Would you select a server without layers given the choice?

[Frolk]

We all know you will be back at retail after a week anyway so why ruin it for everyone else?

Ill quote u in September to see which one of us is highest lvl on Classic e_e

[Echocho]

The spread here is surprising. I'd rather not have layers as no matter how great and short-term the tech, it is still a change that will affect early gameplay and the people you interact with. How are you going to invite guild members to the guild from another layer of they are put into another layer before you form the guild? Can you get their signatures even if they're on a different layer?

The system will make sure that guild members are all on the same layer, Ion and Omar confirmed this during the summit.

/ginvite Playername is how you invite people.

[PenguinChan]

Layers while the rush is there, normal realms after it has died down. I thought this was the intent behind Blizzard's systems?

[King Robert the Glutton]

layering should be fine as long as its only used on launch

[Methodd]

Interesting question. I guess it depends on whether Blizzard is telling the truth when they say it will be limited to the first few weeks or not. I played on nost release which had 6k people crammed into all the starting zones at launch on one server. Granted they had dynamic respawns, but we've now confirmed that vanilla servers had that as well back in the day.

[tuckles]

Rather just have layering with no cross-play between them. The current layering system is highly exploitable and is shown frequently on streams.
create a new layer for that server when one fills up, you choose your layer at character creation and you're stuck there till the merge. simple.

[Nestoras]

Even though the poll is with a negative (queues) vs a neutral term, still many people are openly expressing their distaste about the solution blizzard came up with about handling the population and is watering down the economies and communities of the servers.
Those ppl are mostly the ones that will be playing classic after a couple of months, were the "layered" crowd will opt out from the game, leaving a watered down version of it, for the ones that truly love vanilla.

[RoKPaNda]

No. I don't believe in the whole server community tall tales that I never personally experienced in Vanilla/BC so I'm not worried about anything that I never saw or believed in being gone. I'd rather play than sit in queue.

[Depakote]

I swear the only people against layering are the ones that want the launch to be a shit show, just so they can say "told ya so classic sucks!!", it's a non-issue.

Even if there were exploits, blizz would likely ban people and remove the I'll gotten stuff. And there will be barely anyone at max when layering is removed as well so the opportunity is minimal.

No i don't want layering because of what you said. I don't want it because it's not a healthy thing for the game. Besides server tech has surely improved over the years. There's not really a need to layer crap is there?

[Aleksej89]

Where is the "i dont care about the system that will be in place just at the start of the expansion" option?

Seriously its just for the initial rush and will be disabled after that.
Since its so temporary i dont really see an issue with it.

[HordeFanboy]

I'd rather stay in que than get tp'ed to another shard

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

You speak as if queues would be the only issue or counter argument to the problem Blizzard are trying to solve at launch...

One problem, which Vanilla also had, is limited server 'connections' which (if true to Vanilla) would be 2500-3000 realm population (online) at any time. Any more players and you enter a queue and have to wait to enter, sometimes this is minutes... sometimes it's hours!

Another problem is what happens after you've connected, key word: mob to player density. At launch, and weeks following, hundreds of characters will fight over the same 20-30 mobs that a area has. These mobs you need to kill to quest and level up, the items they drop have a 1 in 4 (which is generous for Vanilla quest drops) chance to drop and you need 5 of them. The mob respawn timer is 2 minutes- so you need to kill 20 mobs to finish the quest, if you're only able to camp 1 spawn location that will take you 40 minutes ...and that's if you're one of the lucky few that are able to tag the mob. There's simply not enough mobs to match the players that are in one location, in later expansions (and on private servers) the devs added quicker respawns depending on player density. However that only creates a lot of other problems, you could for example make a group of 5 who can instant tag mobs and just spam tag mobs for insane xp and loot rewards- which also doesn't solve that there are classes who are slow to pull/tag mobs.

Just accept that layering/phasing is the best option Blizzard has to make the game playable for as many people as possible without completely breaking the game, it's "the lesser of all evils" that Blizzard could make and a lot better than not being able to play at all.

[Eon Drache]

Wrong.

The point from Blizzards perspective is to make money. The way to make money is to grow the playerbase. The playerbase grows when there is a vibrant in-game community to draw in players and hook them. Sharding and / or layers prevent an in-game community from forming so they are 1000% toxic to Blizzard. It is VASTLY preferable to put up with some players complaining about queue times than to outright kill the game. Just open more servers if needed. You can merge them later. It would be better to have quest mobs set to respawn faster for a couple weeks if you have to. What is sacrosanct is the in-game community. Nothing ever must interfere with it.

Your idea is brilliant. Open more servers and merge later. You realized that is effectively what layering is, right? It all has the same server name, but you know that server will be merged with x server later and you can still play with friends.

So say billy gets on server x. His friend bob sees server x is full. He gets 2 choices. With layering, hes on x2. And can still play with his friend! Without it, they can't play together now. Later, servers x and x2 will be merged.

with layering you can still group and play with x and x2 together. You can build that community.

If you had x and then server y and merged them when they never interacted THAT fucks with community. All of a sudden you're throwing people together that could never interact with each other.

