Though World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery has been an undeniable success for Blizzard, some of the changes to the game’s infrastructure are currently drawing the ire of the community.
Widely seen as the developer’s attempt to test the waters and make the highly-requested Classic+ a reality, Season of Discovery has quickly risen to become the second most popular flavor of WoW. The mode features new experiences, abilities and powers, many of which have been extremely well-received by the community.
There have also been several changes to the technology behind the scenes as well. Faction balancing is now actively in place on PvP servers, and there are far fewer servers than players of the original Classic would be expecting.
The latter is primarily thanks to new layering technology that separates players while keeping them on the same server. Unfortunately, players are now taking to social media to complain that this has brought about an unusually empty world.
Too many layers have made the Season of Discovery population feel small
In a post on Reddit, one user shared their experience with the layering system, barely running into any other people, even during peak periods.
The logical conclusion is that the technology has dealt with the incredibly high player count of the first few days. Then, as the concurrent population lessened, some were left on empty layers within otherwise busy servers.
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Many were quick to chime in with their own experiences in Season of Discovery, with one saying: “I noticed it yesterday. It was like a ghost town. We had at least 10 layers. Felt like they could have kept it the same and just halves the number of layers. It was nice getting to hit tons of ore nodes, though. Farming in Wetlands as Horde felt a little underwhelming without alliance there to gank me every 3 seconds, though.”
Another added: “I’ve felt this too and hope they find a more elegant solution. I’m sympathetic towards the team, though, the problems they’re trying to solve with layering are legitimately hard problems.”
Others thought the development team had managed to strike a reasonable balance, saying: “It’s great. It’s busy in capitals and somewhat less busy in other cities and perfect in questing zones. You don’t have to compete for every mob, but there are still some players around to group up for things.”
With Season of Discovery only in its first phase, Blizzard has a lot of work to do to maintain the momentum they have built at this early stage. If they can, this latest WoW flavor could be one of the most universally popular.
