r/classicwow • u/shadowraiderr • 3d ago
Forever Beta Feedback The layering between zones is just nuts
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u/Toasted_Waffle99 3d ago
This doesn’t feel like classic at all with people phasing. Even TBC did have this
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u/purple30klegion 3d ago
i think sharding started around MoP or Cata, but yea it really ruins the world immersion. In TBC I remember being able to run into enemy cities etc, sharding killed that.
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u/Punelle 3d ago
People need to stop downplaying this concern and just upvote it and put pressure on the multi-billion company. Sharding isn't only bad for PvP, but an MMORPG as a whole. Why is it so hard for Blizzard to understand that anything that separates the community is inherently bad?
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u/Double-Scratch5858 3d ago
Completely ruins immersion for me especially when trying to world pvp. People just phasing when im 2 feet from them. Incredibly lame.
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u/Ass_Blasties 3d ago
The number of mindless drones who get offended by any criticism is so insane
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u/Sweet_Search_3616 3d ago
I swear some of the people on this sub must wear a Blizzard cheerleading uniform when they go to bed the way they so passionately defend them
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u/slightlysublevel 2d ago
This sub was captured by retail players. Anything negative against anything Blizzard does/adds is seen as wrongthink, and you will be downvoted for thinking that vanilla was better than the Retail- that is Forever.
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u/Moonman23569 3d ago
It's because being a fan of game/company becomes their personality, thus any criticism is treated as a personal attack
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u/tinylittlebabyjesus 2d ago
Yeah I noticed that when I first started being active in the sub after Forever was announced.
People seeming to identify with the game so strongly already that respectful criticism of it was treated as if you farted on their grandmother.
And there's still people stirring up shit, straw-manning the critics and farming upvotes.
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u/Preinitz 3d ago
I wonder if it's some effect of people not being religious, they've filled up that space in the brain with their loyalty to their favorite corporation instead? It's bizarre.
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u/i_wear_green_pants 3d ago
Why is it so hard for Blizzard to understand that anything that separates the community is inherently bad?
Well devs do understand this. They have said that they want layering to work so that you don't get layered to different layer when switching zones.
I bet this is just corporation problem. They clearly use existing tech from retail. They might need completely new tech for Forever mega servers to work without phasing like in this video. Now try to explain that to executives that you need to spend so much time and money for no new engaging content. They would never give huge resources for the game that doesn't have microtransactions.
Everyone jumping into Forever has to remember that this is the reality. No matter what devs want, there is always this mega corporation behind them and devs need their approval.
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u/sknilegap 3d ago
The problem is that this isn't layering, people are just calling it that out of habit (dev's included).
This is strictly CRZ/sharding from retail.
Layering didn't just magically break and start swapping people on zone transition. They are trying to sell retail's setup as if it was layering. Which, ironically, layering was created with the sole intention of NOT having these problems.
Layering was created to have each continent be a sole singular "layer". This simply is not that.
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u/PlayfulSurprise5237 2d ago
Bro WHAT THE FUCK are you guys talking about?
HFS I've never seen so many people so wrong and confused about what's going on with something in my life, honestly.
Sharding from retail is, at least last I checked, a layering system that just takes people and moves them willy nilly, wherever and whenever, with no regard for literally anything. It's layering but completely loose.
Layering that we seen in all other forms of Classic(except Forever), so long as it has existed in Classic, appears to move people more in groups. So it's not casually just taking people left and right, a person here, a person there, and moving them with no regard like retail. It splits, creates and merges layers as it needs, as well as moves chunks of players from one layer to another.
There is only so many ways a layering system can work.
If layering system IS going to exist it should happen only at zone borders(if it needs to happen). When there's less likely to be things happening(because people are simply traveling from one area to the next), and so that it does not break immersion as much.
They have done major work on keeping individuals on the same layer as friends, guilds, and people they have partied with in the past, so there's still an aspect of community. We can argue about whether or not layering is a better way of doing things, but there's not really much room to argue about how it's done, if it's going to be done. There is one vastly superior way to layer, and you're looking at it.
IMO while I don't like the hit to a sense of community with layering, or the loss of immersion, the way they have it set up(so long as they move to zone border exclusive layering), is better than regular servers. This way there is no dead servers, there is no overpopulated servers, there should be no dead or overpopulated zones. And it opens a big door to what they can do in zones(things that might not be possible without a saturation of players).
They're still fine tuning some things, but it's to be expected. Theres some fine details in how it makes it's decisions on who to layer, and how to manage a zone population that are very complex.
