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.

Thanks to player reports and feedback, we’ve identified a bug affecting how XP was calculated for parties of 6 or more players.

We are rolling out a hotfix right now, to all realms, that should correct this. Going forward, XP awarded should be significantly lower for parties of 6 or more players.

Again, thank you very much for your feedback.

In order to deploy an improvement to the game service, we will perform restarts of all WoW Classic realms in this region at 8:00 a.m. PDT, August 28th.

Realms should be unavailable for about 15 minutes. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

With a hotfix to WoW Classic a few moments ago, we’ve changed how the realm population labels work in order to display realm populations in a more meaningful way.

How it worked before this hotfix

As we explained here, the system previously calculated the population labels by comparing all realms to the most-populated realm. This could result in a very crowded realm (with a lengthy queue) showing up as “Medium”, since it was being compared to the realm that had the highest population and a potentially massive queue.

How population labels work now

This system now measures each realm against a realm’s absolute capacity. Medium indicates a healthy total population on a realm – well in excess of what we considered Full in a 2006 – with room for more players to log-in. You’ll now see a High label if the realm is close to having a queue, and a Full label if the realm currently has a queue.

We will continue to monitor this system closely and take further steps if necessary.

Thank you very much!