In the latest episode of the WoW: Forever podcast, Principal Software Engineer Frank Williams discusses forced layering and lessons from the Beta. WoW: Forever features new layering technology because the game no longer has any realms. He describes how the system is designed to put players on a partition of the world where it thinks their community is: whether that's players you might recognize or allied (or enemy) guilds. The goal is to have consistency and repeated interactions, and for players to see the same people while leveling, because then you might decide to do a dungeon with them or join their guild.
On the Beta, many players noticed there was a new pop-up when you were scheduled to get layered. In addition, this happened a lot at the start of the beta, and Frank Williams noted that their algorithms were overaggressive and trying too hard to make sure everyone was with their community.
Source: WoW: Forever Podcast Episode 6
At the start of the Beta, players were getting moved around a lot, and this graph shows the number of times that the popup showed up for players. As they started fixing and tuning things, they got to the point where the system wasn't moving players around as much. After the first two weeks and some fine-tuning, they realized the system was working, and he mentions how they don't have to force the community. He continues to discuss how the system will change launch, particularly when grouping with other players.
Frank WilliamsNow the philosophy of how that pop-up works is generally you're not going to get moved. It's going to pop up in a more limited capacity and be much more friendly. One change you're going to notice at launch is that when you join a group, it's actually going to just do that pop-up; it's not going to just move you. Because I think universally we want it to be consistent, where we're not going to disrupt your gameplay, and when Hardcore comes out, shortly, that's going to be a huge thing. You don't want to be in a cave, and oops, you got moved to a spot where there's an Elite standing right next to you. Now you're going to have a time window.
On the Beta and on Retail, players are automatically phased when you join a group. This should no longer be the case on WoW: Forever, and players will have the option of when to make the change, within a certain time limit.
This new layering system should allow for more repeated interactions with particular players and guilds. From the Beta, they feel like they've dialed things to the appropriate levels, and on launch, you can expect something that feels like the flow of Classic.