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u/sknilegap 2d ago
Layering is an entire continent at a time. Wow forever isnt doing layering right now, it's something else. No clue what it is, but it's not layering. If you sit on the edge of zones people poof in and out when they cross the border. That didn't happen with layering.
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u/andynator1000 2d ago
You should brush up on the difference between sharding and layering.
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u/SurroundOk3941 2d ago
They need to bring back real servers. If the populations die off then they can just merge them later
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u/RevolutionaryText749 2d ago
The funniest part is that it is not even some sort of an UE5 game or whatever so no limitations coming from performance on the players end. They just don’t want to spend money. That is why we also have all these fake Classic SD models and other issues coming with it. They are like “hey pay 30 dollars for the NEW race but we won’t make any changes to the game apart from these small ones we could do YEARS ago”.
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u/b4k4ni 3d ago
First of all, I'm also not happy with the splits. But ... what's your idea? Servers also cut the community. Because others cant join their friends as the servers are full. And you can't simply change. Or your server gets abandoned.
And you can't run everyone on the same map. Not only that its a technical limit, but 200k users in OG won't work.
They are still developing in and fine tuning. You decide on a language before and that's the region you will go to I suppose. The language you select in the client, will decide on he people you will see later on. So Germans should mainly see Germans, french mostly French etc.
This will already get the layering issue better.
Right now we have one beta environment with everyone in. No regions. And beta servers have less capacity as live later on. So this issue we see today, might get better if the main game launches and you give them time to fine tune. Not to mention, with the level restrictions, we are all cramped in a few regions. The higher the level get, the more players will spread out.
Again - what else would you expect? How else would you do it? There's not a ton of ways to deal with this issue. Or the perfect solution.
At launch we will see massiv layering next to the mega server, because the pure numbers won't work out anyway. With 2 million people in the starting areas, you need to split them up and this won't be optimal.
As soon as the first waves start to spread with higher levels and regions, we will need to see how this plays out. Can they find a good compromise - and nothing else would work, there's not perfect solution - or do they need to rethink all of it.
Really, if you think about it, there's not much you can do about it.
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u/M4yze 3d ago
the real issue is that this is sharding not layering.
Thats why people get "layered" (sharded actually) everytime you enter/leave a zone or on a boat/zepp.
What they should do?
Using actual layering would be a start dont you think?
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u/pileopoop 2d ago
They need to flag people who are doing immersive things, Taking boats, inside caves or dense mob areas, recently in pvp combat and allow a buffer on the layers for them and keep them on the same layer as they travel cross zones.
If a zone has a 200 person layer cap, then reduce it to 100-150, and use that buffer for people that shouldnt get layered. They should prio to move people off layers that are inside quest hubs.
I have found theres actually too many people on every single layer at the moment, it doesn't need to be always at the absolute cap.
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u/LimbonicArt03 2d ago
So Germans should mainly see Germans, french mostly French etc.
Will Bulgarian be a thing? And would I be able to see both English speaking players and Bulgarian speaking players?
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u/Desperate_Return5199 3d ago
They were pretty clear in the podcast that this is an issue and a high priority for them to fix.
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u/QuietBobcat8333 3d ago
They also said they were not going to be so lenient with gold buyers anymore.
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u/Aswizzle77 3d ago
But if it kills the amount of people we can give for huge assaults... I'd take what we have now even though it sucks with the layering; (
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u/GreaterHannah 3d ago
My favorite is when they ultra instinct disappear and reappear several times throughout a PvP fight
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u/Rhobodactylos 3d ago
Sharding needs to be continent wide similar to how Asian mmos do it.
For those who haven't played: You have "channels" that you can choose from [ch 1 to ch 4399 for example] and each channel effectively represents a "classic realm" that you can freely move between with a "world refresh" on a 5-10 minute CD.
Those channels also show if they're full with a red dot, populated with an orange one or green for a low populated one.
A step further improvement would be to have dedicated channels for each region that you can connect through at your leisure [example ch 1 to 1000 for US, ch 1001 - 2000 for EU, 2001-3000 for Asia and so on.]
There can also be manual & forced world refreshes every 60 minutes for non-instances on very popular channels to keep servers stable.
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u/NondeterministicTM 2d ago
I play OSRS, and this also sounds like OSRS worlds. This is what I hoped would happen. Let me freely switch between which world I play on
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u/Gus_VonLiechtenstein 3d ago
Layering has killed so much immersion for me. People just disappearing while I'm trying to heal them or toss them a buff. I mean, I'm having a ton of fun but when it happens I'm always disappointed.
I just tell myself Thanos is practicing for the galactic finger snap competition.
