Asmongold agrees with Blizzard’s idea to reintroduce layers in WoW Classic due to influx of activity

"Would you rather have your finger cut off or your hand cut off?"
Image via Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard is considering bringing back one of the most controversial elements of WoW Classic—and Asmongold thinks it might be the best available option.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned a resurgence of activity on many popular World of Warcraft Classic servers, which has resulted in several popular realms having long queue times. High population realms like Faeralina, which is home to most notable Twitch streamers, have consistently had queue times. Some players need to wait hours before getting into the game, depending on when they tried to log in. 

As a way to combat that issue, Blizzard made a post today, bringing forward an idea that it implemented at the game’s launch when servers were at their most active. To make it so that more people could play, Blizzard added “layering,” which basically meant that each server had different “layers,” making it so that the realm could hold more people in it without being overloaded. 

“While I can only name half-a-dozen realms in this region that really have extended queues right now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more realms experience queue growth during this remarkable period we’re living in,” Blizzard community manager Kaivax said.

Kaivax requested feedback from players about how they would feel about temporarily increasing the number of layers for high-population realms to two to shorten queue times.

While many Classic originalists don’t like the idea of layering because it’s technically a change from the way that WoW was when it first came out, Asmongold said on stream today that he doesn’t mind the idea at all. In fact, he’s an advocate for its reimplementation.

“It’s not even a question,” Asmon said. “There’s no reason not to do it.”

On the other end of the spectrum, many people have expressed concern that layering a realm into multiple instances at one time would be disruptive to its economy. In WoW Classic, unlike retail WoW, farming raw materials in the open world was significantly more important. And with no WoW token that can be purchased in-game to increase a person’s buying power with real-life money, open-world farming has more importance. 

But Asmon believes that Classic purists are living in a state of denial. He thinks that the true vanilla experience can’t be recaptured because of how populated servers are and how much more knowledgeable the player base is about the game now because of greater access to internet resources.

He claims that back in vanilla WoW, servers had significantly fewer active players on them, making it much more reasonable for the realm’s single layer to provide all of the resources players needed. Nowadays, that isn’t the case since demand for extremely limited resources, like the Black Lotus herb, distorts the game’s economy in a way that wasn’t as much the case in 2005 when the game came out. 

“I don’t think layering is a big deal,” Asmon said. “I actually think layering would be good for the game at this point. There are negatives, but the fact that consumables and reagant prices are so high… it’s not like vanilla, and that makes that game worse.”

While Asmongold doesn’t love the idea of layering, he believes it’s the lesser of two evils.

“Would you rather have your finger cut off or your hand cut off?” he said. “Your hand is queues, and your finger is layering. I’d rather have my finger cut off. Obviously one of them is worse, but that doesn’t mean the other is good. Layering isn’t a good solution, but layering is better than having ridiculously-overpriced materials and a two to three-hour queue.”

Blizzard has not yet announced plans to implement any layering on any servers, but the idea being floated around by a community manager suggests that it’s certainly on the table. With Blizzard being particularly cautious with how they treat Classic because of how vocal that player base is, the community’s response in the coming days will surely determine whether this idea is executed.


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Author
Max Miceli
Senior Staff Writer. Max graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a journalism and political science degree in 2015. He previously worked for The Esports Observer covering the streaming industry before joining Dot where he now helps with Overwatch 2 coverage.