The Layering Scandal

According to that video, people grouping and in guilds get priority to stay in the layer. People being social in an MMO have priority.

Stop the presses!

This was true in retail Vanilla. I (and many others) rerolled on servers after a certain duration. You can argue this point all you want but like I said it is historically true and time will prove me correct again.

This point is not the main point, however, stay on topic.

I’ve been in one of those situations too, in stormwind. Almost no one there. Yet trade chat spammed the ever living hell “OMG PLS INVITE TO FUN LAYER!!!”. But… where are the people… awkward stuff. Feels terrible indeed.
And then of course i also saw the stuff in the video. Needless to say i experienced PTSD from sharding/CRZ etc, which this is but another version for classic of.

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Way to act like a jerk do you always act this combative? And did you watch the rest of the video you didn’t have any trouble finding? Clearly you didn’t because they explained themselves and the reasoning very clearly. There should have been no reason to post your rant at all after watching this video. It’s only three weeks old so what’s with the posts about no information?

I don’t think you and I were on at the same time and in the same place the second stress test was much better than the first and I had no issues, but the first one was terribly crowded. It was at least 25- 40 people stuck waiting for spawns for each quest.

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When people respond to me with condescending and strongly adversarial responses like: “Why do you keep saying sharding” When there is no sharding"

Which also, btw, are incredibly ignorant… I typically respond in a more forceful manner. I know people these days are so thinned skinned that the first sign of strength or someone who strongly asserts things makes them quiver. I am not going to apologize for strongly responding when people respond to me pretending I am wrong when, in fact, they are ignorant.

Yes I watched the whole video. It proves sharding and layering are interchangable. Simply a modification of sharding. I also noted the guy on the left say it would effect gameplay for MONTHS did you? You wanna play the game where you argue every minutia as best you can or do you wanna be honest for half a second?

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The issue, to me, is that I would expect a lot of short-term tourists. Layering will accommodate them. Once they drop off and layering goes away, I hope we have a healthy long-term realm population.

It just seems like a necessary evil. I am not going to stress over it for something that will only be there for a month or so.

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The ultimate goal for layering is to have healthy server populations three months down the road. There are going to be a lot of curious folks that stop by to check out Classic when it is new. Most of these people will not stick around.

Layering will allow them to pack far more people onto server than there really should be, and this will ensure that the servers don’t die down the road.

Layering is absolutely vital to the success of Classic, and it’s time people start waking up to that fact.

The lady doth protest too much.

Seriously. Get over it. It’s temporary. Take a deep breath and get over it. Use your free time to do something constructive rather than complain about something temporary to an internet message forum.

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Since layering looks like it is here to stay through phase 1 (let us be honest, they will keep it for all phases), I have some suggestions to make it not ruin immersion as much as possible while also preventing abuse.

I am going to use 2,500 as the layer cap that causes the server to spin up a new layer. The number can be any number you like.

  1. When Layer 1 reaches the cap, Layer 2 is created. Layer 1 will NEVER have more than the cap. If Layer 1 goes under the cap and Layer 2 has enough players to shove into Layer 1, the merge occurs.

  2. If a player from a full layer invites another player from a not full layer, the priority will go as following: if there is 2,500 players on the full layer, the group gets transitioned to layer 2 and 1 spot opens on layer 1.

  3. Existing players on a layer are NEVER kicked off of that layer no matter what.

  4. You cannot switch to a different layer more than once every 15 minutes. This includes being invited, logging out, etc.

  5. After being invited to a layer, after leaving the group, you remain in the layer. That is now your base layer. You cannot go back to your previous layer if your current layer has an opening.


    Basically, servers will fit up to the cap in a layer and then create a new layer. No one from the older layers transition to the newer layers unless they invite too many to the group that overfills the cap, then the entire group is transitioned to the layer that is not capped. Blizzard will prioritize the oldest layer for players logging in (while keeping with the 15 minute policy of not being able to just randomly swap a layer). If two layers combined are less than the cap, they merge (i.e. layer 1 having 2,450 players now and layer 2 having 40 players, they merge so there is no layer anymore).

