It seems like there is an excessive amount of shard “balancing” going on. Mid-session, mid-quest, even mid-combat, I’ve seen almost every gaming session I’ve been playing, regardless of character, that I get shifted from shard to shard, frequently to my detriment.
A few examples:
During the escort portion with Sendrax. She disappeared. The NPC didn’t even appear in her starting point. Had to drop the quest and wait for, I’m assuming, the server to figure out that she was supposed to be there to re-pick-up the quest.
Waiting on transports - The boat the goes between the zones in the Dragon Isles, the timer went from 4 minutes remaining to 16 minutes remaining to wait, while I’m standing there waiting on it.
Suffusion Camps - The Fyrakk progress bar went from 80% to 25% while I’m in the middle of trying to complete the event.
Mid-combat - I usually play tank if it’s available (I have lots of alts), so I mass pull, but some areas, like the Cobalt Assembly, sometimes I have to be a little more careful. Grind my way through to a rare elite world-quest spawn, pull the quest mob, then have it de-spawn in mid-combat and all the guardian mobs around it instant re-spawn on top of me and stomp me into the ground.
What is going on? This is getting ridiculous to the point where I have passed up logging in (even when I have time) because I don’t want to deal with the frustration.
This has been happening ever since they announced that they would be “fixing” sharding leaving too many underpopulated shards (which accompanied the announcement of Zaralek rares despawning after 15 minutes of not being engaged) prior to 10.20.
At this point I don’t think they’re going to re-visit it until after 10.2.6 at the earliest.
I get it. Right now, it’s not showing up much on their complaint histogram. The way I look at it is ignoring it won’t push the peanut forward. They’re not acknowledging it because they’re seeing it as an edge/minor issue. The more interaction they get from this (particularly negative interactions), the higher priority it’s going to get. That’s how customer service metrics work.
@Pendraeg look here .
Yesterday, I cleared an area in the Emerald Dream to get a rare to spawn. It spawned and then disappeared before we could pull it. I’m getting tired of this. (This was on a rp server that gets phased and unphased with Moonguard and Wyrmrest Accord way too often.)
I know I’m not the only one posting about it, but there are some things about big corporate metrics you have to take into account:
A.) In a huge property like WoW, there are more bugs than they could handle if they had 10x the staff.
B.) Because of A., management, probably not the developer team actually handling the bug-fixes, but someone higher in the food chain who gives whole departments their marching orders has to set priorities somehow.
C.) The easiest way to do set priority is by measuring some sort of metric.
D.) These metrics are to let the customer base tell you what the biggest issue is.
You COULD do something more resource intensive, like, say, measure the number of logouts that correlate to some kind of bugged action, and how long those accounts stay logged out, but there’s a lot of noise there that’s going to make it a difficult measure. There are other things you can do to measure customer satisfaction, but they’re going to get more and more indirect and arcane from there, and each degree of separation will take more and more resources.
So, to push that metric, keep making touches. Every touch to a CS or Forum or Bug report adds more to the negative customer engagement score for this issue. Again, with resource management, the juice isn’t going to be worth the squeeze to figure out if they’re coming from the same account or not (though multiple customers/accounts certainly helps).
Because this issue is SO disruptive, when it does impact play, I’ve decided to do 3 things:
1.) Re-open the ticket interaction I already having going with CS, though I know they can’t do anything, it still adds to the tally.
2.) Submit an in-game bug report.
3.) Create a forum thread (like this one) in the Bug Report forum.
And frequently, there’s a 4th: I log out in frustration.
I’ve been noticing this too. I was fishing in Azure Span with another random person. We kept phasing away from each other and back every 10-15 minutes or so. It was absured.
I’ve noticed it often while ice fishing, but the other person there made it extra noticable.
What prompted me to actually look this up was doing a bonus objective in Zaralek. I got it to about 75% and phased, which meant I had to start over ._.
This is now preventing me from contributing to some seed events in Emerald Dream because I get sharded before the seed finishes, then no matter what I do, can’t get phased back, and then get the message I can’t contribute because I have a chest nearby to loot still.
Came to post about this myself, instead am upvoting this thread.
I just waited through a complete Suffusion Camp cycle twice. Once Fyrak hit 100% and began flying through the zone, I was phased to another shard where the camp was back at 0% progress.
This is immensely frustrating. Especially when you are inside a “group progress” quest area like this.
Honestly, Blizz will never fix it. You want to know why, it’s because it’s open world content and Ion and Co don’t give a crap about open world players. They will continue to ignore this issue, like they do with everything else that isn’t instanced content.
