Burning Crusade Classic Anniversary - Layer Issues and Fixes

[Lumy]

Burning Crusade Classic Anniversary - Layer Issues and Fixes

For the last 24 hours, we’ve been aware of and working to solve multiple issues affecting players who form parties intending to play on the same layer together. Today, we deployed some changes that we think helped the situation, and we’re continuing to look at every report we receive to hopefully find more adjustments or fixes that we can make.

There is one issue in particular that we want to call out: If you don’t see your party after walking through the Dark Portal, we strongly recommend that you stay on one side of the portal and do not continually walk back-and-forth through the portal. We’ve noticed players doing this and it appears to make you increasingly unlikely to get onto the same layer! We’re developing a fix for this particular issue and we expect to implement it next week, after thorough testing.

Thank you very much for your patience and understanding.

[Kel_Sceptic]

Bet you wouldn't be able to have a clean start even at the 40years anniversary launch

[GUZ]

Nobody cares about wow tbc rerelease number 3 go make plus

[DonnieDice]

══════════════════════════════ ═══
SHARDING AND LAYERING KILLED WOW
══════════════════════════════ ═══

I will die on this hill.

Sharding and layering are the reason World of Warcraft no longer feels like a world. They are the knife that cut out the heart of what made this game an MMO.

THE IMMERSION IS DEAD

Nothing kills immersion faster than watching the world glitch out around you in real time. Corpses vanish within seconds. Mobs pop in and out of existence. Resource nodes flicker like a broken hologram when shards overlap.

You walk from point A to point B and phase through 2 to 5 different shards along the way. Nodes appear. Nodes vanish. The environment constantly reloads around you for no explainable in-game reason. This is not a fantasy world. This is a tech demo with visible seams.

PERMANENCE IS GONE

In Vanilla WoW, when someone died, their corpse stayed on the ground until they logged back in and released it. The world had weight. It had memory. It felt persistent.

You could run into the same player twice in the wilderness. You could build rivalries, recognize names, form spontaneous groups. The world was shared.

Now? Running into the same person twice is statistically improbable. You will probably never see them again. Everyone is phasing through different versions of the same zone. The world is not shared anymore. It is fractured into a thousand temporary instances that constantly shuffle and reset.

YOU CANNOT SEE YOUR OWN PARTY

You form a group. You are literally in the same party with someone. And you cannot see them standing right next to you. You have to manually troubleshoot shard syncing like you are fixing a bug.

In an MMO.

In a genre built on the concept of a shared, persistent space.

How is that acceptable?

THE CORPORATE COPE

And here is my favorite part. The excuse.

"Sharding will allow us to tell stories where the world evolves. We cannot evolve the world without sharding over the old content."

Are you kidding me?

This is the AAA solution? This is what the big brains came up with? "We can tell bigger stories by sharding over the old stuff"?

That is not innovation. That is cope. That is someone dropping the ball and then scrambling to justify it afterward. Maybe you designed it wrong. Maybe you built your systems in a way that painted you into a corner. I do not know. I am not the person who broke WoW.

But do not sit there and tell me that fracturing the world into a thousand flickering, temporary instances is necessary for storytelling. That is an excuse. That is damage control.

I KNOW WHY THEY REALLY DID IT

Sharding saves money. It smooths server load. It makes launch weeks cheaper to operate. From a spreadsheet perspective, it looks genius. Save a few pennies per player on CPU cycles and network costs.

But at what cost?

• The cost of immersion
• The cost of permanence
• The cost of a shared world
• The cost of ever seeing the same player twice
• The cost of the game feeling real

THE ILLUSION IS BROKEN

An MMO lives or dies on one thing: the illusion that you are inhabiting a persistent world. Once players see the seams, once nodes flicker, once people phase in and out mid-conversation, that illusion shatters.

And when the illusion dies, the magic dies with it.

WoW did not just lose players over time.

It lost its world.

══════════════════════════════ ═══

[Hellfury]

^^^^^
To the person above, You are right and wrong but you arent using the exact term for what it is.

Sharding is putting ppl from different servers on same world when the world doesnt have enough ppl from the same server-> This is good

Layering is when a world is filled it creates a new world for other ppl -> This is the meh part becuase this was made for a time servers and player PCs were weaker, this solved the massive lag, server crashes and the powerpoint presentations, but with today's tech it shouldnt be needed and this was always buggy, and in TBC everyone going to the same zone was predictable.

Phasing is when a small region of a zone can be different like different NPCs, objects and ambience -> This makes some parts of the story alot more dynamic but creates alot of issues with groups.