Back when World of Warcraft: Classic was announced, the goal was clear: make World of Warcraft: Classic as similar to the original “Vanilla” World of Warcraft as possible.
For the most part, Blizzard has done an excellent job of this, and that can’t – and shouldn’t – be discarded. Even when they were giving buffs to the Modern version of World of Warcraft to help with Social distancing, such as the double-XP and double-reputation buffs, they avoided giving these to Classic.
Of course, this was because those buffs didn’t exist in Vanilla, and applying them could heavily threaten to throw the entire feel and challenge of Classic out the door. Blizzard seems to have put accuracy and being true to Vanilla above anything else for Classic.
Unfortunately, that means that the same problems that Vanilla suffered from have returned to. One of the most pressing issues on the client, which we’ve discussed quite a few times, is the absolutely insane queue times to get into some of the more populated servers.
There are times, depending on the realm and time of day, when logging into your character puts you into a queue that can last several hours. From there, all you can do is wait, and once you’re in you just have to pray to every deity you can think of that you don’t get disconnected and have to start the wait all over again.
Blizzard has published a blue post announcing that Layers are being disabled in Classic for US realms.
Layers were re-enabled a couple of weeks ago to fight long queue times.#ClassicWoWhttps://t.co/CStBocL4GC pic.twitter.com/HnphzJ6BlE
— Wowhead💙 (@Wowhead) May 14, 2020
To battle this issue, Blizzard implemented layering, which essentially puts players into different phases from one another – on separate layers. However, Vanilla didn’t have layering, and it can also be an easy system to exploit, as well as making it so that you don’t see all of the other players running around the same zone as you at times.
After removing and then reimplementing the system, Blizzard has finally managed to remove it again! Blizzard announced that they’ll be disabling layering for all US realms in Classic.
“As we’ve constantly watched and analyzed realm populations over the last few weeks, we’ve seen enough of a recent trend to justify returning to the intended population arrangement for each realm,” Blizzard wrote. “At the same time, we’ve unlocked any realms that were locked for new character creation.”
With this change, all realms that had been given layering have had their layers contracted from two to one. In addition, any and all paid character transfer restrictions will still remain, meaning that this fix hasn’t yet been removed.
Blizzard intends to continue using their halting on paid character transfers as an effective “stopgap” to keep players from transferring to and re-overpopulating some realms. Given that layering has been eliminated (for the US servers, at least), it hopefully won’t be long until these restrictions are lifted as well.
