r/classicwow • u/zhellqq • 16d ago

Forever Beta Feedback Phasing like this is really immersion breaking

I understand why they do it, but it feels like there has to be a more elegant way of handling it, or perhaps a better "overlap" period where someone only moves off your layer when they are no longer visible.

5.6k Upvotes

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710

u/xXGreco 16d ago

It’s very anti Classic. Anti community. And immersion breaking. I hate it.

85

u/Diffusion4Change 16d ago

The problem is no one wants to be on a low pop or medium pop server and then servers die

35

u/Broad-Shallot-410 16d ago

I want medium pop. It's honestly the best way to experience the game. You can find people for groups, guilds and raids, but it's not overcrowded. You don't have to fight over every mob tag. When you meet someone on the road it feels more special.

If the server goes below a certain amount of players just merge it with another similar one that has low or medium pop. Doesn't seem that difficult in theory.

13

u/apemopo 16d ago

I still remember this night elf warrior from a classic medium pop server in 2019. My gaming group thought we leveled fast and when looking for a player for lbrs this ne warrior appears with both rend swords and full prebis when we were getting our last 60s and first rares. It was one of the first real challenges to tank as a druid against him and he became a visiting legend in our dungeon group whenever we were lacking a dps. He had no respect for aggro and i loved it trying to compete against him and allow him to full nuke.

The interactions in low pop servers feel much more special when youre not bombarded with them all the time.

5

u/Accomplished-Fix3996 15d ago

Medium pop is nice, hell even low pop has a lot of up sided. Can just chill by myself and the tiny community of close players. No crowded people stealing my mob tags, etc

1

u/Lesty7 12d ago

I don’t get why they can’t just combine realms when they break a certain player threshold and keep everyone at medium pop. My guess is that would require way too many servers...

1

u/ReeceAUS 12d ago

The realm-less system needs to actually split people into realm like layers and then combine them as the playerbase drops.

87

u/birdukis 16d ago

you can have realmless without sharding like this, regular classic layers span the entire continent

13

u/JohnMT1 15d ago

this is the answer, we need layers that span the entire continent, not little zone ones.

43

u/ripleyisntreal 16d ago

Yeah but if you layer an entire continent you're gonna have some layers that have no people in certain zones and a lotta people in other zones. I think the dynamic layering is designed to keep every place feeling reasonably populated. Problem is it just doesn't work well right now at all.

Layering should be something you really don't notice.

75

u/zigzagofdoom 16d ago

You dont need players EVERYWHERE, you just need players to be noticed. I'm not looking forward to going to out-of-the-way zones like Feralas and see 100 players swarming around me. The duality of remote and popular locations is important too, and unfortunately omega servers with dynamic layering kills this.

37

u/missingpiece 16d ago

Exactly this. I don't want Blizzard's fucking algorithm telling how many people I'm "supposed" to be playing around at any given time. What the "optimal" population of STV ought to be. It was so fun playing PvP in Classic to go questing there early in the morning before it became a warzone, then head to a lower population area once people started waking up.

I'm not saying it should simply go back to the old way, I'm saying there's gotta be a better middle-ground than having every single zone effectively be its own instance.

2

u/ripleyisntreal 16d ago

We don't disagree which is why I said reasonably populated.

1

u/pymode 15d ago

great perspective

1

u/Xae1yn 15d ago

You still need sharding for that, otherwise you get the classic layering issue where you have 1000 ppl per layer in org and 2 in desolace. Even going to just 20 in desolce means it needs 1/10th of the shards.

1

u/zigzagofdoom 15d ago

Having 2 people in Desolace isn't necessarily a bad thing. I would much rather feel alone every now and then over feeling like I'm in a bustling city 100% of the time.

-3

u/lostspace_1 16d ago

What are you rambling ? The issue you describe is solved by layering.

1

u/zigzagofdoom 16d ago

Not if every zone has a unique list of layers. If I understand the layer method correctly, it will only populate a certain amount of layers based on zone. So like a main city will have many many many layers, but a sparsely poplated zone will only have a few layers. It will only create a new layer if the other layers have reached capacity, meaning there will only be 1 layer that is less than the limit. 

I could be wrong about this, but if my assumption on the layering method is correct, that is a serious problem with megaservers.

1

u/Arteqt 15d ago

Don't think what you are saying is plausible. If people are not disappearing, why are they going for instancing in the first place. This is not their fix to "oh no servers are dying". This is their fix to "server costs are too high"

1

u/itsyenzabar 13d ago

We def noticed it in hardcore xD

1

u/Lesty7 12d ago

It’s tough because the major cities obviously have the most amount of people in them, so you’re almost always going to layer there. My best idea is to simply move the layering boundary a bit outside the city, like halfway into the next zone where there isn’t a bunch of foot traffic there to witness it.

-4

u/zhellqq 16d ago

I would propose to keep the old layering system for now, so that Blizzard can have more development time to work on a system that is the best of both worlds. In the beginning the layering system would not have the issue you mentioned as the servers are fresh anyway!

3

u/DevlinRocha 16d ago

bro this is an advanced technology they’ve developed and implemented into the game, not a Lego brick they can just swap out for a different color whenever they want

0

u/Traditional-Fee-9682 16d ago

I don't know if you can, and have a it stable. Frame drops pretty heavily when entering a city. Its a bit better now however - Hasn't been an issue for me as I spent a lot of money on my Rig.

