Most games with the “problem” of “too many people wanting to play their game” would be working on a solution to get more people on the game. Blizzard, for some strange reason is finding ways to limit how many people can play. It makes no sense at all. Causing players to miss raids because of a pointless server queue is a good way to get people to stop playing classic. You win this round Blizzard.
I just don’t see there being a point to forcing a queue when the economy is already trashed. A few more items on the AH isn’t a game changer at all. So i ask, what’s the point of removing layers?
I think xrealm phasing is a good idea, and still is as well as layers. ANd even if people would use a layer exploit, just don’t let them get anything and lock them out on world boss kills. heck, have the player “phased out” till the raid kills the world boss. Blizzard has the tools, use them.
Phase 2 is going to be a complete mess because of server imbalance. Not addressing before phase 2 just seems like a bad idea. Judging from the server I play on it will be nearly impossible for one faction to kill the world bosses.
There are advantages and disadvantages to that. Personally, I prefer the smaller population sizes over large mega servers. That way we get to know most of the other people on the server and a sense of community can develop.
I can spend an afternoon playing with people, and there is a sense of excitement that I might see them again. That feeling is simply lost on mega servers, and cross sharding like in retail.
That was the original plan, The guild I had reconnected from the vanilla days picked a PVP server with the lowest population in our timezone but for some reason after the first few days the population shot all the way up to full and it hasn’t gone down since. We tried to do everything right but still got stuck somehow. If it wasn’t for the fact that I want to play with my guild again I’d probably play something else.
There does not need to be a reason to remove layers, rather there needs to be a reason put up layers. The default vanilla state of things is no layers.
I agree that the vanilla solution to the problem did not involve layering, at the time that wasn’t something that could be done. At the time, the problem was solved by adding more servers, lots more. IMO it worked then because most players didn’t have must time invested and hadn’t been playing with a particular group of people for years. So it wasn’t a hard choice to reroll on a new server. The same approach wouldn’t have worked this time around, so I can understand why layering was the go to option.
Removing layering to make servers feel like they have a healthy amount of players, on paper, sounds like a good idea. However, making this change while time-gating is going to lead to problems. This is where queues come in and now you have to take a step back and ask… “is this a better experience than vanilla?” for me, the problems created from these fixes feel just as bad if not worse.
its like running the heater and AC at the same time.
There should have never been layers, just enough servers at launch, but blizz bungled that so this is their hamfisted way to try to shift the population away from the 8 servers they thought was all they would need.
Im on a server that will have queues forever, but there were servers like that in vanilla, so it goes.
When the populations recently crashed to the point that all but the most populated servers lost some of their layers we’d instead have 75 mostly dead servers and far more players ready to cancel their subs so who would benefit from that? Angry nerds who just want everyone else to be as angry as them? Blizzard? The people on mid sized realms who would have to play in ghost towns? Unless you have some special machine that can compress multiple years of natural flow into and out of a server into 30 days your point about what was or wasn’t in vanilla are irrelevant.
The initial rush of excitement has already gone for a ton of people and those people left the game. Or do you anti-layer guys honestly think it was some magical spell that allowed these high/full servers to lose multiple layers and still not have 5 hour queue times? Blizzard was smart enough to realize that the hype really was just rose tinted glasses for a ton of people and built a system that wouldn’t punish everyone else for it. The only issue at all is people abusing the layers for gain and there should have been a lockout timer on that from the beginning. That’s a lack of foresight issue on Blizzard’s end not an issue with layers themselves. On Whitemane I’ve gone from 2-4 hour daily queues to only one for 5 minutes in the last month and they haven’t mentioned adding layers so the only assumption that can be made is that 3-10k fewer people are playing, (the number listed in queue just on my server), each day currentyly compared to the end of the first month.
, have you even been around ?