Layering vs Dynamic Respawns

[dragnipur]

What do you think is better if you are on a full server?

[Gavll]

Personally prefer the idea of dynamic respawns, having played on a PS with these. Zero chance of people popping in and out of your layer. The ratio of resources to players remains the same.

[Thraendil]

I much prefer layering, at least if it's kept to an absolute minimum. Dynamic respawn is quite memeish and makes the experience less authentic for me. Layering distorts the authenticity much less in my opinion. Moreover, dynamic respawn makes it suicidal to walk into caves, which there are plenty of.

[rad586]

Dynamic respawns for me.

It sucks when there are not enough spawns for the players killing mobs. It also sucks when people are separated from each other by layers.

So ..... Dynamic respawns are win win for all ..... as long as they won't respawn instantly on top of you due to the ammount of players in the area.

[dzd]

Only reason to hate layering is that you don't trust with their decision making, which is why I voted for dynamic respawns. Objective and the only choice for blizzard is obviously layering and that's what they are gonna do.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Assuming a world where we absolutely have to choose one or the other I would go for dynamic respawns. It seems a lot easier to adjust in the back ground as populations rise and fall. It is a tested and proven system already. Also, if phase 2 rolls around and populations are still really high (and I imagine on the "mega" 1-3 servers it will be) it wouldn't put the devs between a rock and a hard place of having to switch off layering and letting the servers explode or being forced to keep it up and pissing everyone off (you lie blizz! QQ). Layering and phase 2 turn off is a pretty massive gamble by Blizzard.

[Elias01]

You know those two are completly different type of systems right? Layerting is there to decrese load on server. Dinamic respawns is there so you dont have to wait for mob spawns way too long. Scarecity of resources in world is what made vannila great so no dinamic respawns are garbage.

[dragnipur]

You know those two are completly different type of systems right? Layerting is there to decrese load on server. Dinamic respawns is there so you dont have to wait for mob spawns way too long. Scarecity of resources in world is what made vannila great so no dinamic respawns are garbage.

The common between them is the population in a specific area or server.That is what is connecting them.And why i asked the question.

[Battlebeard]

To quote Barbossa: "There were a lot of long words in there, miss, we're naught but humble pirates."

Can you explain what the difference is between these?

[Miena]

Seeing as Kevin Jordan, a dev from vanilla, confirmed dynamic respawns were a thing back then as well, dynamic respawns it is, by a mile.

Layering is in my eyes not an option at all for a game like Classic. It is completely out of place, was in no way or form in vanilla for ANY period of time, and what little help it gives with server management is NOT worth the consequences we'll see and feel ingame at all. Especially when it gets dragged out for Blizzards current estimation of when they will remove it, promising 2 dates: a "couple of weeks" in (very open ended, coming from Ion), or at the release of P2 (MONTHS in).
#actualnochanges

[Letrema]

So I played on the stress beta and actually got in the second one. I voted layering, although the mobs were almost always dead, we did end up grouping and helping each other out, which was how i remembered vanilla.

[Kralljin]

Layering.

There is only so much dynamic respawns can handle, even if the tech existed in Vanilla, i am fairly certain that there was a cap on how fast mobs could respawn, once people went over a certain number, people got clogged up on certain quests.

On top of that, at a certain point, it just dips over into this theme park mode where there is no more "challenge" or danger involved but it simply turns into a "how many mobs can you tag" fights where anything dies within seconds anyway because multiple people do loads of damage to tag it.

If 20 people hop around Moonbrook, killing Defias, most of the challenge of actually going into an "enemy town" is gone because you have 19 other people that are camping respawns.
You can't die unless people deliberately let you die, which is sadly beneficial to them as they then have your tag(s) - completely counteracting the Vanilla idea of "community".

Also, it turns collection quests into a cesspool, because so many people will steal quest items under your nose.
Fight some harpy guarding a grain sack? Better watch out or that Warrior might take the sack while you fight the harpy.
Same shit can also happen to professions related nodes such as ores and herbs.