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u/sknilegap 3d ago
This isn't layering, we had layering in classic. This is them trying to say CRZ/sharding from retail is layering.
They are trying to pull a switcheroo on us. Layering was created to stop exactly this from happening. Layering was the entire continent int he same instance, not ever separated by zones.
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u/beatenmeat 3d ago
I was doing an end cave quest boss and got swapped mid fight with no prompt. The cave I had cleared was completely full and the boss full HP again. The entire area pulled after I layered and killed me, and the Rez spot was annoyingly far because I had to run around an entire fucking mountain to get back. I was legitimately annoyed at that run back and subsequently needing to reclear the entire cave again.
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u/ftlftlftl 3d ago
I remember back in SOD I think doing the escort quest in Redridge. Dude takes forever to get out of that cave and run back to lakeshire. I kid you not like 100 yards from the turn in our group got layered and had to quit the quest and do it again.
Praying that stuff doesn't happen.
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u/7figureipo 3d ago
That's a nightmare. Characters should not be included in a layer change if they're actively engaged in combat at the very least.
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u/Mminas 3d ago
Layering is an issue made worse by high concurrency. This will ultimately be problematic for the first month of the game. At no other point in time will it be as relevant.
I'm sure there are improvements to be made but I've been playing wow since forever and crowds like these switching zones is most definitely not the norm.
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u/DGolubets 3d ago
Yes, these crowds in Vanilla would cause so much lag that you wouldn't enjoy it anyway.
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u/Andvari_Nidavellir 3d ago
I think it’s “sharding” when it’s between zones while “layering” is continent-wide, if I have got Blizzard’s terminology correct.
Regardless of the term used, I think we can agree what’s going on in that clip sucks ass.
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u/Sweet_Search_3616 3d ago
Yes they are using sharding technology that they use in retail where every ZONE has its own layer. This has never been done before in classic, it use to be every continent had its own layer, now its ZONE wide, which means if you are pvping someone and they just run across a zone border they'll just disappear. Awful design for classic
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u/sknilegap 3d ago
You are correct, even the Dev's themselves are misspeaking on this. This isn't layering. Layering was created SPECIFICALLY to counter this exact problem. This is CRZ (cross-realm-zones).
I think they just didn't want to implement layering from the classic client into this retail client. Super lazy IMO.
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u/QuietBobcat8333 3d ago
you have to be sniffing the most premium of copiums to think blizzard will fix or even think it needs fixing before launch
"it'll smooth over after launch"
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u/Zero3020 3d ago
You raise any kind of concern or complaint in here and you will always have people racing to tell you that you should just believe that it will be fixed, "trust me bro".
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u/sdrawkcabsihtetorW 3d ago
Just as people freak out the moment 1 lock of hair is out of place. People are gonna be people.
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u/Genghis_Sean_Reigns 2d ago
I mean, the devs literally said they didn’t like this and want to fix it before launch on the podcast.
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u/MuhBlockchain 3d ago
It seems to me that introducing anything immersion-breaking into an RPG, especially an MMORRG has got to be a cardinal sin. The immersion is the escape from reality a lot of people look for in games.
A huge part of WoW was meeting people along the way, sometimes bumping into them again and again. Even solo-clearing your way through a difficult cave can be very immersive. If you layer and everything respawns, or people around you pop in and out of existance, it completely breaks that immersion.
Equally another big part was that there'd always be that dude dripped out in SW/Og, or the big guild or two with the tryhards. Realms actually felt like you were part of a community.
I get it technically. It's a problem without an easy solution. Realms can be awkward to balance for PvP, or fade in population, or are way oversubscribed due to popular streamers, etc. Sharing/layering solves that and probably makes maintainance eaiser to, but can be deeply immersion breaking.
To be honest I don't know why they didn't go with the Classic Era approach of individual severs but then combine/condense them if/when populations drop. Just feels like sticking to realms is the lesser of two evils.
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u/iiNexius 3d ago
This is the reality of warcraft now sadly. The sense of community is gone because everyone wants to play on a megaserver.
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u/NondeterministicTM 2d ago
I always hated having realms split up the playerbase. Really limits who you can meet and play with.
Blizzard is separating their playerbase so much. Game versions, regions, realms, factions. The amount of times I've had different friend groups select opposite factions or just random realms.....
Look at OSRS. One big megaserver. No split whatsoever. Yet the community is thriving and its never been healthier. Blizzard just implemented the megaserver very poorly.
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u/swordfishy 3d ago
Saw 2 mages camping RR border the other day...anytime they were challenged they would just zone into Elwynn to get away.
Definitely annoying that "PvPers" have found another way to abuse the system.
