True, but that was before we saw how detrimental layering could be.
If given the option, I’m sure most of the anti-sharding crowd would choose low-level sharding over the current plan for layering.
Layering was a good attempt, but there are just too many negatives to code-prevent. Sharding is already proven, it just need a level cap or zone limit.
I’m sure Blizzard know the communities view on layering. They just don’t seem to care. Perhaps its just a way of them being able to say… “people wanted classic servers, we gave it to them they didn’t play it and went back to private servers. we were right… they thought they wanted it but they didn’t”
Sharding the initial starter (non contested zones) would work as a buffer its not like you go there for PvP. For humans you would have it for elwin then westfall. As soon as you hit redridge no more sharding possible… by then people will have started to spread out and there is really very little to gain from running exploits in those zones anyhow…
I really hope they change their minds. They’ve already seen what happens when they don’t listen to players during the BFA beta for example so hopefully they’re more apt for Classic.
I’d like to see one of the no layering folks list every issue, and explain what the flip side of said issue if there was no layering.
No one’s ever said layering was perfect. But it is better than not having anything. Maybe going back to sharding the low zones would be better. But the community already yelled at Blizzard enough NOT to do that. In a world of “you can’t please everyone” Blizzard is choosing the please the majority (The No Sharing group, as well as the people that are okay with layering. The No Layering group is actually quite the minority here)
EDIT: Calling it here. Anyone that snips this will just focus on me calling the no layering group the minority on the subject and ignore the rest.
They absolutely know and agree that layering isn’t ideal either, if you watch the many interviews about this.
They’re not going to sink so many resources into creating this just to purposely sabotage it out of pettiness. That’s a bit tinfoil-y if you’re being honest with yourself. ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
This is simply the option they’ve decided is the lesser of two evils. I don’t think anyone is excited about layering as a “feature”, but to some people it’s an acceptable price to avoid the alternative of a one-two combo of crashes/queues at launch + dead realms/server merges a few weeks in.
This is simply a matter of whether people believe layering will go away as Blizzard says it will. Personally with all the passion and excitement I’ve seen from the developers in all the interviews, I have no reason to distrust what they say in this case.
They know layering is not authentic, and it will be removed as soon as it can be. That’s me trusting what they’re saying based on everything else they’ve shown us throughout the process. Personally I think they’ve earned that much.
That’s actually not true. CRZ only pulls from connected realms. You can and probably do run into the same people again. But something to remember: After the starting zone, the world opens up and there’s way more options on how to level.
You see the same people, because anyone you see cross realm is from the same list of realms. Basically they took 3 realms and decided that it’s going to function as one. That backfired with some areas, especially starting zones being too crowded, so sharding happened on top of it. This was AFTER WoW peaked and was losing subs. Blizzard already knows how classic’s launch is going to go.
Layering, OTOH, is realm specific. It’s not really sharding, more like CRZ but combining the group of realms under a single realm name.
Layering actually gives you a HIGHER chance of running into the same people since it’s a very limited number of instances of the continent, and once they start removing layering, everyone condenses down to being in the same instance.
The fact that they are adding layering to classic wow is a disgrace to the game and completely ridiculous. If they actually cared on making it a legit classic experience they would implement ques to enter overfilled realms like back in the day and let the world playout how it was designed to. Sectioning off players into different layers on the same realm will ruin the community aspect, split the playerbase, create confusion in pvp situations, create an inflated amount of commodities, and will promote the exploitation of the system.
No it won’t, because they’re still on your realm, you’re going to still see and interact with them. And it’s not going to inflate commodities. If 20 people collect and sell 20 ore, whether they were on 1 layer or 2, it’s still 400 ore being sold.
They’ve already moved the goalposts from sharding starting areas to layering the entire world. They cannot be trusted to remove a system that will by design force the server to rely on it forever just to function if enough people don’t quit.
Playing with people in an MMO.
Sound terrible.
Right?
they said 8.2 was going to be great… haven’t seen many good words over in the other forum… I believe your trust may be misplaced
Have they performed a stress test without layering?
It seems the best way to really give people an idea of what it would look like both ways. I saw huge crowds during the stress test while layering was enabled.
I honestly don’t think it will be that bad, unless it continues past lvl 20 or so.
To be fair, these issues are problematic with CRZ as well as Layering. For this reason, neither are a good solution and why I support limiting any player distribution tech to low level areas or level caps.
Each one of these issues with the exception of #4 will require more coding and testing before live. While layering is like sharding, it’s brand new tech that is unreliable unlike sharding. However, both types of tech could be manipulated at to farm nodes, resources or rare spawns.
Currently, you just need to perform some type of action to reset the internal CD to layer hop. Players will find a way around it, they always do.
For this reason alone, layering/sharding does not belong in any zone where max-level characters can abuse the system for profit and more importantly negatively affect the economy.
1 & 2: Mobs don’t transfer through layers. They are static to their own. Would need more data based on if the leader was shifted out of their layer(Which I believe isn’t supposed to happen), or if this was with players joining other groups.
3: That shouldn’t happen in general. I’d chalk that up to being a bug. Unless you mean not seeing some of the chatters (Like Trade chat), which may be a more global function bridging layers
4: Blizz seems to be working on this one, which is good. There will always be exploits, but even still:
If it mitigates the early bottleneck of starting progression, having layering everywhere is better than having big ol’ queues. I’ve brought this up a few times, though not sure if it was in this thread or a few others. But if there’s a bottleneck at the start, layer exploiting is a small thing compared to someone who was able to stay online for many more hours, rocket up to the level of said materials, and farm them completely unhindered by other players. 0 competition on a non-layer server will yield FAR more than competing among other populated layers of players. Gotta remember that someone layer hopping still has to deal with the server-sized layer they’re hopping into. Maybe they get 1 node from where they logged out and back in/regrouped. But they likely lost one they could have walked to in a few seconds.
With high numbers, layering is actually safer to the economy, and still allows for community to foster, rather than the mad dash of a bottlenecked queue, and the cheap tricks those players will do to get ahead. No one would group to quest. They just snipe tags and try to move on asap. (Not 100%, obviously, but it’s a common trait among gamers lately.)
I agree that starting zones and zones which will be more populated with tourists and need some sort of player distribution tech, sharding being the more stable approach.
I disagree that any player distribution tech should be allowed in higher level zones for economic reasons. While Blizzard has stated that layering won’t exist past Phase I, we do not know how long that will actually be. It is quite possible with the speed at which players will level, that phase 1 will be just long enough for max-level players to undermine the economy. Personally, I’d rather not take that chance and it definitely doesn’t feel like the authentic vanilla experience Blizzard is trying to achieve.
Layer/shard the starting zones and be done with it.
Agreed. But the uproar about sharding had Blizz reconsider. The players are to blame for that one, sadly.
This I also agree with. But in a vacuum. It relies on the early game being playable enough that people aren’t* stuck, and that the few that get out don’t slingshot forward.
Timeline said 2 months or something of the sort.
Less detrimentally than however long the first player that gets to said economic material can hoard up and bully the market. Pushing a strong demand for the supply, spiking prices early, siphoning most of the gold onto the few that managed to break away.
As for all of it:
I support this. But we might be a little too late for that.
But being gone by phase 2 was the absolute longest that they’d have it. Their plan, like they’ve stated multiple times, is for it to only last the first couple weeks.
They’ll just postpone phase 2 until populations drop sufficiently. God help Blizzard if the playerbase grows over time, though.
It won’t. Blizzard knows that and is planning on it.