I just would like to open a discussion for a (from my point of view) rising problem:
First guilds are farming world bosses on multiple layers to the extend that
they can kill Kazzak in a 5 minute loop. I understand that people just want to “use”
this mechanic and all available addons but it destroys the classic HC immersion for
me if early guilds now can excessively farm equipment, shards, recipes etc.
It also gives an unfair advantage of every player now hitting 60 in a week
within the first weeks/months with 5-10 layers (or even more).
Which additional “behaviors” will layering bring up the next weeks?
Every channel (even guild channel) is spammed by people wanting to layer,
you can read the word “layer” like 100 times in a minute in a city.
Will people soon camp every black lotus spot and switch between layers every few seconds? Same with specific rare or quest mobs?
To some extend the low amount of realms and high layering has the potential
to cause a lot of “damage” to the overall HC experience.
Yea well apparently, after thinking i came in 2nd place in yhe STV fishing tournament, after turning in my 40 tastyfish for silver because a winner was announced, about 6 more winners got announced because they were layer hopping…so yea, like 8 or 9 people can win STV fishing tourney apparently and i wasted 30 minutes for 90 silver because i disnt know you could layer hop to win…
This is a good post. I think layers are a great way to the control player populations while still letting you teamup with friends, but the system is highly abusable at it’s current state. You can dramtically improve the efficency of whatever you’re farming, wether it’s herb/mineral gathering, mob xp grinding, quest progressing, rare farming by hopping between layers. I think you can fix this by making the layer-swap happen only when you are in view distance of the partymember
I love the fact that I only have 1 life, but what’s even better is the fact that all the players around me also only have 1 life. So even though me as an indivdual chooses not to abuse layers, the fact that other players does it kinda hurts the immersion, and That feeling of being in the same boat. (And you get reminded by that all day if you have chat on, “layer inv plsss”)
Please delete layers! Zones are so empty on Nek’Rosh because you can’t see other players because other players on the realm are on a different “layer”. Layer is like playing on a totally diffferent server which makes the community divided and allows exploits. It’s harder to make new friends when there are layers because you can’t see other players.
Example there were 8 people in total in Western Plaguelands last night on Nek’Rosh, but these players were on different players so the zone felt very empty and was very hard to find others to do Araj elite quest in Andorhal because of this. Layers ruin the experience.
If you don’t want to completely remove layers at least disable layers on zones above lvl 10. Thank you.
Not everyone is in the global chat channels though. You’re probably missing out the majority of players who are in your zone, with the same quest, but on a different layer.
What I would suggest is that players can only change from one layer to other meanwhile in a major city (SW, IF, Darn, ORG, TB, UC).
Or to apply layers based on the area, no the whole server.
So, a crowed area, let’s say Elwyn Forest will have 6-8 layers, but WP may only have 1, or 2.
While both of your suggestions look good at first glance both have their drawbacks.
Onky being able to switch layers at the capitals will make pugging for open world quests nearly impossible, especially in the lower population areas. Imagine wanting to do some Heathglenn quests but first having half your party needing to fly back to IF to switch layers.
The size of the area’s (I believe Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are separate) was a concious decision, so players wouldn’t constantly see others appear and dissapear at the borders because they entered different layers. This to preserve the classic feel.
Therefore this one is a bit of a dillemma, where different people will have different preferences.