Dynamic respawns rewards the greedy, the more you can take, the faster you are done, even if you're acting at the expense of others.
At a certain point, some people just commit to being assholes, especially during the early phase where so many names hop around so you cannot possibly keep track of every assbag without instantly putting them on ignore.

[Mosotti]

I remember playing on a private server at launch and there were like 20 Stitches stacked on the grave. Good design.

[bloomy]

im fine with both for the launch to help smooth out the starting zones as much as possible. also mark kern already spoke about this on stream, dynamic respawns were a thing in vanilla so if there can only be 1 my vote would be for this. but in reality, add dynamic respawns with a shitload of layers and it should be good for everyone.

to be clear, im against layering all together, but if they're going to use it as they said they have, i'd much rather just layer the shit out of starting zones than trying to pretend like it isn't layered when it is. just go full layering for the first month or so in starting areas and then never use it again, although i have a feeling it will show up again near the opening of AQ.

[FelPlague]

What do you think is better if you are on a full server?

"Alright i killed the boss! and it just respawned ontop of me instantly..."

dynamic respawns change "exploring and group up" to "just camp 1 spot and kill it as it respawns"

also dynamic respawns does not fix the lag issue of having hundreds to thousands of players in 1 spot.

[micwini]

Voted dynamic respawns, since it prevents people from phasing out which is a no-no for me.

I do think that both options in the poll are way to different to be in the same poll. They also tackle different problems (Amount of people on a server vs. amount of spawns)

[Redroniksre]

Seeing as Kevin Jordan, a dev from vanilla, confirmed dynamic respawns were a thing back then as well, dynamic respawns it is, by a mile.

Layering is in my eyes not an option at all for a game like Classic. It is completely out of place, was in no way or form in vanilla for ANY period of time, and what little help it gives with server management is NOT worth the consequences we'll see and feel ingame at all. Especially when it gets dragged out for Blizzards current estimation of when they will remove it, promising 2 dates: a "couple of weeks" in (very open ended, coming from Ion), or at the release of P2 (MONTHS in).
#actualnochanges

You would prefer for servers to be unstable messes that crash constantly and are down for long periods of time? Just look at what the stress test did to people. Unless you think lag magically goes away on new servers.

[rivercola]

Still not seeing anyone talking about how Layering doesn't accomplish what Sharding was designed for in Classic.

[BananaHandsB]

Trying to level up with literally thousands of people surrounding me would be a further departure from my original classic experience (not to mention probably crash my pc) so I chose layering.

[MardestyGSOG]

Personally prefer the idea of dynamic respawns, having played on a PS with these. Zero chance of people popping in and out of your layer. The ratio of resources to players remains the same.

That’s not how layering works. It’s not sharding

- - - Updated - - -

Layering for sure. Dynamic respawns and 10k pop servers aren’t blizzlike at all, and dynamic respawns in caves is gonna result in a death quite often. And layering isn’t nearly what many seem to think it is. Think of a partition of a server, every character creation is gonna be assigned partition 1 at launch, with a corresponding partition(say partition 1b) for the opposite continent. When that partition fills up then new accounts logging in for the first time will be assigned to partition 2, and the caps will be flexible to allow for things like partying and guilds and friend lists. When you change partitions you stay. So if you have 2 accounts, account 1 is on partition 1 and your later account is on partition 2, you add your friends from partition 1 to your friend list on account 2, you permanently move to partition 1 so you are joined with your friends.

Sharding is extremely dynamic, layering is just statically assigning players permanently to a partition of a server with the flexibility to move partitions to join friends. You can’t just freely hop to different layers by joining new parties because you won’t see players from other layers to be able to join them, so you would have to already know players from a different layer, and to exploit layers you would have to coordinate account creation with layer caps and partying up with other layers in which case you would then move to that layer for good, and would then have to party with someone from your original layer to move back. It’s not nearly as easy as people make it out to be and it’s gonna take some serious no lifers to exploit this, and the odds are that layering will be removed by the time enough players are in a position to exploit it.