https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/layer-switching-is-the-problem-not-layering-itself/286941/20
We’ve been monitoring players’ use of layers, and we agree that we should add a delay between subsequent layer transfers. Under the hood we have all the controls I talked about in the Reddit AMA before launch, a few secret weapons we haven’t discussed publicly, and we’re working on deploying some additional controls to further restrain layering from being exploitable.
However, we also want to assure you that the issue is a much smaller problem than some people are claiming. We’ve been closely monitoring the effect layering is having on economies and other aspects of the game, and many of the stories we see posted are wildly inaccurate. We’ve seen screenshots of banks full of rare crafting materials, which we’ve investigated and proved false.
Another popular theory is that you can determine your current layer by doing a /who in a capital city, and comparing the results against the /who your friend does. That doesn’t work because /who returns results from the entire realm, not just from your layer, and if the result set is too large it truncates the results before sorting them. This means every player gets different results, but those differences in result set have nothing to do with which layer you’re on. This has led some people to claim that they’ve discovered dozens of layers per realm, but that claim is completely false.
All realms have a single-digit number of layers. Most of them have a low single-digit number.
Rest assured that there are not people running around with banks full of (Thorium) Arcane Crystals or Black Lotus.
This confirms my thoughts on layering. I have seen people on here either blaming layering for their bad experiences, or not understanding how layering was functioning. It is good to see they are monitoring it closely, calling out the bullshit and continue to tweak and implement more restrictions on layer abuse.
I also learnt something else today, and that is that Stormwind is the city of choice over Ironforge. This was true on Private servers what I saw playing limited alliance also. I think this is because of shared Auction House from day 1. There is no longer the need to all go to one city to get the best supply/demand auction house. Watching Staysafe's stream and he logged into bank alt with a bustling Stormwind, then back to his Main with a quiet (not empty, but quiet) Ironforge. The meta continues to show itself?
Low single digit layer count provides a lot more optimism for the 'squish' pre-Phase 2. Once the tourists and Black Monarch leave Classic I think it will work out ok - there will be some outliers though with the hugely populated servers, and streamer servers - which are more likely to retain high population over the next couple of months.
Thanks for posting this. I was downvoted to hell on reddit saying that just a single photoshop and hearsay was not enough proof, and that Blizzard has far too advanced tools to detect any sort of exploitation that one addon was claimed to be doing. Even if there was such an exploit like this (which there wasn't), Blizzard can safely detect all the item/gold transfers between characters which are logged anyway, and ban / remove the gold & items gained this way far too easily. Why do you think gold buyers / sellers were banned so easily (as WoW developed over time)?
Classic was also built on retail systems, which means all these systems to detect abnormalities are in place.
Good for Blizzard to snip the rumors by literally saying "Those screenshots are fake eat dirt".
The fact that they have to restrict it tells me i was right about it though. It is being abused enough to be a problem.
The fact that they have to restrict it tells me i was right about it though. It is being abused enough to be a problem.
Well tbh any abuse in anyform is grounds for restriction. I doubt the amount you were sooo right of this tttterrrrifying layer abuse is something nobody will notice in anyway on a server which has more than 50 ppl online.
The fact that they have to restrict it tells me i was right about it though. It is being abused enough to be a problem.
Well tbh any abuse in anyform is grounds for restriction. I doubt the amount you were sooo right of this tttterrrrifying layer abuse is something nobody will notice in anyway on a server which has more than 50 ppl online.
Doesnt matter. Blizzard should have just stuck with sharding low level zones over something that impacts the economy like layering.
So basically a lot of people claiming layering is destroying the game has been faking screenshots of bank accounts and making a mountain of a grain of salt. At least we now know from first hand.
The fact that they have to restrict it tells me i was right about it though. It is being abused enough to be a problem.
Well tbh any abuse in anyform is grounds for restriction. I doubt the amount you were sooo right of this tttterrrrifying layer abuse is something nobody will notice in anyway on a server which has more than 50 ppl online.
Doesnt matter. Blizzard should have just stuck with sharding low level zones over something that impacts the economy like layering.
How far is low level zones? No need for sharding if you dont let more than the pop cap on the server, and if you let more what happens if too many leave the sharded place? Server crashes because of this 24/7 till enough people stop? You join a que for duskwood or what ever the nonsharded place is? How would it work in your mind, Im curious.
Also we would have up to 30 realms in eu without layering to not have huuuuuuge ques on each realm. What you do when tourists leave? 10 realms on low, server migrates, people reeeeeing about their server communitys being MASSACRED by blizz, why didnt you use layering blabla.
As someone who has abused layering as I leveled, it is a major concern. I have abused layering for two escort quests. Me and my team simultaneously camped Prince for Tidal charm on 3 layers at the same time for almost 8 hours and guess what? We got a tidal charm. We have also used it while farming devilsaurs as a team. I have personally used it to escape ganks and corpse camping. Look in the world chat of any server and tell me this isnt an issue. A WALL of players asking for layer invites. Dont get me wrong, there are people exaggerating how much they are able to do with layering, but layering is fucking massive! It makes the world feel empty and it rewards layer hopping.
As someone who has abused layering as I leveled, it is a major concern. I have abused layering for two escort quests. Me and my team simultaneously camped Prince for Tidal charm on 3 layers at the same time for almost 8 hours and guess what? We got a tidal charm. We have also used it while farming devilsaurs as a team. I have personally used it to escape ganks and corpse camping. Look in the world chat of any server and tell me this isnt an issue. A WALL of players asking for layer invites. Dont get me wrong, there are people exaggerating how much they are able to do with layering, but layering is fucking massive! It makes the world feel empty and it rewards layer hopping.
