Board Thread:Online Discussion/@comment-151.226.203.213-20130711234451/@comment-7153552-20130919051450

Well, with it being on the consoles, we can actually look to Defiance for that answer, they use a technology very similar to what ESO is claiming to use. The number of layers will be variable based on the number of people online and where they are in the world. In Defiance you're randomly pushed into a layer and if you group up with a friend, then you can port to the leader's instance. This is also the way Firefall works and Neverwinter Online. Once in a group, you will travel together from zone to zone without any downtime of finding each other again.

In ESO they are saying that you're going to fill out a questionare, of sorts, at the beginning so they can decide what kind of players you'd best fit in with. The idea is that you will primarily be layered with other folks with similar mindsets and/or goals (like if you only want to PvP with some questing in the downtime, you shouldn't be layered in with somebody who only wants to gather and craft). However, there are other factors in the layering equation, one of which is grouping and we discussed above. The second is guilds, if you're in a merchant guild (crafting and selling things) but you answered the questionare as a hardcore end-game content runner, you'll still folks from your guild in your layer.

Most games seem to have some sort of method to move between layers freely - most, not all - so you may be able to jump into a layer at will. The only thing being, I don't know why you'd want to. Unless you just happen to know a friend of yours is on layer 7 and you're stuck over on 9, but you want to world PvP gank him as a funny, I don't see much use in this mechanic. In fact, as there is slated to be no Wolrd PvP in ESO, I don't see any use for that mechanic at all, lol.

Now back to this "off-topic" bit. ..