Agreed.
I was thinking you were thinking your static layers would be say Thrall 1 Thrall 2 and etc. If that is the case why share the name if not to be merged regardless of community size?
Ok.
Guys.
I’m sorry.
I’m reading your response and I’m like…that really isn’t bad at all.
I was going to rebuttal with all my negatives but…I can’t really think of any myself ![:sweat_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/sweat_smile.png?v=6" ":sweat_smile:")
They hope the average player won’t notice. Hide it from them and they won’t know there are several players around you on different layers when you should be together. Say it is a tool to enable better play-ability and they will accept the lies.
Glad to have made the acquaintance, continued support and discussion is how changes are made. Even if it feels like only we are talking to an unresponsive wall.
Just want to clarify, in my(sorry if someone else has brought this to the table) proposed idea… players wouldn’t be able to select where they end up. Blizzard has the most data, and would be able to make a better informed decision on when and what servers get merged.
So in your experience, you believe its not overly costly this day in age for said multiple servers to die out and be merged? That there is a cost and bean counters say no?
If past history is any indication blizzard would botch the merges. When they did server transfers in vanilla (I know not merges) they seemingly didn’t account for anything but timezone.
Transferred a high pop further progressed realm into a low pop non progressed realm. Giving everyone on the high pop realm a huge leg up on everyone on the low pop realm.
For me I’ll take layering and its bad. Cause that transfer experience in vanilla was worse than anything I’ve been through on an mmo.
Lmao sharding bro. I’m sorry I have the sense of humour of a 3 year old but watching you call it sharting like 7 times killed me. Lmao.
Interesting, so basically an exceptionally geared player transfering off a high pop server to a new pop server. This gives the exceptionally geared player a leg up on the new server. I can totally see that, do you think that low pop dead servers being merged into high pop living servers would have simular effects?
I think in your example it shows the worst case scenario, where a merge would be best case scenario - Vandal’s lifeboat analogy. More cases then not, the larger server would be more raid/pvp/economically progressed.
I had not taken into account timezones, though I doubt the in game clock being dialed forward or backward 1-2 hours being much of an issue, then comes the distance of said new server from players house… possibly giving the small merged server an increase of ??? 10-50ms?
I also experienced 2 complete PvP fails in the stress test due to layering.
The first was when i leveled in Northshire, and people in general started spamming “omg HORDE here in the tower!! need help etc”. I rushed over to the tower, and nothing was going on. ![:unamused:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/unamused.png?v=6" ":unamused:")
Ofc i knew it was cause of my layer, which already was a huge letdown feeling cause it’s not like old WoW at all and immediately took me out of the world, realizing it’s just game mechanics reminding me what this is…a game, not a World. I got a dose of retail in Classic, nice.
Eventually i asked for an inv to the raid, and upon my invite i phased into a big army of alliance fighting a bunched up horde in the building. Just like that, i poofed into all of them.
Imagine if you’re someone who doesn’t know about the new feature “layering” until you actually play the game. And then you run into simple scenarios like this which would normally happen without any weird, out of place obstructions like that like it would have back then.
The confusion would be real. Anyway.
The second PvP fail happened in Goldshire. I specifically went there because a couple people said there was horde near the inn there, so i wanted to check it out and join the fight! … only to find nothing but crickets and maybe 4 people standing there, with no one else around the inn anywhere when i looked for the action.
Disgruntled from my first PvP fail i didn’t bother to fish for an invite again. I just was pissed i wasted my time going there, thinking i could just join the action like i normally would have been able to. But nope, i got layered. Tough luck, welcome to 2019.
All these type of situations have been confirmed to be able to happen, even with BRM PvP too. Entire raids could pass eachother and not know there’s another raid there waiting to fight.
You could even have situations where people specifically choose a layer to fight it out on. LOL!
How weird is that gonna be? The raids would need to communicate to each other cross faction over discord “Hey guise let’s kill eachother on that layer over there mkay?” before they can actually PvP in the world…
And then there’s gonna be losers and winners of course, and guess what they could do: The loser raid can hop layers before or upon ressing, completely heal and buff up again, and then poof into the old layer again shortly after to attack the winner raid, without giving the winner raid a chance to prohibit their recovery.
Amazing gameplay awaits us in Classic indeed. Everyone gets the short end of the stick, but PvPers and RPers are gonna feel it the strongest i’m certain of that.
This happens to retail players also. It’s almost like Sharding and CRZ was a flawed system to start. Strange when one considers that some of Blizzard’s original Developers even spoke with passionate disgust for it when it was used in Sony’s Everquest MMO.
Here’s a crazy idea. Maybe they should go back to their original stance which they promised us in 2004 and like… get rid of it once and for all? I mean cutting costs is no excuse for quality, right? Right?
Oh. How… 1990’s of me.
This is why i quit retail WoW for, just got plain sick of these awful broken systems. If any sort of layering / sharding is used for more than a few weeks in classic I’m gone for good from Blizzard games.
I almost quit after the first roll out of CRZ in MoP. I left WoW largely due to CRZ when WoD went down. I came back because Legion looked good and I thought they had maybe learned something.