Reminds me of the old exploits where people would sit in safe zones of cities and one shot pyroblast people with no way to retaliate. Would be nice to see bans going out for abusing these kind of mechanics to harass players, but I don't have much hope that will ever happen.
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u/nostupidquestion3 3d ago
hows it different to current layering in era ?
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u/DesperateAdvantage76 3d ago
Era layers the entire world instead of by zone.
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u/nostupidquestion3 3d ago
so in forever you get layered by zone? huh weird choice to make
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u/Paradidle_RLRR_LRLL 3d ago
You can see it easily for yourself by walking into Org with a group of folks that just came off the zeppelin.
You walk up to the city gates buffing the people around you, then you enter the city and have a whole new group of players to buff @.@
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u/howtojump 3d ago
You see it very clearly on zeppelins and boats themselves. It's usually a completely different group of people before and after the load screen, which is silly.
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u/sknilegap 3d ago
This isn't even layering, its cross-realm-zones (CRZ) from the retail client.
Layering was invented to strictly combat this garbage.
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u/gubigubi 3d ago
I am not even joking when I say this but Layering might be the worst mechanic/technology in gaming history.
I literally cannot think of a dumber system that exists in any game. And I've played a lot of games in my day lol
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u/DGolubets 3d ago
I think people just need to accept that it will never get perfect. They will no doubt improve it though, even if not by November.
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u/myusernameisokay 3d ago
It seems like the benefit of layers over the system that we had in vanilla, which was realms, is that you never try to join your realm and have it be full, and also you can meet pretty much anyone in the game by getting invited to a party and joining their layer.
The big downside, though, is people just randomly appear disappear if you get switched layers, and on top of that, if you join a depopulated layer, cities look depressing and empty, which is sad and immersion breaking. Essentially, layers are very immersion breaking which is bad for an RPG.
I don’t understand why they can’t have like a “stable” layer system where you pick a layer and you just stay on that. You could even give the layers names and call them like the classic realm names. But of course, just don’t have people switch between the layers automatically. It seems like it will potentially solve all the issues.
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u/Varzigoth 3d ago
If you can pick your layer it will create other issues, people will abuse this . That's why it's hard to fix
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u/Uhwop 3d ago
Black desert online basically does exactly what was suggested. It works just fine and isn’t abused.
If the area you’re farming is taken you change layers. If someone is camping and PKing you you could switch layers.
There is a small cooldown so you can’t move around instantly.
However, at the end of the day it’s no different than just having a bunch of servers if they’re naming specific layers, that will eventually require consolidating.
People will start in the “Kalimdor” layer and then 6 months later that layer and a bunch of others never have anyone on them. If they have to name each one they aren’t being dynamically created as needed, and they’re right back to having to consolidate layers or have a bunch of empty ones serving no purpose.
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u/Varzigoth 3d ago
I get other games have a way of doing it, guild wars 2 does this also. But again , if you just google "issues that layer selecting can cause in a game like world of Warcraft " there is literally a thread on wow forums with plenty of issues and videos of people abusing this .
So il go again name a few more because people won't do their research.
gurubashi arena chest ( being abuse by streamers with link to venruki )
mining nodes
rare spawns ( links of video asmond/ cdew )
layer hoping to escape PvP
And there are plenty of videos of people trying to suggest solutions.
So again this isn't a easy fix
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u/zombiekoalas 3d ago
Yup. Layering makes the world feel full. Which is great. But its going to remove a core part of my memory of classic.
As horde I KNEW the alliance PVPers. We didnt speak or anything like that but you knew who was who. The gnome rogue who you battled in EPL over mining rights. The rank 14 warrior with his 2 healbots. You recognized the names. You established a reputation.
I don't see how thats going to work with layering constantly spamming everyone together and apart.
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u/chefao 2d ago
People name some issues and then act like it requires some 5d chess new whole system of logic to be solved.
Dude, just add a cooldown to layer switching like 1 hour cooldown. Problem solved. Just make it so if you killed a rare spawn you get a debuff and if you kill the same named mob in the next hour it won't drop any loot. Just go over them 1 by 1 and fix them, that's what devs are supposed to do, right.
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u/Varzigoth 2d ago
Even if if doesn't drop loot, people could be griefing others to make sure no one else gets it. But yes the 1h cooldown that was suggested by someone else makes sense and I did agree .
I just think there will be other issues to solve at the same time, the 1h cooldown does help in many cases
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u/myusernameisokay 3d ago
it will create other issues
I don’t understand what other issues will it cause? Do you have an example?
Back in Vanilla, you picked a realm and layers didn’t exist, and that was not really a problem other than the fact that characters got locked to a realm.
