Blizzard Responds on Layering Abuse
Blizzard has published a reply in response to Layering Abuse claims on the official forums. The exploit that players are claiming is that people can swap layers at will and use it to farm materials and potentially wreck the economy.
Early this morning an Official WoW Forum Post suggested that people are exploiting layers to farm Arcane Crystals and Black Lotus. The blues have reassured us that is not the case in an official post.
We’ve been monitoring players’ use of layers, and we agree that we should add a delay between subsequent layer transfers. Under the hood we have all the controls I talked about in the Reddit AMA before launch, a few secret weapons we haven’t discussed publicly, and we’re working on deploying some additional controls to further restrain layering from being exploitable.
However, we also want to assure you that the issue is a much smaller problem than some people are claiming. We’ve been closely monitoring the effect layering is having on economies and other aspects of the game, and many of the stories we see posted are wildly inaccurate. We’ve seen screenshots of banks full of rare crafting materials, which we’ve investigated and proved false.
Another popular theory is that you can determine your current layer by doing a /who in a capital city, and comparing the results against the /who your friend does. That doesn’t work because /who returns results from the entire realm, not just from your layer, and if the result set is too large it truncates the results before sorting them. This means every player gets different results, but those differences in result set have nothing to do with which layer you’re on. This has led some people to claim that they’ve discovered dozens of layers per realm, but that claim is completely false.
All realms have a single-digit number of layers. Most of them have a low single-digit number.
Rest assured that there are not people running around with banks full of (Thorium) Arcane Crystals or Black Lotus.
My Thoughts
Layering abuse could potentially wreck the game and economy for World of Warcraft Classic. Which why many of the No Changers hav e been against it from the get go. While I am on the fence on the issue as I have never used or done this. It is one of the many exploits that players have been using! It’s great that Blizzard is responding to these issues and trying to fix them now!
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