How exactly does layering work?

[Savagedragn]

Does anyone have good resources in understanding how Blizzard has implemented layering?

Links to dec interviews, links to documents or blue posts, etc.

Thanks for any help!

Trying to settle a discussion about any possible link between Q times and layering implementation.

[Ssateneth]

IMO, the best place to get details about this are forums dedicated to exploiting, because the only reason you would need to know anything about layering is to exploit it for personal gain. It's supposed to be a transparent feature to make the hugely populated servers more tolerable, because reference 1.12 mob/object spawn timers can't support a player population that is likely 10x what it was on the original 1.12 servers, but people found ways to abuse it for personal gain by switching layers on demand.

[ellieg]

If u read all the interviews, they explain it pretty well. U can Google them. I'll give u the run down and I'm sure a few ppl are gonna disagree, but here we go.

Think of each server (Herod) as a mega server. These can handle much more than the servers they released vanilla wow with 15 years ago. Think of each layer, as a mini server. Each layer is the size of a realm as they were known back 15 years ago. 3k pop.

Layering is instituted for 2 reasons.
1. Even tho the servers are better now, it takes a huge toll on them to load a whole bunch of people in one area. I.e. starting zones at launch.
2. They want to keep population caps at around what they were 15 years ago, but expect a huge drop off in number of players.

So layering was created so that servers have less load on them, and so that players are running around and seeing 3k other ppl (like they did on full servers 15 years ago) instead of seeing 12k. When layering is removed in phase 2, they want 3k ppl total online for the realm. This means if 12k ppl now, they expect 3/4 the people to leave.

So even though servers can handle 12k ppl spread about, they want that 3k feel.

When layering is removed, there will be queues if you have over 3k concurrent players.

Heres a quote to leave you with:

Newman: How big is a single layer? What’s the end target you’re shooting for, for each server?

Hazzikostas: Each layer is effectively going to be what a healthy server was at launch in 2004 in terms of the number of people it holds.

You will log in, in a layered world, and it’s going to be very, very crowded. People will fan out, and you will be teeming with players all over the place, and those who get a head start and make it into the Barrens or make it into Westfall initially will have a little bit of breathing room. But it’s going to feel very populous.

We’re looking to preserve the traditional experience. I think you can view it as effectively, just us running multiple classic launch servers, 2006-era, in parallel, with the intent of collapsing them down into a single one over the course of a few weeks.

[Savagedragn]

Ellieg,

That’s how I understand it. So we hit Q when the layers are full. If population stays constant, we can’t remove a layer without either increasing population per layer, or increasing the Q by 1 layer worth of population.

Do you agree with that?

[ellieg]

Ellieg,

That’s how I understand it. So we hit Q when the layers are full. If population stays constant, we can’t remove a layer without either increasing population per layer, or increasing the Q by 1 layer worth of population.

Do you agree with that?

Correct. A week ago they said they increased the server caps temporarily to help the queues. They added another layer. So if you were paying attention, avg queue times on your server either dissapeared completely, or dropped by around 3k.

If you notice a day or 2 ago, after a steady week of slight decline in queues, it jumped back up. This is because they removed that layer again.