As for prioritizing players to join layers with guild members, that is a bit more tricky. I think it is fine though. Blizzard should prioritize consistency over guilds seeing all of their guild members on the same layer. They can form a group or raid to force a transition to one layer or the other. Under no circumstances should a layer go beyond the cap. We should not see mega layers and ghost town layers.

It will be bad for a solo player if they are in the middle of a cave clearing mobs and all of a sudden they are forced to a new layer and then die to the new layer mobs and have to start all over again.

If you give people 2 months to have multiple shards to farm with they will destroy the economy and gain an unfair advantage. It also destroys PvP gameplay and PvE gameplay in the open world for multiple months.

The trade off is that a couple servers may have to be merged 5 months down the line otherwise. Seems like a no brainer to me.

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Ugh, why we gotta do this Blizz.

I know it might mean queues or other issues, but honestly, those would just be “part of the vanilla experience” for me at least.

I like the world of my server being accurately represented. Full or empty, these are my colleagues.

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I did play the stress test beta, and I experienced mobs and players disappearing before my eyes. It threw me off, knowing that layering was happening, and I did not like seeing it. I’d rather just wait for mobs or group up for a bit more advantage. Layering is just wrong.

I wasn’t there for Vanilla launch, I took a few months to get into it, but I was there for BC launch at midnight. It was a bit crazy in the Blood Elf zone, but nothing that made me get angry over it. It helps to group up definitely, as you can grab mobs faster, but a solo experience isn’t impossible. Just takes longer. I don’t see this as a big deal, either way. It was part of the experience. Layering will change this experience fundamentally. It reminds you that Blizzard isn’t allowing you the real ‘Vanilla’ experience, and people who never played back in 2005-7 will not get to see it as it really was. Hence not a true Classic experience. C’mon Blizz…

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If these people are so thinned skinned and you aren’t why the insults? Why are you getting bent out of shape when someone disagrees with you? I was wrong about people going back to using the word sharding, but that’s no reason for you to be so hostile.

At 5:19 in that video the dev explains what it’s going to look like and in that video they explain why they are doing it. So I don’t understand your post in light of that information directly from a developers. What more information could there be?

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Essentially they did. They said layering would be gone by Phase 2 at the latest. How could they be more clear? If you choose to think they are lying, fine; but why do you think a “date” would be any better?

use layering as server merges. let people pick a realm that shares all character names. there can’t be 2 of the same names on a realm.

then let people pick a layer which has the normal server size. cannot ever change layers.

if your layer has a queue, it has a queue and prevents character creation. when a layer gets too underpopulated, merge it with another layer on that realm forever.

no character phasing, no layerhopping abuse, if your layer gets dead it gets merged, if your layer doesn’t die it will always have the same community it started with

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Vanilla launch was so bad that an mmo having that launch today would be DoA.

Even a month after launch there were constant crashes, extended maintenance and queue galore.

If you’re going to make a bunch of servers to handle the initial rush, many of them will have unhealthy populations in a few months. Having to merge/CRZ them would be awful.

All this silence about unarmored Mounts I think there might be a scandal.

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It just astounds me that some people are so narrow-minded that they cannot see the necessity of layering at launch and not being able to look ahead and see layering will be gone and a non-issue forever a few weeks/months after launch.

Do some people like to complain just for the sake of complaining?

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I don’t believe that is the way it’s going to work when the game goes live. I never experience any of that in the first or second stress test.

I was in the human starting zone and it was said to be the worst zone as far as starting areas go.
I don’t know how to set the scene better than it literally took 4-10 minutes to tag each quest mob and joining a group was the only way to get past the quests and even then it did not create any kind of community as people did not have time to chat and it still took 15-20 minutes to get through a kill quest while grouped up.

I don’t see how anyone can say this unless they are on an actual classic server on Aug 27th. I would think it would be transparent to the player as it should be. The human starting zone in 2005 wasn’t crowded and I didn’t have to wait or party up to get past kill quests. If layering creates that environment it would be just like it was back then.