On Dec. 14, Blizzard shipped a massive hotfix for World of Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery that was meant to fix the recurring layering issues in the game. Unfortunately, this left the world feeling empty. Fortunately, the devs have reverted some of the changes.
In a Blue Post on Dec. 17, senior game producer Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield announced the layering auto-retiring system has once again been enabled, namely because they don’t “want to get into a situation where the fix is worse than the issue we are trying to solve.” This, essentially, means that layers that have been dynamically spawning and retiring, depending on the number of active players on a certain realm, are now active. After the hotfix, layers would stay up in the morning, even if there weren’t many players around. More layers meant players were scattered around, and the world felt dead as if it was an expansion at the end of its life span.
This initial change wasn’t taken lightly with players repeatedly complaining about how layering changes left the world feeling empty, and even dead in posts on Classic WoW’s subreddit.
“I noticed it yesterday. It was like a ghost town. We had at least 10 layers. Felt like they could have kept it the same and just halved the number of layers. It was nice getting to hit tons of ore nodes, though. Farming in Wetlands as Horde felt a little underwhelming without Alliance there to gank me every 3 seconds, though,” BadSanna said.
Thankfully, the world will once again feel like it used to before–alive and packed with players on every corner, especially in Ashenvale during the PvP event. Layering is worldwide, and not zone-wide, and that’s why it left such a huge impact on the game. Blizzard, namely, Aggrend, is carefully listening to players’ feedback, and you can expect even more similar changes down the line.