Also, you can request an invite to a particular layer, so players can already kind of pick their layer in a roundabout way.
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u/Rhaekic 3d ago
Have you never seen the ppl spamming for layer invites? So much that there are addons specifically for that, who use backchannels. Basically abusing mob/resource farming
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u/MeltBanana 3d ago
Put it on a 15 or 30 minute cooldown. That's probably enough to stop any serious resource farming, and still low enough to not hinder normal play.
It's the best solution I think. Let's you stay locked to a server/later if you'd like, seeing the same faces and not dealing with game-breaking phasing, while still enabling you to move to a different server if yours is dead or infested with streamers.
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u/andynator1000 2d ago edited 2d ago
And if your layer is full, what happens? Or what happens when there are too many people grouped in the same location on your layer?
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u/MeltBanana 2d ago
It would be like a server with a queue, can't join if already at capacity.
Basically I'm saying use traditional servers as "layers", and let people swap servers as they please, just with a cooldown.
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u/andynator1000 2d ago
This is just describing normal layering, but instead of needing to have an addon to know which layer you are on the game would tell you and let you pick without needing to ask for someone on that layer to invite you.
If you're imagining that you could mostly stay on the same layer and have it be "your server," that falls apart as soon as you get enough people in the same area on your layer and get kicked off the layer. The other alternative is to have a pitifully small player cap per layer so that you wouldn't have to kick people off the layer, but now you have the issue that the world feels dead.
I think, regardless, their priority for launch is going to be letting the most amount of people play at once, which means sharding. The recent player change should help the world feel more consistent even though there will be hundreds of thousands of people (at a minimum) all on the same server.
I do think the idea of having sub-servers as individual layers sounds cool, but you're going to reintroduce the lag that individual servers without layering or sharding had back in the day. Our computers are faster than they were 20 years ago, but the problem that layers solve can't be solved by having faster servers.
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u/AdventurousBase221 3d ago
the worse part is, even with a literal dedicated channel ans add-ons these lemmings still just spam the main channels. absolutely killed what was left of chat channels further killing off what little was left of a semblance of a world community.
had to turn off all chats and exclusively used lfg bulletin only. never looked at them since.
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u/myusernameisokay 2d ago
Right. I'm the person they were replying to.
Isnt his argument an argument for my point? If people can choose their "layer" then you wont have people spamming to join a specific layer. That seems like a benefit not a downside.
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u/b44l 3d ago
To name a few:
It’s unimmersive to have to consider switching between these paralell dimensions (layers) during regular gameplay.
Raids layer hopping during wpvp from an empty layer onto a target one to position for mass goblin sapper shenanigans.
Bots reliably layer hopping to avoid players contesting their open-world resource.
Bots reliably layer hopping to farm multiple layers while one is respawning.
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u/Guilty_Turn8903 3d ago
you can already hop layers easily
you can limit layer hopping in certain areas
you can bind resources to resource layers or similar solution, this is not an engineering problem, it's blizzard's attitude problem
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u/myusernameisokay 3d ago
I mean, that’s fair for the last three points. On the first point I personally think that having it swap layers for you is more immersion breaking than having control over it. Like in theory, if you’re just an average player, you could just pick a layer and maybe your guild defaults to that layer, and then you’re just hanging out, seeing your guildies, etc, not even really thinking about the different layers.
On the last three points, I think you can already sort of do some of this by getting invited to a different layer via a group invite. But also, you can mitigate the bot farming issue by having a cool down for picking when switching layers. I would expect the average person to switch away is like a zero to a couple times a day. If Blizzard sees someone switching layers every five minutes in order to farm that obviously hints that theyre a bot farmer.
I think it’s a fair point, and there’s obviously a couple levels of abuse as you pointed out, but I don’t think that they overcome the the core idea of not forcing players to switch layers.
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u/CreamdedCorns 3d ago
1h cooldown, done.
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u/Varzigoth 3d ago
I mean that does kinda remove some issues, would have to see what else they do but I like that suggestion
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u/PeaceDangerous7619 3d ago
Know what a bigger downside is? Not enough realms at first, gigantic queues, eventually more servers pumped out, eventually servers start to die off due to low pop, you're forced to transfer off or start over. People whine that blizzard did nothing to prevent this.
Ad nauseam.
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u/Crafty_Country3098 3d ago
The old days of "Channels" in KMMOs/Free MMOs. Funny that it all comes full circle to "ancient tech" LOL
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u/AyissaCrowett 3d ago
This has been an issue for like a decade lmao it’s never getting fixed
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u/DGolubets 3d ago
That's why I said it's gonna be improved. Not fixed. There are problems that just can't be fixed, only compromised on.
