Your salt is noted. Most of the community found it a success.
If the reduction in the layers is a measure of max concurrent users, that means some realms have had at max 50% declines in population. Even greater declines for the realms that shrunk from three down to one.
If this is a good approximation, without layering, we’d be calling out dead realms in Classic already.
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Given that layers have ruined economies, no it wasn’t worth it. Dead servers was never an issue, as you can always merge them. The only negative to mergers were some folks lose their names.
Losing names or destroyed economies? I mean, come on. Not even close.
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I used to feel that way before I got my mount. Now not as much. lol
But given Blizz’s track record on server mergers, the dead realms would be waiting a long time for relief.
Having played Vanilla WOW first day in 2004 yes layering has been successful!! Why lets just say all the crying boogerfaces that are crying about layering now would have quit already! Dont like it? go back to Care Bear, easy mode, LA LA LA world Battle For Azeroth!!!
Unless I’m missing something, that’s not quite the case.
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The intra-server decohesion definitely ruined much of the experience for me.
I was generally ahead of the curve in terms of leveling, so while there were a ton of people online near release (and therefore many layers), much fewer were my level. This would’ve been fine if we were all in the same layer (there were just enough around my level to flesh out the zones), but we weren’t. We were dispersed through many different layers, which, again, were spawned to accommodate the lower level population. Because layers are essentially continent-wide, it affected me in a big way.
I also didn’t like the exploitation of layering. It 100% happened. People in my guild were constantly pestering others for “layer invites”. It was a pervasive problem.
It also sucked when you were WPVP’ing and when someone decided they were going to try and run, they could just snag a layer invite and disappear. This happened several times to me. Not cool.
So, no, from my perspective, layering was a huge failure.
Fewer single-layer realms with increased dynamic respawns would’ve been better. In fact, this is part of how they’ve started accommodating more people per layer. DRs have become very obvious in the last couple of weeks.
They’re not dead. Many are medium pop during their timezone’s prime time, which Blizzard is on record as saying are comparable to high population realms back in vanilla’s time.
Basically, I think you’re wrong in every conceivable way.
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If you actually understood how WoW’s economy worked, you’d understand its largely self-repairing except for the most egregious of cases like P.Server inflation (and even then it takes years on a 1:1 native rate server).
There is exactly 0 chance, that the people who did exploit layering to farm materials and gold represented such a large population sample that they could have any lasting effect on their server’s respective economies, unless it was a very very small, and soon to be dead anyway server.
A lot of the fear mongering was generated by early reports and exaggerations about how people were raking in cash with layering. The example of the guy who thousands of Arcane Crystals comes to mind. It also comes to mind that a blue post specifically investigated the case and found it to be false, and the screenshot doctored for the sole purpose of causing drama.
Let’s stop with the sky is falling stuff or a minute and just enjoy what we’ve got shall we?
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Wow, perfectly said!!!
Well they can’t complain about the layers anymore and now we don’t want them to complain about some economic boogeyman. So what CAN they complain about 
Cool…now fix your layers to NOT LAG OUT when WPVP is involved.
Raiding UC yesterday, apparently lagged so bad, all died, no one could rez, some rezzed instant in the chamber they died in. In the end…all get teleported to the GY.
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When i got through the lomg queue i got to play and not be frustrated by spawn rates and overcrowding. In that repect an emphatic yes, it was a sucess.
I do get that it borked the economy a bit, which is a shame, but i’d much rather be able to play on the server i want than for the economy to be ‘normal’. Especially since i dont know what that entails.
I feel that this could have all been avoided if we just went with realm-specific sharding and force world boss locations into a single instance of the map. This was an idea fought against like crazy by this community because it “hurts their immersion.” Well Kyle, waiting for that guy at the end of the quest chain’s corpse to disappear and then him respawn so that I can finally put an end to him, and the 5 people in my group each loot a head off of him affects my immersion way more than sharding affects yous.
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Wrong. It means the population is more spread out. Layering is more essential when everyone is say 1-20. Than 1-60.
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For the people that complain about the game economy, ‘normal’ to them is being able to egregiously overcharge for things.
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You could take the blue post either way. I take it as low might be max for vanilla but probably on the low end of medium pop is like a old full server. I have to say only 4 am do i feel like my server is at the pops of vanilla servers. My server is high pop but rarely ever hits full.
Personally i think the whole idea of this layering thing works pretty good. It helped a lot, especially at the very launch day and a few following days.
whether people quit or not,
whether the servers are dead now or not,
layering has little to do with those issues.
and you can just reply in the original post,
theres no need to make a new post.
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There’s no boogeyman. People exploited layering to level faster, obtain more raid gear (and no not everyone who did that was banned), and wreck economies. If people think the damage is already done, you’re delusional. People stockpile resources waiting for later to deploy them in the economy, or use them for personal use, giving them a massive unfair edge.
Anyone who legitimately supports layering is not thinking clearly. That’s not vanilla whatsoever. As stated, the costs of layering are astronomically higher than simply having more servers on launch and merging them when their pops get too low. There’s barely a cost to doing that, vs massive costs for layering.
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If they went that route and knew they would be merging servers then they needed to make name and guild names unique across all servers so there was no conflict in the move.
Layering has been a success. Thanks for asking.