Layering and Large Scale PvP
In the WoW: Forever Beta, players tested the limits of how much a layer could handle. Large-scale world PvP battles were tested, and while some were successful, others found themselves struggling to get everyone on the same layer. This week's guest on the podcast, Shobek, asked if there was anything to adjust to help with these large-scale battles.
"There's a lot of cool things people are doing, using addons and stuff to organize things; we look at a lot of that functionality really closely and say, hey, what do we really wanna pull and try to integrate?"
Featured developer on this week's podcast episode, Principal Software Engineer Frank Williams, would also share that they do have something on the board later down the line to maybe try and help with world PvP battles happening on a grand scale.
"There might be a whiteboard on campus with the word "megaraid" scrawled on it, but we've also been thinking of ways to auto-detect PvP battles that are happening and have the servers expand slightly to keep the battle continuous and flowing. But I would say the state at the end of the beta is what you can expect for launch."
Layering between zones
A more common issue amongst players, however, is layering that occurs between each zone. Alliance players might be following a herd of their peers from Hillsbrad Foothills into Silverpine Forest as they make their way to Shadowfang Keep, but as soon as they cross the barrier from zone to zone, you could see a large number of these players disappear as they've now entered new layers.
"One of the things we can kind of tune or tweak are which zones are actually connected to each other. That's why you're in Durotar watching people duel, and then someone suddenly appears out of nowhere because they walked out of Orgrimmar... for launch, that's an important thing to have because Durotar will be slammed, whereas there won't be many people idling in Orgrimmar; however, later on, it'll flip. We can fine-tune when we group things so at launch, the way it looks may be much different than the way it looks a month down the road."
Frank Williams also stated that layering features like that were already adjusted in the final couple of days of the beta and the stress test, and that more improvements and tweaks are in the works, but it's just the tradeoff of how Forever is designed. Although the design isn't perfect, as they've stated in the podcast, they said that you still will see zone layering happen, but they are looking at the best possible ways to make this system work in the long run.