They could have servers like in old days and force faction balance. People wouldn't be able to play with their friends, but I bet they would cry but play anyway.
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u/AyissaCrowett 3d ago
so essentially it will always remain shit but hopefully it will be a little less shit.
just bring back old servers atp jesus christ
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u/glormosh 3d ago
Retail players: this is near identical if not better than retail!
Classic players: We don't have servers anymore and this is how it works? Wat?
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u/Desperate_Return5199 3d ago
They were pretty clear in the podcast that this is an issue and a high priority for them to fix.
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u/Anticreativity 2d ago
They called it a “bug” when it’s clearly working as intended.
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u/PlayfulSurprise5237 2d ago
It SHOULD work this way. If layering is going to exist it should happen only at zone borders(if it needs to happen). When there's less likely to be things happening(because people are simply traveling from one area to the next), and so that it does not break immersion as much.
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u/Edurian 3d ago
For some unknown reason people are hyped about a megaserver...
If you think beta launch was bad, just wait till there is 20x the traffic... It's gonna be queues, layers and jank all over the place
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u/Lordofthereef 3d ago edited 3d ago
People are hyped because the alternative is you picking the "wrong" server and in six months all the players are gone.
My biggest gripe is having to commit to a faction to PvP for the life of the account unless you want to delete your toons and start fresh. Kind of an odd choice, but I guess we get to deal lol.
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u/Crafty_Country3098 3d ago
Concerningly, people are saying that even deleting all characters on a pvp realm keeps you locked to the original faction. And no one in those discussions has debunked that claim(which is the main cause for complaints about it).
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u/Lordofthereef 3d ago
Wow. I had no idea that was the case. Seems like a bug to me though?
I do know horde was getting a "can't make this character due to faction imbalance" error at some point a few days ago because my six was trying to roll a horde toon since that's what I was on.
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u/Crafty_Country3098 3d ago
Really hoping it's a bug, but haven't really heard much in detail about it. At least being able to full delete and reroll would be fair. Perhaps unpopular, but I'd rather just free access to making both sides. The sweatier types already do it with multiple accounts, so why not just open that up for everyone at this poi-- Oh right. Money.
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u/Lordofthereef 3d ago
The ease of using multiple accounts is why I don't understand the people defending it (not that I am getting much of that now but I have with other comments in the past). A second $15 sub isn't really a barrier to entry for any modern gamer. If it's the only version of wow they're playing they can also put their "main" account on hold as they reroll to the other faction, thereby keeping all the data from their previous work intact. They can potentially even transfer mats and currency through the neutral AH prior to hibernating said account.
I've had a bunch of people argue that " they'll have spies and trolls/griefers if you can just make both factions" as if the toxic players aren't going to do that anyway lol. It's just a wildly strange decision that seems to be a vestige of the old ways of doing PvP servers. It made sense in 2004 but it makes zero sense today with a single mega server where they're trying to sell you on being able to play with friends without restrictions.
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u/Crafty_Country3098 3d ago
Couldn't care less about any of the spy/collusion worriers. It happens anyway. But as poor as it sounds(Me. I'm talking about me.), some folks don't *really* have the $15 to spend on WoW Account #2, or have to sacrifice another vice that someone just slightly more well off can just throw money at to solve a problem that, arguably, is against the spirit of the game/rules.
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u/Lordofthereef 3d ago
Well, that's why I said, if this is the only version of wow you're playing, you just suspend the account and start another one. There's no box price so if you time it right, the barrier to entry is just a slight inconvenience.
The whole thing just feels like they didn't think it through as to why it's a bad idea to implement on a megaserver style realm. The barriers are being placed in front of the wrong people 😂
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u/Crafty_Country3098 3d ago
Wouldn't the point of a second account for both factions be... playing both factions simultaneously though? lol That would require paying the 2 subs at once. That's my only poor person complaint lol.
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u/Lordofthereef 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes and no. If you can't simply delete toons and play the opposing faction, it is the defacto only "work around".
Beyond that, I have friends on either side. It's entirely possible one group of friends peters out and moves on either indefinitely or temporarily so I might go play with my other group of friends. I wouldn't likely run two accounts (and not hardly play one of them) in that scenario either.
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u/Longjumping-Car-8367 3d ago
This isn't true. I started horde, decided I didn't want to burn myself out on horde before release and swapped all my toons to alliance without an issue.
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u/iBluntly 3d ago
Yeah, who doesn’t love posts complaining about locked servers, or missed free transfer periods, etc.