Thank you.
As someone who has abused layering as I leveled, it is a major concern. I have abused layering for two escort quests. Me and my team simultaneously camped Prince for Tidal charm on 3 layers at the same time for almost 8 hours and guess what? We got a tidal charm. We have also used it while farming devilsaurs as a team. I have personally used it to escape ganks and corpse camping. Look in the world chat of any server and tell me this isnt an issue. A WALL of players asking for layer invites. Dont get me wrong, there are people exaggerating how much they are able to do with layering, but layering is fucking massive! It makes the world feel empty and it rewards layer hopping.
Yes it comes with big differences from vanilla but none of those things matter once layering is gone they are a drop in the river if u managed to get a good chunck of devilsaur skin, is it sad people do that, yes, does it maybe affect the game/economy abit on the short run, yes but its not gonna be game breaking. By december there wont most likely on 99% of the servers be even a mark of layering existing at the current moment. Maybe in most extreme cases where unemployed melt their brains off infront of the pc screen. In the majority of players even that wont matter almost at all.
Your 3sec stun trinket doesnt matter, you get a kill in world pvp with it or smh? Kinda dont see that as massive tbh, did you get it by abusing layering, yes.
If layering really fucks up the game for the long run, I ll eat my words but I hope and think that it wont happen.
Also would like to hear ideas of other solutions that could of been implemented, said something about sharding low level zones, its upto discussion but I just dont see it work.
Not defending layering and Im not happy about it, but I think it has some good in it that everybody gets to play where they want, and mostly now that ques are gone in eu, whenever they want.
I'm currently layering hopping within guild to farm devilsaurs with a 3 man team. Yes. Thats right. WIthin guild. There is no sticky layering for guild members. We are all on different layers and I am jumping layers every 15 mins. We are farming devilsaurs uncontested and when we hop they are typically full of devilsaurs. Have been doing this all day. Layers are cancer.
a few secret weapons we haven’t discussed publicly
I wonder what this means?
a few secret weapons we haven’t discussed publicly
I wonder what this means?
It means they havent done anything. And layering worked as we had anticipated as I am experiencing first hand. Lol. But instead of acknowledging that they have a "secret weapon".
Meanwhile I just made two full devilsaur sets in 2 hours with a 2 man team. 1 guy logged.
We run around and kill devilsaurs for 10-15 mins. PM a guildy (they SHOULD be on our layer if layering worked as Blizz said it would) we jump layers (typically or invite someone else and do it right after) and then go again. There is no cooldown. There is no downside. We are farming WAY more skins than would be possible in a single world with a longer respawn. When we face competition we either kill them, or if they have more guys, we jump to a different layer and avoid confrontation. Layering is awful.
As someone who has abused layering as I leveled, it is a major concern. I have abused layering for two escort quests. Me and my team simultaneously camped Prince for Tidal charm on 3 layers at the same time for almost 8 hours and guess what? We got a tidal charm. We have also used it while farming devilsaurs as a team. I have personally used it to escape ganks and corpse camping. Look in the world chat of any server and tell me this isnt an issue. A WALL of players asking for layer invites. Dont get me wrong, there are people exaggerating how much they are able to do with layering, but layering is fucking massive! It makes the world feel empty and it rewards layer hopping.
I guess I'm lucky to have chosen the right server - on Ten Storms (EU) haven't read a single message in the world chat about layering. And I have been online a lot of time in the past days.
I understand layering might be a problem tho.
I also learnt something else today, and that is that Stormwind is the city of choice over Ironforge. This was true on Private servers what I saw playing limited alliance also. I think this is because of shared Auction House from day 1. There is no longer the need to all go to one city to get the best supply/demand auction house. Watching Staysafe's stream and he logged into bank alt with a bustling Stormwind, then back to his Main with a quiet (not empty, but quiet) Ironforge. The meta continues to show itself?
This was not true on private. Nor is it the meta. The meta for alliance raiders is to set their hearth at menethil harbor which further emphasizes the mass trade that occurs within ironforge. I assume this is in response to my screenshots showing an empty ironforge, which hasnt changed by the way. You can try and manipulate layering as much as you want to protect your ideology of the system and the stance you took on it prelaunch, but it is here in full force and it is awful. As someone who is abusing it daily, the system is garbage. It does NONE of the things Blizz said it was going to do. There is no delay switching layers. There is no penalty in switching. There is no sticky layering within guilds. There is nothing that they said there would be. The system is sharding.
I have been farming devilsaurs for two days straight. I'm giving you my word that this system has no restrictions. I have personally tested it and this is how it works... Its just a series of game worlds that you can hop between as you wish. Thats it. No sticky layers. No layer delay. Nothing. Just a divided world. Source: I killed ~200 devilsaurs today - layer hopped the whole time (sometimes in rapid succession). There are 6 devilsaur spawns in Ungoro. Imagine how many times I hopped? Assuming every layer had a full 6 devilsaurs (they never do) I would have hopped 33 times. But I can assure you I hopped more than triple that over the course of 5-7 hours as most layers have 2-3 devilsaurs or none at all. By cycling between them we get larger yields. We also track who we invited and how many they gave us. If we get two guys back to back as our host and they both yield 6, we know these two are on separate layers so we wait for the devilsaur respawn timer and do those two guys back to back, and guess what? Both layers are full again. We can use a variety of techniques to determine what layer we are on, like weather effects. We are manipulating layering with ease and we are getting better at it constantly.