The new way layering is working, whether intentional or not, should be addressed. Here are some issues I’ve personally had, feel free to add anything else you have experiences to the list…
10+minutes (a lot of the time) to transfer to the same layer as a friend when just trying to quest/level together.
Porting to Shatt in a group can put members in that same group in different layers for whatever reason even if they were just on the same layer playing together. I’m sure this will be fun for GDKP groups after finishing a raid and doing payouts. (Waited over 10minutes to join same layer as my friend when this happened and it never swapped layers for me)
Toons that are on the same account do not log into the same layer as a toon you were JUST playing. Especially bad when you’re getting camped on an alt and can’t hop on a main to defend yourself.
Accepting a party invite for say the towers quest and leaving party will boot you back to your original realm most of the time. (not to mention the 10minutes just to phase to the towers layer).
I’m sure there are more issues that this change in layering can cause, these are just some that I have experienced that show the change is really not beneficial to the gameplay experience.
Any news if blizz had addressed this topic? I haven’t seen anything yet.
No, they just made the change and told no one. They never really talked about layers for the entire time TBCC has been around. Personally, I don’t think layers should have been a thing past the first few weeks of TBCC (where yes, at the start they were good to handle the rush/much higher populations but past that all they did was kill servers and make the game feel WAY more like Retail than TBC Classic. Everything about layers at this point is negative IMO).
I understand why they made this recent change but it’s annoying.
I’m not too concerned about the issue of having layers here, that’s a whole topic on it’s own.
I just want to clarify that with the recent updates in the last patch the way layering works when joining parties and phasing has changed and the change is creating negative play experiences.
The layer hopping became an issue when we figured out we could find ine that had a more convenient time to capture the apirit towers. On Bene, we start getting massive lag on layers about 15-20 min before the towers are up. I suspect that if a change was made, it was simply adding a queue for layer hops once the population was capped for the layer. It’s unfortunate that this was an unexpected consequence of the new’ishbhonor changes… But it’s far from unreasonable.
I think you’ve nailed it Cauchy. The gameplay side affects are very poor for players who just want to play together in an MMO.
Trying to do a group quest someone invites you to in world chat to only have to wait 10minutes is pretty poor design. Not being able to hop on a main to defend your alt that is getting camped is new and very unwelcomed. These issues need to be taken into account and examined as well.
That’s not exactly what I meant. When I layer-hop to get the tower quest done, I couldn’t care less about the rest of the folks trying to capture the towers. It’s not like we are doing anything. I’m pretty sure most of the others feel the same way. They want their 950 honor and 12g. That’s all.
I genuinely hate layers; this is absolutely cancerous to gameplay. It’s made it extremely difficult to even feel connected to the world when I might not see the random friends I’ve made out in it unless I’m in a group with them because some bug-brain thought it would be genius to bring this fop of a thought back.
Whoever you paid to get this idea you should fire, why do I want to play an MMO when it stops feeling like any interactions I have with other players matter. You ditched LFD for this reason, now finish the process and drop layers; god damn it.