Layering isn’t perfect, and I get how with some servers you can get a bit more notoriety. But also the fact that eventually servers just lean either horde or alliance, and all the potential server transfer issues (help! Half my guild moved to server Y because the faction we play has dominance there/the server is close to 50/50 split, and where we are the opposing factions is dominating us and we can’t run endgame dungeons without getting farmed on the way in).
Layering has obvious problems of its own, many of them absolutely glaring. But also it does smooth out some wrinkles that show up over time.
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u/testwiese420 3d ago
I just hope layering works out properly. Not really an improvement if there are layers that consist of 90% horde and vice versa. Megaserver is my biggest ick about forever, theres no "the economy is fucked on server xy" now its now for everyone. If they manage to do it properly it would be sick
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u/iBluntly 3d ago
100% with you here. When the issues are bad they’re pretty terrible. It’s rough trying to get a party of 5 who by Blizzard’s own claims should not have the layering issues struggle with getting together because they’re having layering issues.
One of my favourite examples of this was grinding some mobs with two other characters while waiting for the last two characters to join up, and suddenly finding that the two characters beside me phased out while I was mid big pull, losing the support of a healer and another DPS.
That absolutely should not have happed, but it did.
I’m not too optimistic that this will get fixed up, since blizz have a track record of letting things that “mostly work” stay that way.
But also hopefully it will get smoothed out.
The market thing is also a big one. Now everyone’s paying megaserver prices on mats and consumables!
But maybe with time solutions will emerge and actually get patched in.
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u/Ass_Blasties 3d ago
That’s when you offer free transfers if a server becomes too low pop
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u/Lordofthereef 3d ago
Sounds great on paper. In practice a large portion of the player base has moved on before blizzard becomes close to anything free.
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u/Ass_Blasties 3d ago
That’s just an implementation problem then. They should have clear metrics for when a server is depopulated enough that things start falling apart. At that point open up free transfers for the remaining life of the server
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u/afxz 3d ago
If a server population changes drastically over a 6-month timescale ... Blizzard could just, I don't know, do something about it? It's really not hard to nurse server populations and to encourage people to roll x faction on y server over the course of half a year. Blizzard could check in on the server populations with each 'phase', for example, and nudge and incentivise things in the right way. It is really not that hard to ensure that server populations stay where they need to be. MMOs managed this for more or less 25 years ...
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u/Lordofthereef 3d ago
As I mentioned in another response, yes, they could. Historically they haven't in a timely enough manner for most of us to have any real faith that changes this go around.
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u/xClubberLaingx 3d ago
Some unknown reason? Thats crazy mental gymnastics to just flip around the obvious reasons lol.
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u/Snoo_96078 3d ago
Gw2 had megaservers since day 1 and I basically never been in queue in that gae even on release. I am not sure why blizzard can manage to put me in queue even when using a system that should facilitate that a lot.
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u/Pluck_Boy 3d ago
I'd rather see thia than dead servers. This is just launch type shit. Yall can relax
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u/Mminas 3d ago
I'm playing classic era on the mega server now and it's great. No lag, no queues, no layering issues, better economy, better chances of getting groups and better day to day on many things.
Going back to how things worked 20 years ago is not the answer.
Yes launch will be a sorry mess, but this setup is much better for the long term.
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u/MasterTrovan 3d ago
At this point just do normal servers, or at least go the Runescape route allowing people to deliberatelly choose a layer (preferably only when in the character selection screen). To be honest, I was optimistic about this "realmless" stuff at first, but now I doubt they can really pull it off, and the current iteration is completely feustating and immersion breaking...
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u/NondeterministicTM 2d ago
Realmless is the right direction to move in - sadly they chose perhaps the worst implementation of it.
Having played a ton of OSRS, this is what I hoped they would copy. Just a simple layer list that I could freely choose from.
Do I want to meet people? Choose a high-pop layer. Do I want to just chill with less people around? Choose a low-pop layer. The choice would be the players'.
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u/TrackMan5891 3d ago
This takes away from the Classic Experience to me. I'm not sure I can play with this.
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u/Guilty_Turn8903 3d ago
after all the talk about "respecting wow's social pillars" this is unacceptable
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u/Midnightisattwelve 3d ago
Funny how private servers made in a basement did layering better
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u/Ewi_Ewi 3d ago
Private servers never had anywhere near as many players as any version of actual WoW.
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u/Midnightisattwelve 3d ago
They still did it better, player size is not an excuse for poor development of the game system
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u/Koanical 3d ago
My main gripe has to do with the quests which were decidedly not made for this level of traffic. Like the one-off items which need to respawn between collections, creating a layer-wide bottleneck with no recourse, or similarly the one-off quest mobs with sluggish respawns--both made infinitely worse if they've got multiple spawn locations into which only one might spawn at any given time.
