Today I was in a shard where there was nobody in the Emerald Dream (WM off). It was pretty frustrating trying to do anything when the Emerald Dream has a lot of world group content.
I figured I’d use group find to hop to another shard. I shouldn’t even have to do this, but here we are.
Do I stay in the new shard until I log out or am I randomly phased back to my dead shard?
So what actually happened was there was enough people in the current shard that you got sent into a new one (thus it being dead). It would slowly fill as other people joined the area.
As far as getting out of it, im not 100% sure how that works. Does logging out and back in reset you to the orginial one for your realm?
Yes, joining a group from another shard will shard you over to them. That’s how people shard hop. Using the auto-accept quest system for world bosses for example is a very common method a lot of people use. You can also use just other people’s world quest groups to shard hop as well. Pretty much everyone does it these days in order to wrestle some form of control over the automated and incredibly brain dead sharding system.
And yes, leaving the group will usually dump you back onto your original shard (not always). Unfortunately the sharding rules are somewhat unpredictable. For example, inviting someone to your group can actually shard you over to their shard instead of the other way around. It’s rare but I’ve seen it happen. So you can find a rare, list a group, have someone join and…poof…your rare just disappear right before your eyes. Being in combat doesn’t necessarily lock you to a shard either. You can be mid-combat with an NPC and once again…poof…it dematerialises right before your eyes.
thanks for the info. pretty nonsensical system. other games had channels that people could hop into that gave them some form of control over how populated they wanted their zones
Yes, wow used to have that too. We used to use add-ons to help facilitate that. One was called Realm Hopper I think. Those were the good old days.
Now we just have dead zones and dead shards because nobody knows how to navigate the sharding system anymore and blizz shut down such add-ons. A classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater but there you have it.
This happened to me several times while running my alts through the Suffusion Camps.
Drove me nuts.
Editing to add: I noticed that there were several “players” that would fly through the camp, seem to hit a wall, travel up the wall and then continue flying out of the camp.
They were the same “players”, none appeared to be in a guild and this would happen every ten minutes or so, give or take, repeatedly.
So that made me wonder if Blizzard is already using their bots to fill in for players or is this something else weird going on?
It was strange to see.
I was seated at the bubbled area of the camp, waiting for the dragon that showed he was coming but didn’t show up. At least twice.
That’s how I saw this.
ED has its own hard shard because it is the old RP-PVP server. It will happen most frequently on this server specifically. It’s also extremely bad on the normal RP servers, but not to the same degree.
The sharding has gotten crazy annoying. Just yesterday I planted a seed in ED, was running around with the plants etc. and one player showed up. We had just killed a plant together when that player vanished.
And so did my planted seed, it was back to the state where I could plant a seed.
I was annoyed, but went through trying to plant another seed when I got the error that I hadn’t looted a flower.
The flower then appeared, which I was happy about since it meant I didn’t lose the first seed planting. But even in the Plains, playing with a friend, and all the gurlocs or whatever they’re called are dead around us and suddenly – we’re in the middle of a bunch of gorlocs who are very much alive and now mobbing us.
It was very much a WTH moment.
It happened again today, yet every zone in the the lfg was dead