We're not making enough noise about layering

LOUD NOISES!

am I doing this right?

But for real, Blizzard figure it out!

TL DR : OP is late to the forums and not taken the time to read about the game he claims to love. GG

Stress Test 1: May 22th
Stress Test 2: May 29th
Stress Test 3: June 19th

That’s 3.

Also, if you don’t mind, i’d still be curious to hear what you think caused me to see the transition, based on what i just told ya.
Whenever you have time, I’ll be glad to check out your explanation, cause it always helps to understand what we’re dealing with here in regards to layering a bit better.

Just like BFA, Blizzard has already decided what will be and won’t be in game within a very narrow margin for discussion. Any feedback that doesn’t directly praise their choices will be ignored or lost in the noise.

It’s very simple why they will never get rid of layering at launch.

Blizzard moved to a cloud based server infrastructure instead of dedicated servers for realms which is why you see such huge lag in BFA when there are more than 20 people in any given localized zone as they attempt to load balance across their cloud.

In order to support a huge population in a small game area you need dedicated LOCAL hardware in order to process all the updates without the added latency of maintaining data integrity across a wide area network. It also allows Blizzard to rent cloud services instead of purchasing and maintaining dedicated hardware.

This is the reason they can’t get rid of layering. They would have to change their underlying infrastructure to support the initial influx of players but then would see a huge drop off in required computing power as players leave the initial zones, spread out or even stop playing.

This is super simplified.

TLDR; Blizz uses cloud based services now which are bad at handling huge populations in small areas. Too expensive to upgrade to dedicated servers for vanilla when they expect a significant % to be tourists.

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Blizzard manuallly doing things.

Also, there were only 2 stress tests.

Also also, 6 days ago was the 19th.

1

2

3

Okey.

Ah! Indeed it was. Once again, thanks to your efforts i’m always informed of the current year, and past dates. I know you’ll continue to offer your calendar service to the forum, so thank you in advance for any future reminders!

nevermind i missed that

I’m glad we can at least agree now that there were 3 tests :smile:

its fine don’t worry

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But regardless, the people phasing in and out, the major test on that was only this last test. Before that, while they might have been testing it, it was still very early in its implementation. There’s still 2 months of getting this working right.

I will give you that yes, it was early in its implementation, but even so it worked surprisingly well, given what it was supposed to do according to their explanation.

The only bug i saw during the testing was people getting stuck at the SW gate, where layering seems to cause some weird issue there that doesn’t add up with what it’s supposed to do.

I’m not sure they can prevent any of the phasing transitions from happening, because the whole system relies on that to do it’s thing.

Either they have to put restrictions on it (which again, introduce a whole new set of issues, further changing and damaging the game), or they scrap it.

I doubt they can come up with a new tech with only this little time left. We’ll see.

Why would I ? I’m not a developer, not even near.
I hardly understand a thing about that, let alone the depths of their intents. I leave it to those who work on an everyday basis on it to decide what’s best for their game.
I’ll give my feed back as to how stress test feels, nothing more.

Layering breaks the lore of the game.

The Warcraft universe is supposed to be a world. Not a bunch of dimensions you can warp between at will. Except for Garrosh. And that story line thankfully didn’t exist in Classic WoW yet.

As someone who has accounts since Beta. Here are the actual numbers to do with as you please. There where 84 servers at launch according to the server timeline. and Blizz recorded just over 200,000 sales first 24 hours. In the first 24 hours they recorded just over 100,000 players. So if they where evenly distributed (I know they never are) that about 1190 players per server. Now if we look at current numbers estimated to be in classic this could easily go over 1-2 million first hour trying to login and level.
Source: wowwiki.fandom(.) com /wiki/Timeline_of_the_creation_of_US_realms
www.digitaltrends(.) com /gaming/world-of-warcraft-shatters-sales-record/

The pacing is due to those others that can’t land a tag on a single mob in the starter zones. I know I don’t want to be competing with 500 people for quests. Not even the 125 after halved twice.

Late enough that some folks would stop playing already. There are options nowadays, and the gaming populations is much more impatient and entitled. They’ll play something else.

Layering preserves the realm. Not laying it will cause stability issues, gate off 2/3s+ of the population for extended amounts of time. Cause the initial quest areas to be utterly flooded. And favor only the few that got log in literally first and got a couple tags ahead on the mobs, to which they can use that big of grace to rocket up to the high levels and corner material markets way harder than layer hopping exploiters could. Need I go on?

It’s not sharding. It’s not CRZ. Neither of those are layering. And the elements are different. And it’s much less of a community shock to reduce the amount of layers than to cram servers together that already have a sense of economy.

Not… really relevant when discussing gameplay and stability. But you’re welcome to make yet another thread about how it’ll affect RP realms (Which will likely just get locked anyway. Sadly the RP folks don’t get so much as the scraps at the table when it comes to Blizzard’s favor.)

Do we know how many servers those are going to be split in? Cause I recall there being mention of far less initial servers than the original Vanilla launch. If that’s the case… whewf… that’s gonna be some major congestion.

CRZ takes players from different realms and randomly adds them to a zone. This results in rarely seeing the same player twice as you level since CRZ grabs randomly from a large pool of players, making no attempt to maintain a persistent population.

Layering takes server-sized layers and randomly swaps a player’s layer on continent transition, grouping, and login. This results in rarely seeing the same player twice as you level since you’re placed in a random segment of a much larger pool of players, making no attempt to maintain a persistent population.

You’re right in that CRZ and layering are not the same, in much the same way that a knife wound and a gunshot wound are not the same. The mechanism that created the wounds are completely different, but the end result is practically the same. You’re still bleeding out from a hole in your body.

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The only random of those three(since one of them, to my knowledge, doesn’t happen), is the log in. Grouping is definitive (to the leader, when working as intended). And I do believe continent swapping was -not- supposed to affect your layer.

They seem the same. Look similar. But both are dangerous in their own ways. Either with a through-and-through/bullet lodged with the gunshot, or the single puncture of the knife. How this relates is that… yes, layering sucks still. But it’s the lesser of evils. Look at this this way:

Crz has NO contact with the other servers aside from the popping in (And randomness of player sharding, which is on a much more random and wild scale than layering)

Layering allows for a cohesive economy to take place with said players from day 1. As well, none of them will reach a point of being a ghost town before ‘emergency’ merging becomes necessary. It will always pose at LEAST a safe population between layers.

Though, I suppose I could agree that if they worked something like ‘channels’ in some other games (Tera being my example), but you were moreso locked to said channel upon log in(Edit: With some kind of timer required to wait to swap layers on the next log in… like 1 hour after logging out, i dunno. Something)… maybe that’d be a fair enough fix for the interim? Problem is, there’s never going to be a resolution that makes everyone happy. And enough people are tolerant enough of layering as it’s been presented that there’s no real pressure for Blizz to change. There are angry folks now, but if they change, there will just be more angry folks right after. Probably some of the same, since they’d need to rush a new system that likely has a much more exploitable system… Or in the case of removal, disallowing tens of thousands of players(At least) to be unable to play the game for extended amounts of time.

Launch day they overloaded the servers and the game went down as they added more servers. The actual numbers vary depending on who is asked and Blizz never confirmed “Launch minute” servers same with actual sub numbers or sale numbers. Since they added around 40 more that day. This is if you listen to wow wiki which is usually pretty reliable.

They said “lean servers” and “add servers like we did in 2004”. Meaning, start low, provision as required.

Layering feels like garbage