Arguments like “sharding will allow people to play at launch or make it so I don’t miss an event” can be used for other QOL changes like LFG will let me play the game, Cross Realm will allow me to play game now! See where this is going?
No changes. No sharding, sharding bad.
Facts facts facts
Slippery Slope Fallacy is Fallacious.
This toon was originally a Tauren Druid. I haven’t selected my faction yet.
Could always have ye in my guild if yer willing.
This always gets a chuckle out of me, since Ion himself has stated their fear of the Slippery Slope.
Except we have literally had people already use existing changes to try to justify others.
With any sort of validity, no. People using fallacies aren’t restricted to one.
Evidence for appearing and disappearing players?
Battle For Azeroth, Legion, Warlods of Draenor and Mists of Panderia.
Steps on how to see the evidence of appearing/disappearing players:
I don’t think you fully understand:
a) what it was like before sharding
b) what it is like after sharding
I do, which is why I want my old game back without disappearing players. And so does the current CEO of Blizzard:
Brack is clear that using modern server architecture doesn’t mean that these Classic servers will have the same features that current World of Warcraft does. There won’t be cross-realm servers or Looking For Raid and Dungeon Finder automatic party matchmaking. There’s still a lot of questions about how the team will tackle it, but Brack says they’re committed to recreating an authentic Vanilla World of Warcraft experience. “One of the tenets of Classic WoW is none of the cross-server realms and different [server] sharding options that we have available to us today. There’s a lot of desire on part of the community that this is something that they don’t want.”
– Source https[colon]//www[dot]pcgamer[dot]com/this-is-how-blizzard-plans-to-finally-bring-back-vanilla-wow-servers/
The problem is not only server stability but how do we faithfully restore authentic WoW for 2006 and play it.
The sole purpose of this project is to bring Vanilla WoW back - not to do a Proof Of Concept project on how sharding works to solve instability and load risk in cloud-based infrastructure.
This project is about Vanilla WoW as it was - NOT Vanilla + whatever QoL and conveniences. If you like sharding, play BFA.
As Brack said, we want Vanilla WoW - and none of that cloud load-balancing technology, like sharding, that kills the authentic experience of Vanilla WoW.
Some famous game development company once said:
GAMEPLAY FIRST.
http[colon]//us[dot]blizzard[dot]com/en-us/company/about/mission.html
I interpret that to mean, that the QUALITY of the gameplay comes FIRST - before anything else, including cloud-based load-balancing technology, like sharding.
Except the live servers also have CRZ.
Your evidence on how sharding will work in classic is lacking. Because
A) you’re assuming sharding in classic will work exactly like bfa, and
B) you don’t have a sharding-only example.
You are right that the problem is how do we restore authentic wow from 2006. But that ignores the fact that classic will be facing a unique problem of a decreasing population after launch compared to an increasing population as in 2004/5/6. What is your proposal to handle this unique problem?
No where did I reference CRZ - yet another deflection and actual Strawman from you. I am talking about sharding and login queues. Stick to the subject.
You said log into bfa and see people disappearing. That could be (and I would argue is more likely) CRZ. Your examples of sharding were flawed.
Sharding isn’t the only solution in the universe, is it? Maybe consider using a Vanilla WoW solution to solve a Vanilla WoW problem. Free server merges. I don’t really care, TBH. Dead realms were part of Vanilla, login queues were part of Vanilla, server instability was part of Vanilla.
This is all part of Vanilla WoW. Life wasn’t perfect, and I don’t want to change to make it perfect in your eyes - so you can instantly login and the millions of other tourists and sacrifice the community - yet again. We did that already with modern WoW. I want it just like it was because, at least back then, we had community and immersion and not appearing and disappearing players in my world in a dead world where no one cares who you are and you don’t care who is in the zone with you.
Here’s Preach’s example of sharding from the Classic Demo:
Here is Rextroy’s nice overview of sharding:
E2: okay yeah Preach accepts a group invite.
Nowhere will you see me say sharding is a perfect solution. I am adamantly against using it in any broad context. I think it makes sense in the 1-10 zones, and would also be fine in the 1-5 starter areas only as well. And strictly only early on (2 weeks?), Never to return again. Use server queues for AQ event if you have to.
But I do think it is shortsighted or at least underestimates the glut in the starter areas that we should expect everything to be fine with no creative solutions with a fresh launch of a legacy product like this.
That will definitely happen after launch if they overestimated the non-tourist population. But hopefully they plan for that, and have a unified name database so you don’t get Jimmy-Proudmoore and Jimmy-SilverHand.
If they can avoid it though, they will try to, and sharding the starters is a good way.
Have you checked out retail shadow priests?
Uh, if BFA is anything like Mists of Pandaria, there are entire zones that are literally layer upon layer of phases as quest turn ins constantly change the state of the surrounding game environment. If I see players appear/disappear in several zones within MoP, I’m going to assume they’re running along the edge of a phase, not a (CRZ) shard.
Now if they were doing that on Hellfire Peninsula on Outland, I’d agree with you. I almost included some of the old “Classic” zones, but I remembered that after Cataclysm several of those zones also make extensive use of Phasing as well. So about the only place in the Retail game that is safe from phasing at this point is Outland.
Which makes it really easy for players to constantly blame Sharding for something which is actually being caused by phasing.
And in reality, this is something two players could possibly demonstrate very easily in Icecrown, as there is a Very Large Phase that exists there that it is entirely possible for people to not engage. It’s been years, so I forget what the offending questlines are, although I think they were tied to the Tournament of Champions.
So a player character who did do the ToC related quest-hub stuff, and another player character who never visited that quest hub could easily demonstrate phasing causing people to appear and disappear as you move around the boundaries of the phase. Icecrown is probably one of the better places to do this because if they pay attention, there are indicators when you are on/near some of those boundaries.
Phasing can cause players to appear and disappear around you, but it is not the only thing that can.
Players demonstrated in the demo that sharding also does.
And Blizzard already acknowledged that what was going on with the demo was a special case, and abnormal operation(due to “special case”), even for retail.