I’m not one of those anti-layer curmudgeons or even think it’s a proverbial necessary evil. Layers are great.
Finding a layer for an Ony buff isn’t a terrible thing - it makes the game more fun. Nobody wants to sit in a cave waiting for Hammertoe Grez to spawn in 2025 either. And being able to hop to a grinding spot where the mobs aren’t all lying face down in the snow is a good thing too.
However, there are some toons who spend the entire day clearing resources on one layer and then rinsing and repeating on another. Hour after hour, day after day… hop… hop… hop…
Heck, I’m not even against people doing this occasionally in the name of efficiency if they need to fill a quota - like for getting some crafting done or for a raid… But for some people, this has become their farming meta. I’m a farmer too - always have been, always will be… And I can farm enough resources from a single layer to keep my bank balance smiling broadly but seeing players hop in and out of my farm and knowing that they’re hopping in and out of other people’s farm all-day-every-day feels a little bit like griefing to me.
I understand that hopping comes with an ever increasing CD in order to frustrate the abovementioned behaviour. But if said behaviour is frowned upon, why is it not expressly prohibited and compulsive offenders given some time off from the game?
I don’t have a problem with layers or the ability to layer hop itself but I do think that blizzard should really add a function that just makes it easy to layer hop from layer to later without any third party add-ons involved
Speaking as a casual “dad gamer” I am simply thrown in and out of layers by the game. I had a group of ppl explain to me in detail how to use weak auras to be able to tell what later i am on and to hop at will and we’ll, it simply didn’t work. They couldn’t understand it, so they gave up. I don’t have time to read up how to use some esoteric addon for several hours so I gave up toom
This is the problem with it, for the hardcore players or for those who these addons simply work for, they know what layers they are on and can jump to get buffs, level faster, bla bla bla. This should just be a feature of the base game. There should literally be a button on the mini map that says you are on layer X and you should be able to click it to select layer Y if it has space. Guild wars 1 had this in like 2006.
OP, your message basically says people should use the layers to the extent I personally find comfortable for my gameplay, but using it any more than that is bad and should be limited. It’s almost comical in the lack of self-awareness.