I’ve noticed that too… sad 
This is a direct quote from blizzard themselves
“With 1.15.5, PvP realms will attempt to balance faction at both the layer and the specific zone level. What this means is that if one faction exceeds our balance threshold, any additional players attempting to enter that same zone will instead transfer to another layer.
The system will work much like our Warmode system in The War Within, where we balance as many copies of the zone as possible and eventually any overflow of one dominant faction will end up on a one sided zone by themselves.”
It is by zone.
They make copies of each individual zone and decide who gets to be in it or how the players are sharded in.
If you ask someone for an invite you get added to their shard, and it stays the same across the zones. But other players will be moved to a new shard or layer or make up for it.
I’ll even give you a quick example you can check. Stand outside the gates or UC, you’ll see people vanish as soon as they cross the door. And they might stay disappearing, or they could re appear if the zone allows it.
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I know what you mean, what I’m saying is that it’s not the same as retail, because in retail one zone can have 1 shard and another zone have 10 based on how busy each zone is.
“The system will work much like our Warmode system in The War Within, where we balance as many copies of the zone as possible and eventually any overflow of one dominant faction will end up on a one sided zone by themselves.”
How is this not multiple shards or “copies”?
You don’t understand how those two things can be true? The balancing works like warmode in retail but the way the layers exist (worldwide vs. by zone) is different.
Blizzard has game design backwards. They dont do the work so the player can have fun. They set it up to do as little work as needed because its costly to dev time.
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But unhappy players = less revenue = less money to pay devs.
They could have half the devs if they had a single game designer.
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I don’t like waiting in a gargantuan que line to play the game.
You and the 3 other people left on the server don’t need layering.
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they layering we have now is indistinguishable from layering on era and sod
Before launch the server was more crowded than you can imagine and we had no layers; it was amazing.
It’s not and bliz themselves even said in a patch that it’s more like sharding in war mode in the anniversary servers
The layer system is working very well.
It’s beneficial to Blizzard for the purposes of server administration, it keeps their load light.
Players however… generally hate it.
War mode sharding on retail is seamless though. If sharding was like retail nobody would be complaining. It’s felt just like every other version of sharding on every other of version of classic. In that it happens at inopportune times like mid combat or during an escort. I truly do not see this as any better or any worse than normal sharding. It feels the exact same.
Even PVP wise I don’t see it as accomplishing it’s goal. I still get camped by 4-8 alliance outside uldum when theres only 3 horde roaming around.
So many people would be complaining.
In fact, probably more. Open world in retail is so bad.
Over layering or sharding in any realm sucks.
Have you even played retail? The layering is more responsive and also less noticeable to happen randomly. I’ve never been layered in retail and lose my entire quest progress like on classic. I’ve also never been layered in the middle of pvping someone. I’ve also never had an enemy faction layer on top of me randomly. Or had enemy npc’s all spawn instantly due to being layered into them.
Retail layering is much better.
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I did until recently and the sharding in retail is even worse; its one of the main reasons I quit retail.
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Completely TRUTH! The layers are the only thing that helps even hopping through different layers it’s still WAY too crowded to do quests it’s nuts! Especially the high popular zone for questing like STV. GOOD LORD that’s a hot mess not enough layers to mitigate the population everyone’s camping quest mobs.
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