It seems their logic right now is “Now that we have you back, we’re taking everything away we gave you. Now eat your gruel pleb.” They could of gotten away with this in 2010 where there was no serious rivals. But right now? Shadowbringers is really starting to look appealing due to this.
It’s literally my guild right now, not Blizzard that has kept me subbed.
I really hope they are listening, I really hope all of these obvious bad things aren’t true, that our deductive reasoning is mistaken.
the reason why beta is dead is because there is nothing to do, the game in the current state is infinitely better then private servers. Most of the major bugs have been addressed. Layering is the only thing that needs to be tested which will most likely happen when they wipe characters near the end of July. I have a feeling they will open the flood gates to truly test out layering which is the only thing that really needs to be tested at this point. Reading posts by people on the outside looking in is absurd.
The fact remains is the original idea of sharding zones was 1000000000x better then layering which is just a mega form of sharding. Sharding had so much more control. But guess what? They buckled to all the whiners like you.
Unfortunately, all of us here are on the outside looking in. Not many issues with layering, aside from exploitation and an occasional annoyance. Sharding, in my opinion presents a big issue to classic, which would be missed opportunities to make friends.
i disagree completely. Sharding they had so much more control, they could do it it by zone and timeline. Which means they could have it up to level 30 zones then its gone while also having the 1-30 zones on a 1-2 week timer to just phase out completely. Layering is by continent so all they have control over is time. Which is a problem because of all the exploits.
Your position has a lot of merits for sure, I can’t disagree that it may be better overall. Though I still remember meeting and playing with Nervx for all of Vanilla, whom I met in Westfall.
How has this troll thread gone so far…
It is all number tweaks and scalability, cause its software you can just scale things down and get most of the bugs worked out. If you expect 15k people on a server and expect to have 5 layers for those 15k players and you have 500 players on the Beta you can test the same effect of layering by setting the layer cap to 100. In such a way you can see how layering can be used and abused without having to invite 15k players to the Beta. You still need to test with 15k players to make sure that the scaling up doesn’t introduce any unexpected problems(which is where the stress tests come in).
Then when you have the large number of players you can set up multiple realms and test different layer sizes at launch to see how a layer size will affect playability while everyone is in the starting areas(more crowded than normal play) this will let you know that maybe you set the layers to 1 or 2k for the first couple days so that the starting areas are not too crowded then later move them back to the expected 3k till the population drops and you can remove them.
As to how layering and sharding are different, shards are much smaller(usually there are multiple shards per zone and they hold a much smaller amount of people). Layers are much bigger, they are not set to the entire world like some have said, they are set to the boarders of the continents, so essentially to reach the edge of a layer you have to go through a loading screen. however EK and Kalimdor have separate layers.
The biggest complaint about sharding is that as you run around you switch shards, and so you will constantly be seeing people and mobs popping into and out of existence due to sharding, with layering the only time you see layer changes is when you enter or leave a group. Essentially layers are hidden, so unless you go looking for them you really wont see them.
As to Economics
Layers are FAR less impactful on the economy than merging. if you have 5 layers you have 5x the demand and 5x the number of people who are farming. So you are just as likely to run into someone farming the other layers, so have yet to see any credible evidence from someone that understands economics that layering will actually cause any damage to the economy. So ya throwing two separate economies together is def gonna cause more damage than layering.
As to pvp, yes you can potentially jump layers to escape pvp, but you are just as likely to have pvp in the other layers because again the server populations are proportional to the layers. Plus finding someone on another layer to invite you might be a bit harder than you expect.
TL/DR
This whole thread is a joke, layering is by far the least bad option from all the proposed options(including sub realms), its being tested in small scale because they don’t want a large scale beta and software is easy to scale.
In your example of 5 layers, anyone that understands basic economics wouldn’t disagree with you. However, don’t delude yourself that guilds won’t exploit that 5th layer with 50/3000 active players by having alts on said layers invite farming groups on their mains.
Example, Devilsaur leather and Un’goro Mafia’s. Farming group gets there and is heavily camped, /g Hey Pelpo, could you invite us RQ so we can get on the dead layer? Am I wrong to think that 4/5 layers is not creating balanced supply and demand?
A smaller dying server being absorbed by larger living servers, hopefully doesn’t happen, and if so only once the “tourists” have left. Explain to me how this is better then exploitable resources?
Could be a troll thread, but many valuable points and concerns were brought up and discussed, your opinion of it being a joke doesn’t mean that the least bad option is the only option and can’t be solved. I for one don’t want Classic to fail, and just the mention of layering sent players running for the hills.
So obviously you dont understand how layers work they are dynamic you wont have a layer with 50/3000 because you would only have 4 layers then… you get more layers when you have the population for them when you dont have the population for them they go away.
Also it is significantly harder to monopolize multiple layers than it is a single layer which means you are actually less likely to have mafias on a layered system…
And not a single valid point was raised in this thread, it was a bunch of people who don’t understand layering or beta testing making a huge fuss about something that is actually nothing. Then it shifted to a troll egging people on and the responses to the troll while a couple people debated how merging economies cause a significant disruption to those economies. A couple people putting forth “problems” with layering while ignoring the fact that those problems are significantly less than the other solutions.
If what you’re saying is true not only are all of our points valid; you’ve proven by yourself layering is garbage.