Because 5 people on the forums that spend all day crying and complaining about everything to do with this game have asked for mergers… does not mean its real… in fact it means exactly what you think it means…
I can not speak for all servers… I can speak for my opinion on BSB and the place is a zoo at every single level on multiple layers… advocate for layers being gone on your personal server if you want… leave ours the heck alone…
Not all realms have layers at the moment. Heart seeker doesn’t have layering but Kirtonos does.
I transferred from Kirtonos to Heartseeker last night and I was amazed by the number of people in Ironforge. After asking around they told me layering was removed in Heartseeker a while back.
Layering does nothing for the server cap. This is where it differs from Sharding. Layering is one server split into many, it does not change the cap. They did also raise the cap sometime ago.
I always heard that the Layering is to be removed by phase 2 but then I don’t listen to a single thing Ion says cause its mostly crap. If you read the info posted by the engineers who are working on classic, they’ve put a lot of effort to get this running. It wasn’t as simple as copy pasting as they way they stored the data post-cata was different and it was only semi-recently they found a reliable way to copy the data from the 1.12 reference client onto the Legion client thats more stable.
From what I understand Layering was done to ease congestion during levelling as they predicted that Launch was going to be very busy and with the tag rules of classic in place meant that there was going to be a lot of people hitting the same mobs. I still have some issues in Red Ridge and Westfall in this regard while levelling on Pagle during certain times of the day where I feel like I’m just running into players doing quests and not wanting to group for them to share a tag.
I do believe that they didn’t expect Classic to be so popular, but they didn’t want to merge servers if they didn’t have to. They heard the community complaining about Ques and they slowly started to open servers. No point opening 15+ servers if half of them are going to die from day 1. No one wants a dead server, not everyone is happy with a server merge, server transfers are currently a way for blizzard to move some of the more populated servers onto the less populated servers to have servers more balanced and therefore have a healthier life cycle.
They are trying their best to please as many people as possible but all people can seem to do is complain complain complain complain because of the Retail team at blizzard and aren’t seeing how much time and effort the Classic Team at blizzard as spent trying to find a balance between QoL and keeping Classic the way it is. I cannot speak for Ion but I at least feel like the Classic Engineer at Blizzard have been pretty forward with there plans and AFAIK have stuck to their word on what they have planned to do thus far.
TLDR: I feel like layering is a lesser of two evils that was done with the players in mind. It would of been easier for blizzard just not to have layering at all and have the first couple of days of classic just be people stuck in the first couple of levelling zones because no one could get a tag. I feel like being are slamming on the Classic team despite their best efforts because of the retail team at blizzard and I personally think thats a little unfair. Its not as easy as some people may think to use old computer software on new computer software. Same thing if someone tried talking to someone in Old English and they tried to talk back in Modern English. Despite being the same languages you’d probably have difficulties understanding each other.
When layering goes away, the max number of players on at once will drop to 3000. Layering allows them to increase the server population. If they didn’t have it, and 9000 people were in the world at once, it would break the world because there are many parts of it that assume only 2 people will be there at a time.
Same with lockpicking… It’s annoying
It absolutely does happen. Half the layer requests going out in channels are from people getting ganked who want to move to a different layer.
That’s the key word here “annoying”, I think it being a nuisance gets out wayed heavily by allowing people to actually play the game.
Look how people were reacting when que times where too long and couldn’t do their quests. peple were screaming for extra sub time and other things. Without layering that problem would have persisted to this point and probably longer.
Even now it’s quite challenge to do quests as there’s still a lot of people in the same area.
That’s not accurate. The “first few weeks” promise was in the context of an expected rapid drop-off in population. That didn’t happen, so naturally nothing based on that expectation was going to happen.
It was only unreliable in the sense that any prediction of the future is unreliable. Not much to do with their sincerity as such.
RP events, too, I’d imagine.
A friend was excited to attend an RP event at the cross roads, but didn’t see anyone there. Only later did I suggest it might have been in a different layer.
Maybe they don’t have to get rid of all of them, but maybe narrow it down to two layers?
Apparently the exploits going on are due to layering - if so please remove layering
https://www.reddit.com/r/Arugal/comments/db7vb3/real_test_server_first_hand_of_rag_layer/
world feels empty ? I am still having to play at 3 am in order to find quest mobs.
