Groups no longer move you to a new layer
Joining a group in World of Warcraft: Forever no longer moves a player to another layer at once. A pop-up with a time window comes first, Blizzard says in episode 6 of its podcast. Forced world refreshes should become rare at launch.
Episode 6 lasts 69 minutes and appeared on 29 October on the World of Warcraft channel. The guests are Lead Software Engineer Ana Resendez, Principal Software Engineer Frank Williams and content creator Shobek, with Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield of Blizzard.
Fewer forced refreshes
Forever has no realms. A new layering system puts each player on the part of the world where it thinks that player’s community is: familiar faces, and allied or enemy guilds. The goal is to meet the same people while leveling, so a dungeon run or a guild invite follows, Williams explains.
At the start of the beta, those algorithms were too aggressive and moved players far too often. After two weeks of tuning, the number of forced refreshes dropped sharply, as a graph from the podcast shows.
A pop-up instead of a move
The beta already warned five minutes before a forced refresh. At launch, that pop-up also appears when a player joins a group, instead of an immediate move. The player then chooses the moment, within a time window. On the beta and in the modern game, a group moves you at once.
Williams links it to Hardcore, which follows after the launch: nobody wants to land next to an elite in a cave. How long the time window lasts, Blizzard does not say.
Layers between zones
Neighbouring zones can still sit on different layers. Blizzard can tune which zones share a layer, says Aggrend. At launch, Durotar will be packed and Orgrimmar fairly empty, so they stay apart. A month later that can flip, and the grouping of zones can look very different.
Williams says those settings were already adjusted in the last days of the beta and the stress test, and more tweaks are coming. Layering at zone borders remains, as a tradeoff of how Forever is built.
Large battles in the open world
Shobek asked about large world PvP fights where not everyone ends up on the same layer. Blizzard looks closely at what players organise with addons and what it could build into the game, says Aggrend. According to Williams, the word “megaraid” may be on a whiteboard on campus. Another idea: servers that detect a large PvP battle and expand slightly to keep it going.
But I would say the state at the end of the beta is what you can expect for launch.
Source: Wowhead