Sharding is designed to increase the number of players in a single instance of a zone.
Layering is designed to decrease the number of players in a single instance of a zone.
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No, Layering increases the number of people who can be in a given zone. Both systems are designed to hide the sheer number of people.
The difference between sharding and layering is that you can transfer between contiguous groupings every time you zone, with sharding.
The way I understood is the only way to phase out of your “layered” server where you are at right now is if a friend invites you on a different layer of the same realm. While with sharding it’s possible with a random invite from someone and people are scattered every time you log off and on, while layers should remain the same and you should see the same people more or less until the system is taken down when the population is stable.
Think about it. When Classic is released a single starting zone would be flooded with players. Layering allows that single over-crowded starting zone to be broken into multiple starting zones.
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Layering is sharding that tries harder to keep you in single group/shard/layer.
It’s very similar thing at the end. Bob and Joe don’t see each other in game because they ended up on separate layers/shards.
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rather than designed for one or the other, it’s just more like,
sharding is more likely to disperse large groups of people
layering is more likely to hide people from you
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I feel like a major difference is also that sharding happens within areas of zones not even just zones themselves and you (or someone else) moved around a lot, including nodes. Whereas the layering will be continent based and locked once you log in, so you’ll see the same people far more often and you won’t see nodes disappear.
Edit: unless you’re invited to a group or invite someone, then that will move you (or them) to a different layer, although only if they themselves are on a different layer.
Think of it this way. Your realm will be divided into layers. Each layer is the functional equivalent of what we normally consider a realm or server. When you log in, you will be inserted into one of the layers. Some of the people who were in your layer the last time you played, may now be put into another layer the next time they log in.
You can pull people from one layer to your own by grouping with them - so playing with friends is always possible if they are on your realm.
The whole idea is to allow a very large player count in each initial realm. But as attrition winnows away the tourists, your realm population shrinks. At some point, when the population stabilizes at a size more or less considered appropriate for a server, the layering will be discontinued.
What remains to be discovered is how Blizzard actually creates these layers. Will then be pre-defined at realm startup after Tuesday maintenance? Or will they be dynamically created and dissolved based on logged in population at any particular time?
It solves a couple problems though - the overload of zones early on after launch, and the fact that many of the initial players will be in it for just the short term. Hopefully this will keep realms from falling dead as the initial population dwindles.
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Yes. I agree.
And both layering and sharding split those people up so that there are more people in a given zone, you just can’t see them. At a zone level, the concepts are basically the same. The difference happens when you cross a zone border.
No it doesn’t. Say a 3k server population, 6 starting zones, 500 peeps per zone. Explain to me how making copies of that keeps the starting zones from being flooded.
Sharding could lower the pop in the starting zones, but layering won’t.
Exactly. I imagine a pyramid design to layering where as players level higher they get spread out into more zones, and thus need to layer zones decreases.
What concerns me is the starting zones with the old play style of “first-to-tag” could make even a small number of players getting very frustrated. I don’t advocate going to the current form of shared-tagging as that was not the way vanilla was.
I believe the layers are bigger than zones. They are continent wide. Basically you don’t change a layer unless you go through a loading screen on a boat, zep or mage teleport.
The first few hours are going to be crazy. Lots of standing around and waiting to tag a spawn. We will also see login queues at start. We will live.
Lay’er? I barely know her!
Well, that might be a problem in that the need to layer the starting zones is going to remain high for quite some time, while the higher level zone populations will decrease in intensity somewhat faster.
This will have the same effect as sharding! Layering will make it so you are playing with a large number of people who are just trying it out (inevitable). Then down the road the few players that remained playing will be joined with other players (basically a different realm) thereby causing the community aspect to be almost non-existent.
This will have the same effect as sharding as when player counts dropped they basically just merged some servers together to share zones. The community aspect is going to suffer from this.
Someone correct me here if I am wrong.
I am imagining it like that layered chess-board from “The Big Bang Theory”
In retail, each tile on each board is a shard.
In Classic each board will be a shard. Meaning, you will have access to all players on all the tiles.
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Except it can change every time you login. You’ll encounter a good portion of the long-term players, and you won’t always see the stragglers. Plus, this is what the friends list is for.
Layering is on the same server, where’s sharding is not.
I dont know that this is true. I think sharding functions in conjunction with cross realm zones in retail, but isn’t part of the same functionality. I could be wrong.
Sharding is breaking off your specific bite size chunk of the world (shard) into a new instance once it reaches the cap of players for that chunk. Layering is the same concept but for the entire continent and the player cap is close to what an entire server in vanilla would handle so you don’t run into the issues where you see people popping in and out as you travel through the world but would still have the issues of not seeing your friends until you invite them if you’re in different layers.
Someone correct me if my understanding is wrong.
You are on the same server, just “sharded”, and can still talk to people in the chats.