[Zuvio]

I don't mind, as long as I'm in the top layer.

[Ozyorkbourne]

Why are we still pretending like layers are blasphemy?

What, they're going to let huge numbers of people play without making 30 people fight over each mob spawn? Oh no, the horror of removing the start zone as an artificial choke point.

[Geckomayhem]

The system will make sure that guild members are all on the same layer, Ion and Omar confirmed this during the summit.

/ginvite Playername is how you invite people.

They can't know who is in your guild until you invite them to the guild. I'm guessing that even if people are on a different layer when they log in, you won't be prevented from being able to ginvite them?

[Echocho]

They can't know who is in your guild until you invite them to the guild. I'm guessing that even if people are on a different layer when they log in, you won't be prevented from being able to ginvite them?

People who's not in the guild isn't in the guild that's correct.

[Hinastorm]

Half of people would rather wait in 2 hour queues, then have temporary layering? Good lord, the no changes clowns really out here.

- - - Updated - - -

This solution brings a lot of other problems and significantly changes the game.

Temporarily. The alternatives are much worse. I don't get why people are still fighting this.

- - - Updated - - -

Layers while the rush is there, normal realms after it has died down. I thought this was the intent behind Blizzard's systems?

It is, people just being dipshits.

[wholol]

There are only 2 things about layering that worries me and although the economy being affected is certainly cause for concern, the bigger issues with layering are as follows :

1) community dissonance due to inconsistency, not being able to visually meet the same players in the world in different zones/at different levels for both friendlies and enemies is a big immersion breaker imo, this includes avoiding wpvp by abusing layer hopping.

This might not seem like a big deal to people who have forgotten or never played vanilla but imagine yourself doing a quest that you are struggling with ,fighting with all you've got to stay live , the constant dread of respawns blocking your exit and the threat of getting ganked lingering on your mind.

Suddenly a friendly player appears , his name is bob. You and bob team up and defeat those mobs , you laugh about it and pat each other on the back then proceed to do a couple more quests together... and after a while you add each other on the friends list, the next day you whisper each other for more questing and potential dungeons and then you end up meeting more friends which might end up with you guys joining the same guild and raiding together. All of these fun adventures and friendships happened because you met bob that day.

But because of layering bob wasn't there that day to help you with your quest, he was in another layer and you never got to meet him, never got to do dungeons at the time you did which means you never got to meet the friends that should've been made as a result of the initial friendship because they were linked, like a chain of events that should've occurred but didn't because the catalyst was removed.

You might think to yourself " but I'll meet other players" , sure you will but you're only ever meeting a portion of them at a time, a time when/where connections should've been forged is lost forever.

2) Cities being too empty. I honestly think layering should be disabled in cities even if it is crowded tbh, it's always nice to see large crowds of people , it makes it feel like a real city full of players, in fact limiting the amount of players in cities has the adverse effect of making one feel like the game is less popular than it actually is.

Here's an example of what I mean : https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/..._ironforge_is/ .

Notice how sad that is ? even if there were 50-100 players, the city would still feel somewhat empty, cities are meant to be brimming with players, I seriously hope cities in classic won't have that issue.

[Hinastorm]

There are only 2 things about layering that worries me and although the economy being affected is certainly cause for concern, the bigger issues with layering are as follows :

1) community dissonance due to inconsistency, not being able to visually meet the same players in the world in different zones/at different levels for both friendlies and enemies is a big immersion breaker imo, this includes avoiding wpvp by abusing layer hopping.

This might not seem like a big deal to people who have forgotten or never played vanilla but imagine yourself doing a quest that you are struggling with ,fighting with all you've got to stay live , the constant dread of respawns blocking your exit and the threat of getting ganked lingering on your mind.

Suddenly a friendly player appears , his name is bob. You and bob team up and defeat those mobs , you laugh about it and pat each other on the back then proceed to do a couple more quests together... and after a while you add each other on the friends list, the next day you whisper each other for more questing and potential dungeons and then you end up meeting more friends which might end up with you guys joining the same guild and raiding together. All of these fun adventures and friendships happened because you met bob that day.

But because of layering bob wasn't there that day to help you with your quest, he was in another layer and you never got to meet him, never got to do dungeons at the time you did which means you never got to meet the friends that should've made.

You might think to yourself " but I'll meet other players" , sure you will but you're only ever meeting a portion of them at a time, a time where connections should've been forged is lost forever.

2) Cities being too empty. I honestly think layering should be disabled in cities even if it is crowded tbh, it's always nice to see large crowds of people , it makes it feel like a real city full of players, in fact limiting the amount of players in cities has the adverse effect of making one feel like the game is less popular than it actually is.

Here's an example of what I mean : https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/..._ironforge_is/ .

Notice how sad that is ? even if there were 50-100 players, the city would still feel somewhat empty, cities are meant to be brimming with players, I seriously hope cities in classic won't have that issue.

Your whole "bob" scenario has maybe happened to me once or twice in 15 years of playing mmo's, I find it unlikely.
I'd rather have layering and be competing with 5 people for quest mobs, instead of 50.

I agree on the city point, unless it would break the server.