Layering, a feature that wasn’t available back in the days of WoW Vanilla. Its absence back in the days served as a cause for gathering a big number of players in a designated zone. A missing feature that pushed World PvP to the limit, engraving its beauty. For now, to all drown in the deep waters and break the game in numerous ways possible.
For those who do not know, “Layering” is something like sub server, acting well in overpopulated player areas, contributing both for the better gameplay experience, but also server performance. As much as it sounded good and exciting when it was introduced during the WoW Classic Beta, its debut in the live version broke the game in multiple ways.
Not only it breaks the economy, but also breaks the character progression, kills the immersion, and turns hard workers into robots. Luckily, Blizzard may have finally put an end to that, but is it “too little too late”? We may see the answer to that question very soon.
Shortly after WoW Classic Launch, Mages got the upper hand in leveling, simply because of their AOE abilities and power. But, a big contribution to that plays the so-called Layering system, which allowed the mages to reset mobs easier or avoid players of the enemy faction at their will. Even add-ons were made to empower the will of anyone in the game, auto inviting people between each other to swap layers.
Shortly after that, or more precisely before a week or so from the time of this writing, Blizzard has decided to add a cooldown to layer bounces. As acknowledged, players now get increased timer before the layer bounce occurs, stalling the spam ability.
Everyone who believed this would solve the issue was wrong. After a couple of days, things escalated quickly. Veeeeery quickly. A short story of a player who was using this exploit has appeared on Reddit (now, it’s removed). Basically, he felt bored with the advantage, and how this would ruin the game’s integrity. This simply means no fun for those who can afford every single BoE on the AH.
So what the layering feature does is allowing players to phase inside DUNGEONS. All you need to do is just drop the part and join the inviting side, which has the dungeon reset and ready to go. That will put the joining player to the new layer on the exact same position where he left the party from without phasing him outside of the dungeon. It would probably be the same for the Raid Instances. Basically, if a whole new layer acts as a sub server, the abuse is inevitable.
This would allow players to grind for their BiS gear, or even get tons of gold without the effort. It couldn’t get easier than that. Now with the black market currently active and the strong conversion rate imagine how much could someone earn? Someone that has been doing this for days is already sitting at 10k gold.
If you’re still finding it hard to believe, you could check the video below, in which a Twitch Streamer exactly showcases how layering in Dungeons work.
Now you get the picture. Retail WoW has somewhat had an economic impact on Classic, but having the ability to do this is far beyond insanity. Blizzard should reconsider their actions, as this is a penalty of a first degree. Permaban imminent. That’s all.
