Personally I would rather not see sharding, myself, but if there’s going to be sharding I’m not going to whinge about it like you guys, either. I’d rather have a game that’s not going to DC me because of an overcrowded zone than a game that does, and if sharding’s the only way to accomplish that on Blizzard’s cloud architecture without artificial server caps and login qeues, so be it.
As if making generalizations the way you do makes you even remotely desirable as an in-game questing buddy.
People won’t be able to simply shard hop, though. What’s done in the modern game happens because of CRZ and Group Finder, which Classic will lack.
To shard hop in Classic, you’d have to take your chances finding someone leading a group that’s on a different shard but doing the same thing you are that can invite you to their group and hope that by inviting you the group doesn’t get pulled to the shard you’re on instead of you getting pulled to them.
People were already shard hopping in the demo.
People who are still pro sharding please watch this video!
Watched it back when it was first posted.
Does nothing to change my mind that sharding should be the go-to for the launch surge, then not be used again after.
Except that you cannot even hold yourself to that standard of “not be used again after”.
Allow me to quote you:
Very sorry to hear that.
IF it never gets used past the starting zone at launch than it isn’t a huge issue.
But if its in the game already they will be tempted to use it whenever they have any large groups of people in one area for whatever reason.
Why do you make this slippery slope fallacy? It’s technically available for them to use because Classic is on the 7.3.5. client and modern server infrastructure. If that’s your thought process, you’re going to be paranoid about them deciding to use it one day even if they don’t use it at launch.
Because their reasoning for using it in the first place doesn’t just magically go away after the starting zones. So if they are willing to use it there why would they not use it any time there is a large group of players in the same location?
There isn’t a logical reason why they would choose to use it in the starting zone but not the next zone.
Give me a direct quote as to their reasoning for using it in the first place, please.
Q: With the CRZ and phasing off the table for Classic WoW how will you address server population concerns in Classic, both with caps and possible lieu with low pop realms?
Ion: Ok so, for some folks who have been jumping into the Classic demo, you may have noticed that if you jump into with a friend you may not necessarily always see each other in the same version of The Barrens right now. That is sharding, there’s been a lot of concern and discussion about it on the internet. We understand. So first off, the demo is a kind of a special case, because it’s not a world where everyone is kind of spread out, it’s literally every single character using a template being placed in the extract same point in the world, in Barrens or Westfall. We leveraged that tech to make the demo experience run more smoothly.
Now that said, we recognize that launching WoW Classic poses a couple of unique challenges. Unlike launching a traditional game that’s brand new, where you can assume that everyone who is jumping in there on launch day has the intent to at least explore playing it long-term, we expect that early on in Classic there are going to be some people who are there die-hard dedicated they’re racing to defeat Ragnaros and Onyxia, there’s going to be others who just wanna check it out casually, they just want to see what all the fuss is about, they want to see what they missed. And our concern is I think exactly what you suggest, what’s that going to look like, what’s that going to do to realm communities as server populations may dwindle over time.
That is where we are looking at using sharding in a very limited way. We understand and I understand completely that sharding is antithetical to the concept of a cohesive Classic community, where you’re competing over limited resources. When Lord Kazzak is up and guilds are racing to defeat him, there needs to be only one Lord Kazzak. If you’re trying to lock down the Thorium veins that spawn in limited sections of the world, you should be competing over limited resources. That said, the first few weeks, when everybody is packed into Valley of Trials, when everybody is packed into Elwynn, we think we can use sharding there in a time-limited way to stop the initial launch-day load problems, while making sure that in the long run, as server communities solidify, there’s a healthy population as a single world for everyone to live in.
“we think we can use sharding there in a time-limited way to stop the initial launch-day load problems”
If you don’t think there will be some AQ Gate opening day “load problems” when it comes to EVERYONE being in 1 spot and not spread out in each starting zone than you either didn’t experience it or just don’t care about it.
As many as are necessary at launch. If you can’t understand that, there is no help for you.
Speculation ad fear mongering.
Read this and read it good. The Classic population is going to be insanely high on launch day and fall off as time goes on. They’re sharding so they can stuff as many people as possible on the server at one time so they can create fewer servers at launch in order to keep the population healthy long term.
Speculation, yes, obviously.
Fear mongering no, fear mongering assumes there is no real reason for concern. But there is.
No there isn’t.
AQ gates opening is going to have a LARGE portion of the population with in a very small area, the majority of players visible from one location.
How is this any different from a starting zone at launch?
sorry but there is. blizzard has a track record of saying the will only do just this one thing and then do more things.
Speculation
Then don’t play? If you don’t trust Blizzard, don’t play.