WoW Forever's Layering Keeps Separating Friends. Beta players say leaving a party or crossing a zone line drops them into another copy of the world, weeks before the November 4 launch.

What Happened

Beta players say WoW Forever's layers split groups, cut into fights and swap zones by accident, and Blizzard has not answered the October complaints.

How the world is split

• No realm list. WoW Forever has no traditional servers to pick from, reports Icy Veins, a WoW guide site. Everyone shares one mega-server.
• Layers do the splitting. Blizzard runs several copies of the world, called layers, and moves players between them behind the scenes to spread the population.
• Beta closing. The beta ends October 21.

What players report

• Fights cut short. Players report sudden layer switches mid-fight and during world PvP, the open-world fighting between factions outside battlegrounds, Icy Veins reports.
• Groups split. When someone leaves a group, the invite can move the group leader to a new layer, away from the players still with them.
• Zone lines swap layers. Bordering zones swap layers by accident. A PvP-realm player wrote on Blizzard's forums on September 27: "as soon as you cross into a new zone you get phased into a new layer."
• A layer lock. An October 6 forum thread, "Layering is breaking the social side of Forever", asked for a 10 to 15 minute layer lock after leaving a group.
• One world per ruleset. The same thread asked for "ideally one shared world per ruleset long-term".
• Wowhead's take. Wowhead wrote on October 17 that players "have noticed some interesting interactions when it comes to layers and layering in WoW: Forever, making for some frustrating gameplay."

Icy Veins has run two stories on the complaints, and the forum threads go back to September 27, so players have been reporting the problem for three weeks.

Blizzard's answer so far

• A Hardcore change. Sportskeeda, a gaming news site, reports Blizzard designer Kris Zierhut said a layering change was made mainly for Hardcore, the mode where a character that dies stays dead.
• Three-minute warning. Per the same report, Hardcore players now get a three-minute warning before a layer refresh.
• No new reply. No Blizzard reply to the October complaints has been found on the forums.

What This Means for the Riot MMO

Riot has said nothing about how its MMO splits players across servers, and WoW Forever is the live test of one answer.

• Nothing announced. Riot has never said whether its MMO uses realms, a mega-server, layers or shards. How it splits its players is unannounced.
• The trade. A mega-server drops realm choice and login queues, but players can vanish mid-quest when layers swap.
• World PvP breaks first. Open-world fights need enemies who stay in the same copy of the world, and the beta reports swaps in the middle of them.
• The 2019 answer. One shared world per ruleset is the approach WoW Classic, Blizzard's 2019 re-release of the original game, settled on.
• Ex-WoW on Riot's team. Orlando Salvatore, a senior engineering manager on the Riot MMO and a former WoW lead software engineer, posted on October 18: "Up next: WoW team ships WoW Forever".
• Hardcore's cost. Blizzard adding a refresh warning for Hardcore shows what a surprise layer swap costs a player whose character can die only once.

Our read. Layers fix crowding, and WoW Forever's beta shows the cost lands on the social side: the group that splits, the rival who vanishes mid-fight. Riot's team includes people who shipped WoW, and it hired WoW's former lead PvP designer. How Riot splits its own crowd is unannounced, and this beta is the clearest live test this year of what players accept.

Matthew Armstrong, a developer building WoW Forever, called convenience the death of the journey. A mega-server with no queues is the convenient option. Players asking for one shared world per ruleset are choosing the journey, and Riot will have to pick a side.

What to Watch

Your Take

Reported from Wowhead and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.