, yes, they would have just had 1 realm with infinite layers.
what’s the point of making layers vanilla-sized if after you remove layers you get a realm with 50k players completely unvanilla? they could have just sharded starter zones as was the original plan in that case.
I have been very outspoken against layering since the beginning. But if I am to be honest, I’m not sure how the game could handle the amount of players if it was removed right now.
I am on Pagle and the starter zones are still super packed. I got into Westfall last night expecting there not to be as many people as there was in Elwynn. I was very wrong. The zone was just packed full of people. I was honestly shocked. I mentioned in guild chat that I couldn’t even imagine what it would look like if they collapsed all the layers at this point.
I don’t think removing it is the thing to do, at least not at this time. But they definitely should do something about people abusing it until it is removed. Maybe they need to start giving temporary bans or something. I honestly don’t know what the solution is, but if it were removed right now I think the game would be close to unplayable.
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It’s not meaningless because Blizzard is attempting emulate the style of server we want which is everyone on a single server where you know everyone and can see the same people every day. They’ve also stated that the hard cap is WAY bigger than it was in 2004. The layers themselves are just spun up virtual copies of the world, splitting up the population to fix overcrowding. But Blizzard has implemented an independent cap separately that is the hardcap people are referring to. This cap is what causes the queues and it’s based on how big blizzard wants the final server size to be.
They are not adding layers above and beyond this cap because they eventually have to kill all those virtual spun up copies of the world and bring everyone’s character back down onto a single layer. That layer size is currently set to the hard cap and isn’t based on what they can handle (they can probably handle anything) but it’s based on what the game world can handle without being unplayable. Still massively bigger than the size of vanilla based on their original comments and then the capacity increase but still ultimately artificially limited causing queues which when you get on seem silly right now (there aren’t that many people around) but that’s because they are on different virtual servers and eventually will be back down to a SINGLE layer. They said at most a few weeks or before phase 2.
With that said, of course there are tons of “servers” virtual and otherwise working in the background to create this single server but attempting to add a bunch of jargon and professional terms isn’t gonna make this easier to understand. In the end, the hard cap they’ve artificially implemented is what is important because that limits how many virtual layers they can create as eventually they have to kill them all in the coming weeks.
No, I’d rather be able to actually tag mobs and do quests
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With the increased spawn rates they implemented at launch, layering is no longer necessary. Layering WILL leave a permanent black mark on the game the longer they keep it in.
At the very MINIMUM it needs to have a lengthy cooldown. Probably 1 hour. And it obviously needs to be disabled entirely in instances
The coming week will probably be when people are the most spread out compared to any other time in the past or future. People will be distributed pretty well from 1-60. Take much longer to remove the layers and everyone will be condensed at the top. Remove them sooner and everyone would have still been in the newbie zones. It is worth noting that Blizzard did account for how many people they thought a single layer could handle when they implemented the server size cap so have some faith it won’t be that bad. Nostalrius was playable at 10-12k people, especially as you got out of the 1-20 zones though it was admittedly bad in those zones.
Spawn rates need to be toned down too. The constant respawns right on top of me are getting way too excessive
The dynamic spawns go up and down based on how many people in the zone farming. But higher level zones with rarer spawns have a lower multiplier so will never respawn as fast as those low level zones. I know you didn’t ask about this but I thought it was important to note that they are dynamic within a range and Blizz didn’t just increase them across the board.
This also means @Celessi that it will get better as you get higher where the maximum respawn speed is lower than at low levels even with the dynamic spawns.
Except that now I’m stuck having to take rez sickness because the 20 second respawn rates on the way to get a class quest done has me literally trapped to where if I rez I die
I’m not even sure if that’s true. I haven’t noticed it outside of the starting zones. There’s been a few named NPC’s you need to kill for quests that have had me waiting 6-8 minutes. That’s 6-8 minutes with other groups waiting to kill them too. I agree the mob rate may need to be tuned down, but not the names NPCs. Boost the hell out of them. It doesn’t add to my experience to wait 20 minutes to tag an enemy and still not be able to beat a druid with moonfire.
I’m starting to hear about this a lot. I’ve begun to notice that the world is looking less populated. Respawns seem to be happening more irregularly; I’ve died like five times in one spot because 1) there were no players around to help me and 2) because things were literally spawning out of nowhere on top of me.
They said they’re increasing server capacity. I’ve been logging in since Classic launch, and the longest I’ve had to wait to play was maybe 45 minutes. Layering/Sharding is awful and it should be removed.
Queue times will be even more… fun?