I actually don’t believe Blizzards reasoning for layering.
I don’t think they are doing it for us at least.
Especially since they know people are abusing it.
And we all know how quick Blizzard is to remove anything we can exploit, yet it’s still here.
No.
I think there are technical issues they aren’t admitting to and instead of saying that, they pretend they are doing us a favor.
layering itself doesn’t do anything to server cap no. but when they remove layering they have implied that they will be lowering server cap. the servers just can’t handle that large a population. my guess is they’ll knock it down by around half if not closer to vanilla’s 2500-3000 pop. which will result in queues. just read this post.
and just to note, they did raise server caps, twice if i recall.
I just wanted to say that layering itself wont prevent a queue. If they remove it (as they promised) then I expect that they still introduce a queue due to the sheer number of players on any given zone for a world that was not designed around 15k players+.
That said I really wonder what their strategy was. If we take the wowhead census data at face value and given the amount of servers available its not too far fetched, it would mean that peak servers like skeram or faerelina have around 60-70k players on the server. Now while not all are active all at the same time it certainly beats the original server size of 3k. Even if you raise the cap to 5-7k as a lot of private servers had its still a large drop in playerbase to even get there remotely.
So whats the plan here? Was blizzard really hoping/counting on a server where 70k players play, that around 90-95% get bored and leave classic? And that goes for every single server they opened? What is the strategy for phase 2? Will we have hourly queues again because its just one server now and the hardware can not handle all players at once?
If they had just opened enough realms all based on a 3k server cap to begin with and then merged dead servers this issue could have been avoided.
I am already dreading this blue post that might announce that in the end they might not get rid of layering at all because its not technically possible. They have promised things in the past so I wouldnt put it past them, in which case classic would be dead anyway.
The layering is still necessary on some servers.
I recall seeing 8 people farming 12 mobs during prime time. And I know that it would have been even worse if not for layering.
Without layering, instances would almost have been the only way to level on some servers.
I really wish layering didn’t exist. It’d be nice to actually go to city and town raids and have a working world defense channel again. That’s the biggest thing I hate about classic right now is the restrictions layering brings.
i don’t think the current server caps are beyond 10k but i don’t have any data on that. someone that looked at full servers on census when it was up might know.
60-70k with people logging out and others logging in every 1-5 seconds won’t be near to that many online at once. and it seems like that would be enough people to add up to about a 10k cap with a queue at peak.
community also whined a lot to increase server cap. i assume the original cap was likely around 7k. blizzard also opened up additional servers for people to transfer, which people asked for. these full servers that’ll end up with another 5-10k additional people in queue when phase 2 happens made their own bed. even the med pop servers will likely have a short 5min queue with their current pops.
they aren’t going to open up more servers for transfer if people aren’t spreading out though. they may open new ones up with phase 2 so we get fresh servers that were never layered.
but removing layering is quite possible. people that didn’t transfer off full servers are just going to be stuck in a long queue when it happens because they can’t remove layering and not reduce pop cap. it will just result in a rather unhealthy server.
anyways, people chose to stay on full servers. blizzard did warn people and did quite a lot to get people moving off full/high pop servers. the player base has nobody but themselves to blame at this point.
Are you playing a different game than I am? Everywhere I go every quest mob is camped to oblivion. I have had to dungeon spam the last few levels because I could not quest (47-49).
I can only imagine how camped the lower level areas still are.
That was exactly what Blizzard was counting on. And since it hasn’t, yet, there’s a bit of a mess, because they also knew layering wouldn’t work for phase 2.
On another note, they also said the hardware could handle large numbers of people, but the experience would be miserable in terms of questing.
[Why isn’t layering gone?]
How do you know it isn’t gone already, on your realm?
Every realm is different. Each realm will change the number of layers based on current population.
As far as I know, layering is dynamic. When your population is low (off-peak) there may be only 1 layer. That is the same as “layering is gone”. Then when the population of THAT realm gets past 30,000 players or so, a layer is added.
Blizzard is never going to “turn off layering, and let you have 90,000 players in the same layer in the same realm”. That does not match the Vanilla experience, where realms could not handle more than 30,000 players: the other 60,000 would be in a queue.