Layering has been a success. Thanks for asking.
Wasnât this a raid with a big streamer and therefore a TON of fans? The problem is that bringing more people into an area causes exponential server load, not linear. When you bring as many as these big streamers can gather on an already packed server like Faerlina, the servers are under tremendous load. Itâs not surprising at all that it would be horribly laggy, and thereâs not really much that Blizz can do about it. Thatâs just how networking works.
I think overall, layering was unnecessary and detrimental.
One claimed advantage of layering was that it would permit larger initial populations per server. However, initial populations ended up being limited by queueing, anyway.
I was on both one of the original Vanilla RPPVP servers and on the first Classic RPPVP server, both immediately upon opening due to queueing early. Layers limited the number of visible characters on the Classic server to a fraction - probably 1/5 or so - of the number on the Vanilla server. This made it much less necessary to group up on the Classic server for initial quests, and also made it impossible to see most of the characters on the Classic server for purposes such as walk up guild recruiting and walk up roleplay. This hurt community building in favor of permitting easier solo leveling. I think this was a bad tradeoff.
In addition, layering made more resources available on larger servers, in ways some players felt was exploitative, which encouraged players to stay on larger servers rather than spreading out between servers in a more balanced way. Blizzard attempted to address this with early free transfers, but that seems to have had some downsides with respect to causing PVP faction imbalance to develop more quickly and more severely than in Vanilla.
Finally, on the less highly populated servers, layering caused those servers to appear less populated than they were until the layers were removed. This may have caused some actual loss of population as players abandoned servers that appeared to be underpopulated even when they werenât.
Ultimately, I think Blizzard would have been better off avoiding layering entirely. At most they could have ramped up the server capacities from a lower initial level. It wouldnât have taken more than a day to ramp them up, given how quickly people level out of the starting zones like Aldrassil/Teldrassil into the first leveling zones like Darkshore.
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[So was layering a success?]
Yep.
Unless you have something that prevents you from saying anything good about Blizzard, the answer is yes. Obviously yes.
Did layering solve other problems? No. Was it meant to? No.
Did layering affect other things? Probably.
Huh? You talk as if queues were a FIX. For most players, queues were a PROBLEM, not a FIX.
That is simply false. Each layer had THE SAME number of characters as the REALM MAX back in Vanilla. That was stated by Ion back in May. That rule is in the code. Itâs how the system decides how many layers a realm has.
So in effect the reducing of layers (in week 3 or 5) has the same effect as realm mergers would have, without the naming and other problems that realm mergers cause.
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Layering was not a success. Things would have been smoother across the board without it having been implemented.
People SHOULD have felt the impact of over population in starting zones. Thatâs the entire impetus for rolling on a lower population server. Without layering the realms would likely have much more equal population numbers.
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I absolutely abhor layering. It breaks world immersion. It breaks a one coherent world. I understand why it exists and why it was needed on an overpopulated server, but it comes at real costs. When someone speaks of something in the game world, it should exist in the game world, not in multiple possible renditions of it.
Also it definitely saturated the economy. I genuinely do not think that layering scaled well with devilsaur spawns for example if farmers were abusing layering.
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Iâm pointing out that queues existed. Layering didnât prevent queues, so layering was not a fix for that.
If he thinks that, heâs mistaken. There was far less competition for quest objectives than there was on new servers in Vanilla. Wouldnât be the first time Blizzard didnât understand what their code was doing.
It would have been better just to put everyone into a single layer from the start.
Exactly.
I donât think so. I started over on a new realm on day 2, because my realm was so full. I chose a brand-new and therefore âemptyâ realm.
It still had around 200 players in the Human starter zone. It was impossible to kill the 6 wolves, then 8 vermin, etc because of the competition. Eventually I gave up and logged back in at 3 am. At that hour it was simply âvery crowdedâ, but playable.
That was WITH layering, on the lowest-possible-population realm.
I think you are grossly under-estimating the impact of more than a million players, all starting in the same 6 starter zones on a handful of servers.
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Can people just be happy we have classic and quit bellyaching about this and that? Blizzard canât do a god damned thing without some needy neckbeard running to the forums to cry about how his/her whole life came crashing down because of layering or because armored mounts shouldnât be in the game. Did any of you frigin people just log into the game and just enjoy yourself? If not why tf are you still here?
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Clearly someone didnât try to do ANYTHING in the horde zones. Durotar was massively overcrowded and it didnât get much better once you got to Barrens since you added two other races to the mix since a lot of Undead didnât go to Silverpine. The Zhevra Hoof droprate meme is all fun and games, but you canât get them to drop at all when the zone is littered with corpses. Also heaven forbid you want to kill named mobs like the centaurs with 10 minute respawn rates.
Real vanilla day 1 launch wasnt nearly as hyped, nearly as populated day 1, and had way more servers.
Vanilla vs classic launches are not comparable.
As someone who started on Fairbanks the first day, and was unable to log back into that server for over a month with out a queueâŚ
I started over Smolderweb, one of the âDeadâ servers, and have had a better experience than I ever had in vanilla, and still am today.
Why donât you go play on one and have some foundation in reality before you spout nonsense on here?
It probably wasnât handled the best really, it didnât really feel like the layers realistically increased the capacity of the servers at all which was probably the intention. But what that meant was that the server size was always going to be forced to drop below full.
Another thing was simply timing, something that at least was incredibly prominent for OCE.
We started off with 2 PvP servers where realistically the capacity at launch required 3. By the time we got our third server released a lot of people or at least the friends of people who intended to play were already locked into the highest pop server.
So a month later whilst Felstriker was still low/medium pop Arugal still had consistent 3k queues. I feel had all servers been available at launch the distribution would have been a lot more balanced and healthy over all.