This would be for ability of people with lower budget computers to run.

Thankfully, with all the stress testing, they will likely determine their limits. I do like the idea though of a capital city having everyone present and no sharding in the cities.

Makes the cities feel like cities.

6

u/Accomplished-Fix3996 15d ago

I prefer to be on a thousand low pop realms before I go play with this layering crap.

6

u/Emergency-Cancel1300 16d ago

I want low pop

11

u/Bohya 16d ago

Then just allow people to swap between servers at will, like in OSRS.

2

u/Diffusion4Change 16d ago

I dont think thats how the server architecture works or they would do that

4

u/nagynorbie 16d ago

But that's exactly how layering can currently work and they still won't allow players to freely choose layers. Plenty of games have solved this issue, just have a dropdown near the minimap where you can select a layer with a 1 day cooldown ( or whatever time works ).

4

u/NumerousBumblebee420 16d ago

They charge for realm transfers and that is the real reason. They would have to rewrite the sales policy and no one has pushed for that. It takes seconds for a transfer to process. It really is not a big issue.

1

u/Fresque 14d ago

The tech ain't there yet

5

u/[deleted] 16d ago

[deleted]

1

u/TenshiBR 16d ago

The tech doesn't exist!

1

u/ThedamnedOtaku 16d ago

Agreed that is their reason but I’m not sure that’s a valid excuse for a company this size anymore

1

u/Mind-Game 15d ago

Or just somewhere in between. Real realms like we had in 2005 but with the underlying technology build around easy server transfers or server mergers when they need to manage population.

2

u/xXGreco 16d ago

They could be more proactive about meeting servers when it comes to that. Idk, all I know is layering and sharding is not the answer.

1

u/Zargabraath 16d ago

MMOs only work when the population is growing or at least not shrinking rapidly. And that hasn't been the case in WoW for at least 15 years now, retail or classic it's the same. When player numbers are inevitably going to be crashing all of these issues are unavoidable.

2

u/iHaveComplaints 16d ago edited 16d ago

The tools they have developed can be applied to make realms work, to remove these issues, without sacrificing any of the justifications for realmless. All it requires is thinking about how to use the tools toward that goal. But that hasn't been done. The idea of realms has just been thrown out.

And they've already addressed part of the problem of not having a growing population. Forever has strong incentives to keep leveling characters over time.

1

u/Mind-Game 15d ago

Seriously. Realms are just layers with more restrictive rules about when you can transfer between them.

If you can make a layered realm you can make realms that you can keep populated correctly with management.

1

u/spn_willow 16d ago

Give me a low pop server any day!

1

u/LabResponsible8484 15d ago

You can have multiple servers that use 1 common name pool where names are unique. You then merge the servers if they drop consistently below a certain population. You can even start with the AH merged.

This solution has been known for decades and has no downside for the players.

1

u/Kobol94 15d ago

Hence they should have just given people a bunch of free transfers per year

1

u/Dolinarius 15d ago

always played an malygos which was med. pop at best and it was just fine. Switched to a friends server bc of his guild and I didn't like the overcrowded main hubs.

1

u/ZerOMrk 15d ago

Blizzard should have just invested time and resources in a really fast way to merge servers when needed.

Fuck the ah, fuck the economy. 24 hours warning before 2 severs get merged due to population problems and whatever is left in ah is deleted if not removed. Let the new economy of the server build on its own.

While this can seem extreme, i think it would still be better compared to layers

1

u/Recursive_Descent 15d ago

Yeah, but you can have layering for the whole world with more or less permanent layers. This every zone has its own dynamic layering system seems to be optimizing server load at the expense of player experience.

1

u/Diffusion4Change 15d ago

The problem with layering is eventually earlier zones will be less populated there are tradeoffs.

1

u/Lagaerthatv 15d ago

Then there high pop server but back then servers had 2500 players on them and it wasnt an issue in OG now even low pop servers have more than that so its not a big deal as much as you make it seem to be

1

u/craftkiller 14d ago

That's easy to fix:

  1. Make names unique across all servers like they are now, so you don't have conflicts when transferring servers.

  2. Allow people to transfer servers for free once every 3 months.

  3. Put a cap on the number of players on a server so you don't end up with 1 overloaded server.

  4. When a server becomes too low pop, force merge it so you don't have nearly-empty servers lying around. You could give everyone on the server a free transfer to any server for a week and then anyone who hasn't moved ends up force merged into whatever server they decided to merge it with.

They wouldn't even need to change their infrastructure. They could do it with the "layering" they're doing now. Just give each layer a name, pretend the layers are "servers", let people pick their layer/server, and keep that layer selection permanently (aside from the free transfer every 3 months).

1

u/ReeceAUS 12d ago

If all those people running out of ogrimmar phase onto the next layer together, then it’s not as much of an issue.

But flying over searing gorge with a train og people only to have them dissapear when you hit run moroh is terrible and so is the phasing that happens on boats.

1

u/n0t_________me 15d ago

Why not just merge servers if that happens?

1

u/Mind-Game 15d ago

Or allow transfers to medium pop servers from low pop dying realms and high pop capped ones and only merge when a server is basically dying (and you could merge it into the server where the largest % of its population went or something).