It's not a question of cooperation when there are literal hundreds of people all standing at a spawn location, clicking like mad in hopes of being the first tag. 300 players in groups of 5 still leaves you with 60 groups, and in those first few days you can bet you'll have at least two more people popping in to replace every one that gets what they're there for.
This One Server lifestyle seems here to stay, so all I can do is hope that they look over these sorts of quests and recalibrate the availability. Increasing layering in single mobs' subzones or extending credit to everyone in the area (whether I kill the gang boss or I'm just there to see it happen, the boss is dead) along with turning these pickup items into infinite nodes so twenty people can collect the item at a time would be a good start.
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u/Ass_Blasties 3d ago
Ya who would’ve thought an entirely different method of player organization would lead to a million problems they can’t predict
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u/Koanical 3d ago
Guy, this was a problem with the old servers, too; it has been dialed up to eleven, but that's an altogether predictable problem given previous experience. To say otherwise is to be blind to the exact problems having existed at smaller scale during previous launches.
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u/Darthbobz 3d ago
They clearly stated they will be fixing this in the podcast from the 24/09/26 i think they saw a video of Payo and someone he was attacking was layering consistently.
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u/Benkenobix 3d ago
yup it's going to kill the game for me. i guarantee it. especially the leveling phase. if they don't tune it dont by a lot and i really mean A LOT this is going to break the game for me
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u/Southern-Pool-8377 3d ago
im honestly happy we have 1 mega server even if we have these issues
remember its a beta. they r testing a lot of systems and this will only get better. they have proved they know what they need to do with how everyone on the mega server can play
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u/Imaginary_Round_8666 3d ago
Idk why we can't manually swap between like Layer 1-10 or 1-50 however many layers there are (with a cd to avoid world hopping and exploiting that for gathering/rare hunting etc) and stay on that layer until its deemed "inactive" with a timer of like 30 minutes before you are force booted. Would make organizing world pvp events etc so much better.
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u/doughnut310 3d ago
This is the only thing Star Citizen got right is how their Server Meshing works. People are on different servers, but all of the data is shared and can see and interact with everyone else. The way it's done here is very jarring. I can't imagine having a PvP battle and my enemy suddenly disappearing into another layer, or warping behind me. Can almost see it as exploitive to warp people past each other and gain an advantage.
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u/villianz 3d ago
I’m fine with the continent wide layering but the zone sharding sucks hard. Huge immersion killer. It’s the biggest thing making this not really feel like classic for me
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u/sknilegap 3d ago
This isn't even layering. This is just CRZ. Layering was entire continents on the same layer to avoid JUST this.
This garbage was the entire reason layering was created, to avoid this.
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u/ShadowsGuardian 3d ago
This honestly takes a bit of the world/community sense away. This was my main worry when they mentioned one mega server.
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u/sassyhalforc 2d ago
this just looks like a buggy game, how the hell are they gonna fix this in time for launch,
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u/Several-Video-272 2d ago
This is absolutely disgraceful. I don't think people realize how much this ruins the feel of the game, consciously or not, it does.
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u/Anticreativity 2d ago
On the podcast they said that people popping in and out is a “bug,” but I can’t see how that is the case when this is how it’s behaved since it was implemented in retail ages ago. I would bet they don’t fix this at all.
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u/Epetaizana 2d ago
The idea of no more servers sounded good enough to bring me back in. This kind of ruins it for me though...
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u/ZeroZelath 2d ago
If they are going to have layering between zones, they need them to be connected at the edges so say, 50 metres of information is persistent on BOTH the layers. I understand they would need to "connect" layers together as part of the overall eastern kingdoms continent for example. But, it feels needed. Modern games can do this, Ashes of Creation was doing this, Star Citizen does this. They need that sort of tech in their stack.
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u/tinyElliss 2d ago
It's too harsh, they gotta tweak it. Phase me in a way I dont notice, everything else is immersion breaking.
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u/Essensia 18h ago
Should've taken a page from GW2 , where you can choose to stay OR go to a friend's layer with ease.
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u/chr1s003 3d ago
No shot they are fixing this by November. We will have the same shit at launch sadly. Sucks....
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u/Symaxian 3d ago
Sharding(different layers between zones) should never exist within Classic/Forever. If Blizzard must use layering then the entire world should be one layer.
Then go ahead and number the layers, allow users to change between them(with a cooldown), and they will have rediscovered the same system RuneScape used 25 years ago...