WoW Forever: fewer surprise layer swaps when you group up

Blizzard's engineers used the sixth episode of the official WoW Forever podcast to explain how layers will behave at launch. Lead software engineer Ana Resendez and principal software engineer Frank Williams joined senior game designer Josh Greenfield to talk through the technology behind the game, a week before it goes live.

The main change concerns groups. Joining a group should no longer throw you onto another layer without warning: the move will be announced first, and you can trigger it within a time window. Williams said the frequent zone swaps early in the beta came from around 17 systems acting on each other, and that bug fixes and more conservative settings have reduced them. The problem of players vanishing near Orgrimmar, seen in a widely shared clip, was largely fixed by changes at the end of the beta, with more fixes planned, though Blizzard does not promise a world with no visible transitions.

Layers are managed by zone or by groups of zones, and Blizzard can change that grouping after launch, so a split that eases crowded starting areas may look different a month later. Your guild still affects where you land when you are not in a group, the language you play in is taken into account, and the ignore list will not move other players off your layer, which Blizzard considers too easy to abuse.

Groups of 80 to 120 players are still only being discussed, and Williams said no such size has been announced. Forever launches for Europe at midnight on 5 November in Central Europe. The same episode also covered faction balance on each ruleset.