Open world feels like retail and that’s not a good thing.
Getting “shard/layer” swapped constantly and it’s not even fun anymore.
Even zones that should feel populated, feel empty because of this new system.
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Eewwwwww…
Thankfully we do not have this on Classic Era servers (whitemane Cluster) where Layering is disabled as of August 2023.
DEATH TO LAYERING!
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And now it’s by zone. People vanish like ghosts when you move 15 feet from one area to the next. It is so lame
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EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW that is disgusting.
in 2019 it was the whole server as many layers so you had a constant feel, but by zone… that’s basically retail sharding…
MASSIVE turn off man, maybe I will not be playing Nightslayer afterall.
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Check it out man
keep spamming these posts till they finally admit it was a dead system
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They try to spin it as beneficial. It’s not at all
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Yeah that crap is straight up retail sharding (basically), only a matter of time before there are 6 or 7 people per micro shard because they will divide the zone up into mini zones to make questing EZ mode for retail scrubs who complain about everything.
This happened to me once already in UC. I was so confused?
Yeah… well… it is.
I remember specifically how for 2019 the layering was put in for just the beginning and there was an emphasis to say that “layering is not retail sharding because it’s done for the whole server, not per zone”.
Now the devs put in the laziest solution THAT WAS SPECIFICALLY AVOIDED BEFORE and in that blue post they are patting themselves on the back for thinking of it, with seemly NO memory of why things were done the way they were for 2019.
Yes, not playing is the best solution if you dislike this and the fresh doesn’t offer enough of what you do like, the BGs might be good with WSG etc but we will see, I’m passing, wasn’t expecting to but there are just too many things that take away from the fun for me.
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Yeah sucks because I want fresh but I am not playing on a server with sharding… That’s one of the WORST parts about retail and one of the things that I feel really did harm the game most… You simply almost never see players on retail in world no matter how many people might be there because of shards. That crap was added in WoD and has basically destroyed the feel of the open world and the server community.
CRZ and Sharding are cancerous, neither is a good thing; healthy servers are the real solution to problems…
If blizzard wanted to really care about the servers and fix the problem they should have just opened a couple more servers and FORBID any kind of transfers in the future; because those transfers are what kills a server long term.
Additionally they could even use their slightly scuffed faction balance system; tho I think the ratio could be a bit more lenient @ 60/40, but with an additional warning when adding your self to an over populated faction that clearly states (your BG Q’s may be very long as a result of gross population balance) This is looking specifically at PVP servers as the prime movers for BG enthusiasts, while almost fully ignoring the PVE servers because those that do PVP on a PVE server in BG’s are almost always a flash in the pan and don’t keep Q’n after they PVE our their R14 for weapons / armor requirements.
I had something else I was gonna say but forgot… it will come back to me eventually, or someone lese will put it.
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it’s retail sharding 
we’re playing retail 2.0
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The faction balance at the creation page is enough to balance servers to the point of one side becoming too powerful. We don’t all this extra sharding
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I was playing last night and Redridge was as overpopulated and impossible to quest in as usual. What zones are empty?
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It’s honestly nice to see another “Vanilla” fan with this perspective, although after all our conversations I’m not surprised that we see eye to eye on this.
It’s interesting because around a month ago I was talking to this person from my Vanilla server and he randomly stated the same sort of thing about the sharding/CRZs killing the “village feeling” in his words. He was trying to find people to play Retail with to get the old server community feel back. I felt bad for him.
Yes, the transfers caused most of the problems. I think that Blizzard has been trying to make things as hands off for themselves as possible but as for discovering why things have gone the way they have, they haven’t bothered to delve very deeply.
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I can only imagine the people complaining about empty zones are swimming out into the fatigue zone or something and then complaining there’s nobody around them
If you actually hang out at quest zones and towns you can’t walk 5 feet without tripping over another player
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yup, they’re just not willing to do the nitty gritty analysis of why problems exist and how to solve them.
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Have any of you guys yapping about sharding actually…done quests? You can’t even get quests done it’s so overcrowded. Every quest mob has 1 person waiting for them to respawn and I’m level 34 and it’s insane. I can’t even get anything done.
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Completely agree, this layering/sharding is ruining the whole feel of the game.
I truly don’t feel like I’m playing an official launch, I feel like I’m playing on a dead private server or something.
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It’s not by zone because you can still ask someone across zones to ‘inv me off layer 2’ for example which means layers are defined worldwide. What changed is that they auto switch a player from layer to layer more often, which wasn’t the case in 2019.