I don’t agree. I think it’s down to normal corporate triage. As much as we players want to make it personal to our own point of view, I think it comes down to resource management against cost of letting it ride.
This might take a great deal of programming resource time to correct multiplied by the risk (which is a real risk because the true testing requires variable loading of the servers) of making it worse balanced against the cost of player disengagement by the delay. If there’s something broken in an instance, it becomes high profile quickly by however many people go in that instance get the problem consistently and comparatively low impact on the risk side because that sort of problem can be fixed relatively simply “offline” because the trigger can be easily replicated once understood and the permutations of the fix are easier to check.
Look, I’m not giving them a pass for this issue. I started the thread because it annoyed me, but I am also not going to be unreasonable in expectation. I’ve played for a long time, and the depth of this problem is relatively new. We do need to keep raising it, but let’s not strawman the problem because that just gives an excuse to not pay attention to the issue.
I’ve been trying to kill Fyrakk’s Lieutenant from the Azure Span suffusion camp for 2 hours. I keep getting phased every 15 minutes from a shard thats just about to fight him, to one that has 0% on the progress bar to summon him. It’s happened 7 times now.
I have had this happen on the centaur hunts in Span at least 2 times. I’d be at 2/6 or 1/6 left and presto! the Hunt is gone, poof into thin air. Frustrating for sure and def appears to be a server sharding issue from what I am seeing in game.
Sharding is so frustrating. Just completed a soup community event at legendary 2 as bisque spawned, I got sharded to an event that had ZERO progress. So, after 10 minutes of actively participating in the soup event, blizzard decided to reward me for my dedication by not allowing me to kill the boss. So, yeah that’s pretty lame.
Blizzard, will you PLEASE STOP THE SHARDING?
Just had this happen after forming a group for Aurostor and pulling the boss with ~18 people while leaving the group listed. We had him to 54% when we randomly got kicked to another shard as people continued to join the group. When I left the group, I was returned to the shard I was originally in.
There’s simply no excuse for re-sharding in that kind of scenario. The shard I was originally in wasn’t even that populated.
Just had this happen while attempting to kill the disciple at the Suffusion Camp event. Boss was about 50% and I got sharded to where the event was at 10% and no rare. In the last several weeks I have witnessed this kind of mid-combat/content sharding far more often than usual. This needs to be fixed!! Characters should NEVER have their zone changed around them unless that character actively does something to change it, like joining a raid group for a WB kill.
Adding to this because this is a problem for me as well. I now have many seeds or rewards (I can’t remember what they’re called) that are invisible in the Emerald Dream - I’m both unable to add dew drops to any plant on the bugged mound that are at the spots because it says I need to pick up the available award, and I’m unable to pick up the “available” award because it’s invisible to me (phased to another shard I can’t access). Slowly the ability to plant seeds in the Emerald Dream will be completely unavailable to me because all of the mounds are sharded into oblivion.
I had a seed shard away from me the other day, and the dropped chest phased back into my shard after the 3 minutes was up. Not real sure what was up with that, but I was actively adding to the flower when I was sharded away.
THIS!
It has gotten progressively worse the last two months for me. Everything folks have listed here happens to me on an almost daily basis.
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Grand hunts - I will work toward completing it–sometimes alone–only for it to shard me out to a zone that has ZERO progress on the hunt and then it’s too late and ends before I can start over.
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Killing rares - Will blow all my cooldowns as I am often alone (especially in ZC), get the rare to sub-10% only to get sharded and either the rare is gone, or I am getting my tookus kicked because it’s at 100% again, and adds are spawned around it.
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Was doing the Soup event, and we were at Legendary (2), when I randomly got sharded to an event that had POOR quality, and 1.5/2/&1 minutes left. So all the time/effort I put to help with the Legendary one was wasted and I didn’t get to kill the rare at the end. This happened to me 3 weeks in a row that now I don’t even bother with the event, even though I am still missing items.
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I’ve planted seeds in the Emerald Dream, and will just randomly get punted onto a different shard, and it bugs it enough that I can’t contribute to the same plot for a few days, as it says I already have one I need to pick up first.
Once again…
At 6:13 pm server time, March 9, 2024. I was just dumped from one shard to another in the middle of the “Deluge Dilemma” quest. I had carved my way in carefully (Elemental shaman), and then everything spawned back right on top of me. I got squished. Enough. I can take the swarm with my tanks, but it’s a damn shaman. It goes splat!