Wow Classic Layering

Blizzard Announces Removal Of Layering Mechanics On World Of Warcraft: Classic. 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. WoW Classic hotfix addresses “wildly inaccurate” layering concerns September 9, 2019 Blizzard has issued a hotfix to counter concerns over layering exploits in WoW Classic. Blizzard Responds on Layering Abuse in Classic WoW posted 2019/09/05 at 5:32 PM by Neryssa Blizzard has just published a reply talking about the possible exploitation of layers in Classic - How players are able to swap layers at will, and how this could potentially affect the economy on Classic WoW. World of Warcraft Classic: What Is Layer Hopping? Blizzard just implemented a hot fix to help fight layer hopping exploits. For players new to the term, here is what layer hopping is all about.

For other uses, see Sharding.

Sharding is a game design tool created to prevent player overcrowding in outdoor areas of World of Warcraft, and improve server performance.^[1]

Wow Classic Exploits

1Behavior

Behavior

When too many players are in an area, the game automatically creates a new 'shard,' a copy of that area. Players entering the area will be placed on the new shard. The world appears identical from the player's perspective, with minor differences:

Players can only see other players on the same shard.
Each shard has its own set of NPCs. As such, rare NPCs may respawn at different times on different shards.
Each shard has its own set of objects such as herbs and mining nodes.

Shards can be any geographic size but are usually limited to zones or smaller areas. The borders of a sharded area are invisible to players.

By design, players usually do not notice when the game moves them between shards, but players may notice NPCs momentarily disappear.

Sharding is enabled on all retail World of Warcraft normal realms. Sharding is disabled by default on retail RP realms to facilitate player-run events, but Blizzard occasionally enables it on these realms for server stability when needed.^[2]

Sharding and parties

When joining a party or raid party, all party members are automatically moved to the leader's shard, but only if they are in the same zone as the leader. This and toggling War Mode are the only known ways for players to move themselves to a new shard.

Comparison to related tools

Phasing is distinct from sharding. Phasing refers to the changing of the world's appearance to match the player's current progress in the story. For example, the area surrounding Wrathgate appears different depending on whether you've completed the Wrathgate questline. But similar to sharding, players in different phases cannot see each other.

Layering is the same as sharding, but affects an entire realm, covering all zones. Layering was used to alleviate overcrowding at the launch of World of Warcraft Classic, but was later removed.^[3]

Cross-realm zones (CRZ) is very similar to sharding, but is designed to prevent under-crowding. If a zone on a realm has very few players, the game automatically moves players from multiple realms into the same 'instance' of the zone (effectively a shard) to make it 'feel active and alive.'^[4]

Patch changes

Patch 6.0.2 (2014-10-14): Added.