Players nearby but not on your layer: what to record in a bug report

Two forum posts on 22 October described the same unsettling feeling from different angles: being right next to other players without seeming to share their world.

What the first player reported

Writing on the US forums at 14:42 UTC, one player described the Venture Co. Mine in Mulgore full of other players, dozens of them, all fighting enemies the poster could not see. The hunters had pets the poster could not see either.

Aggro did not line up. According to the poster, other players walked right up to a monster without drawing its attention, yet the same monster attacked the poster when they came close.

They said they had already reported it. In a later update, they described a new arrival who was fighting the same monsters they could see.

What the second player reported

At 21:05 UTC the same day, a player on the European forums described two frustrations: being pulled out of a layer in the middle of PvP, and not being moved to their raid group’s layer. They asked for players to be able to pick their layer, the way some games let you choose a channel.

What these reports do and don’t tell us

These are two individual accounts, in the posters’ own words. Neither establishes a shared bug, a cause, or how often this happens. Neither post describes a fix, and we have not reproduced either situation.

What they do offer is a clear picture of the details worth writing down if something similar happens to you.

What to record

• Where: the zone and the exact spot, including the subzone, cave or building.
• When: the time, with your time zone or in UTC, and roughly how long it lasted.
• Client build: the version you were running.
• Group status: solo, in a party or in a raid, and whether you had just joined, left or been invited to a group.
• What you could and couldn’t see: players, enemies, pets, spell effects, corpses, loot.
• What your groupmates saw: if you are grouped, ask whether they see the same players and monsters you do, and note exactly where their view and yours differ.
• Anything you tried: moving away, relogging, joining or leaving a group, and whether anything seemed to change. Record it even if nothing did.
• A screenshot or short clip, if you can capture one.

Write it down while it is fresh, and keep what you saw separate from any guess about why. Then send it through Blizzard’s own reporting channels.