De Holinka
Layering is the lesser of several evils when it comes to handling launch week populations.
Many people have been waiting for this launch for years and are committed to the long haul, but there will also be tons of tourists checking it out at launch.
The team is predicting a fairly steep drop off compared to the interest players are showing on launch day.
Community is very important in Classic, so keeping the number of realms reasonable to ensure a healthy population is important.
The team really really wants to avoid having to offer transfers or merging Classic realms later.
Raising player caps on realms could be done but causes contention for finite spawn points and leads to bottlenecks.
When you log in, you'll be assigned to a layer and will stay there for that gameplay session.
The only way to change layers will be accepting a group invite from a player in another layer. Once you move to that new layer, that'll be your new layer for the gameplay session.
The team expects to aggressively reduce the number of layers after the first few days.
As the team goes into Phase 2, the goal is to have just one layer per realm.
Layers will be removed with realm restarts or during maintenance.