I wasn’t around at launch so can’t compare the two, but it seems like layering was a good idea for the high population of levelers. Why are we not doing it anymore? I’m level 30 and every zone on Pagle appropriate for me has over fifty people in it (I guess who cuts off at 50) with all the good farming spots overcamped. At first I just thought Duskwood was too popular, but Menethil was as bad, and it was hard competing for Murlocs and quest spawns on the sunken ships. I’ve even tried finding a spot to grind during daytime hours with little luck, although it is noticeably worse in the evening when I play most. It’s not just grinding either… For some quests I just have to hope for spawns if whatever I am after, and the zones are fairly dangerous with mobs spawning right on top of you if you don’t watch it.
I Imagine it is even worse on the bigger servers. Pagle normally doesn’t seem to get over a five minute queue, and I haven’t gotten a queue in a week or so. I guess it’s nice easily being able to find quest buddies, but it would be even nicer to find a good spot to grind without seeing anyone for a couple of levels… At least on my horde toon (as I understand it, we’re about 70-30 slanted towards alliance, and I definitely ran into less people in Tirisfal, Silverpine, and the Barrens, although all three were far from feeling empty) I’ve been able to grind a little in Southern Barrens (I am a tailor and like farming the dwarfs for wool, but regularly have to either assist questers or share spawns with them), but I still run into people pretty often, but he’s going to be entering more saturated zones soon where horde and allies mix.
But why did we rush to eliminate layering anyway? I imagine the lvl 20-30 bracket isn’t especially overpopulated and that I’ll probably have to deal with crowded zones through 60 unless I want to transfer to a possibly soon to be dead server that I’ll have trouble finding groups on at max level. It would be nice not to compete with all these people for resources and still have the option to invite them to a group with people split into layers instead of these small zones trying to support all of them at once. I can’t even imagine trying to compete for farming spots at 60 either, but I guess I’ll spend most of that time in dungeons or on alts.
Because layering is unnatural, screws with WPvP heavily, and allows world bosses to bgs exploited.
It’s also a jarring and frankly irritating thing to run into in classic, you had to invite everyone you needed to interact with to your group because they tended to be on separate layers. City Raids suffered as the raid typically happened on the layer with few players able to defend on it.
It was awful and most are glad it’s gone. Your leveling convenience is irrelevant.
I’m on a PVE server, so wpvp doesn’t really matter to me.
I’m not saying bringing back layering is the best solution anyway. You have several points for why it worked poorly. But that doesn’t change that the leveling zones are overcrowded. On this server at least. Is it better on other pve servers? I’m not that attached to Pagle. I just joined up here because Convert to Raid got involved with a guild here, but it looks like everyone Alliance side that hits 60 transfers out of that guild anyway.
I don’t play PvE servers so I wouldn’t know population balances on them, but someone else in this thread mentioned you’re on an extremely lopsided pop server, so that’s probably part of the problem.
Well, horde only zones are pretty crowded too. They’re a lot better than alliance zones though. I just worry my horde toon is about of the level that he has to start questing in multi faction zones also.
I’m open to starting over on a less populated server, if there is a PVE one that isn’t so large but has enough players to group with at endgame. I doubt there’s a safe recommendation for that though, since it’s hard to tell if a server is going to be a dead end or not. I’m mainly in this to enjoy leveling for old times sake anyway, so could probably just start over on any less populated pve server and be fine. Are there less crowded pve servers to pick from? I’m open to recommendations, but preferably not servers accepting transfers and on their way to the same problem.
We needed mega servers. We also need layers. There are lots of people playing, but even more have quit all ready. There would be so many dead realms if they used tiny servers that it would lead to even more people quitting. Layers is the perfect solution to everything in the game. When you log on, you want to play the game, this means farming, doing quests, whatever, without layers it’s just not possible. Every area is full of people at all hours of the day. Removing layering was a mistake, the same way introducing only tiny servers would have been.
They had a problem, though - they knew that there would be a surge of initial players. Discrete servers make a player pop problem. Granted, there are many benefits, too, but the size of a server pop has to be closely managed or else there are dead servers or servers that no reasonable player can farm on.
Limited layering could have helped this (as could have more tightly restricted server sizes).
It was greatly abused and should have never been necessary. Vanilla sized servers would have eliminated the need, but they wanted fewer mega servers to manage, which was the biggest mistake and biggest violation of #nochanges.
I won’t disagree that the way they implemented it didn’t work - but the problem is we’re left with large servers that were allowed to get large because layering “would fix it”. For whatever reason, those large servers have fewer people quitting (although the number of people doing stuff under level 55 is vastly diminished).
I don’t really know what would fix things, other than splits - which were a thing back in vanilla.