I disagree, I was on day 1 for Vanilla, TBC and WotLK and the only problems were during Vanilla but that is understandable. TBC and WotLK were flawless on Smolderthorn at least.
I would love no sharding just for the pure chaos of it if the servers can handle it, but I remember day 1 on Vanilla where we had rollbacks every 6 minutes for the last 5 minutes of gameplay…
The Classic demo had a ridiculously low threshhold. I got sharded in a pvp tournament when there were like 50 people around.
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I had time to “schedule my play” for TBC, “Prime Time” for Mannoroth was a cluster----. Even release night(morning) was pretty sketchy for the first few hours. I remeber that because I made a specific effort to leverage my Beta experience, and powered through HFP at like 2am in the morning just so I could be in a different zone come that evening. Even then, loot lag, and the occasional crash/rollback happened in Outland all the same.
Wrath did a lot better in many ways, spreading players across two “starter zones” was a master-stroke. But even then, “we” managed to crash Mannoroth more than a couple times.
Yeah Shattered Hand was a mess for TBC, constantly crashing and all kinds of lag. Granted Shattered Hand was always pretty unstable, it’s why Death and Taxes got up and left.
Wrath was better but still had problems, Cata was about the same, MoP starting for Alliance was a disaster with the gunship, WoD had massive problems with the Garrison. Legion actually was probably the smoothest of them all and BfA had some pretty serious issues but probably less so than some of the early versions.
Yeah. Look at the SINGLE server launching to thousands of people who want this game.
Now look at the multi million dollar company that has already said there will be MULTIPLE servers at the launch of this game.
Your comparison instantly falls apart.
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Turn off your PC and pretend you’re playing. Similar outcome, less effort. 
I. . I just don’t know how to talk to you . . THIS IS WHAT WE WANT!! The community to grow and fall in love with the game!! We are not proposing that we use sharding at any time but the start … and/or that the use of it does NOT mean its the end of the world.
Please stop treating other parts of the larger wow community as second hand citizens who you allow to grace your server for only a little while.
We are a family and the meeting and helping these so called “tourists” is EXACTLY what the experience we all had back in the day was about.
And with that… I am OUT of this convo. I fear I am just speaking into the wind for some.
While i agree I’d love to have more people they are going to havd to conform to classic. Not the other way around
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Sorry but you shouldn’t assume everyone against sharding wants dynamic respawns.
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I think you missed the point I was trying to make.
I see many of the proponents for sharding claiming that classic needs to have drastically overpopulated servers using sharding at launch because the “tourists” will leave in droves and the population will drop to “reasonable levels” without “being dead”.
The point I was trying to make is that is not necessarily the case, especially if launch is altered to be more convenient for the players. More convenience means more people are likely to move into those secondary areas, taking the need for sharding to those areas. Taking sharding and the convenience it provides to those secondary areas could easily mean more people moving into tertiary areas with sharding following to those areas. And that pattern could easily repeat itself through the game.
Tell us all that there is no way the “predicted” 70% drop off by level 10 may well actually be less than 30 or 40 percent by level 60, especially if sharding is used to make the game more convenient beyond those starting zones.
I welcome anyone that wants to play Classic for what it is and that includes all of those warts. I would love to see the need for hundreds of non sharded servers, all with a healthy population of about 3000 players.
What I do not want to see is a few drastically overpopulated servers that have to use sharding extensively throughout the game.
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See, my interest in Classic is the gameplay and mechanics. Anything that hinders the ability to play the game gets to be evaluated. So events that have a high probability of being able to crash the servers will get evaluated on their respective merits. At a certain point there is a cost/benefit call that needs to be made, and the cost of “game is unplayable” for the benefit of “no shards” doesn’t quite cut the mustard.
Yes, there IS a slippery slope concern that is very valid in the mix. As sharding can be used to progressively lower the bar on “game is unplayable” and “sharding is an answer.”
Sharding is cheap, it helps Blizzard lower costs, which increases profit margins, which makes Activision happy. So there is a very real risk factor in the mix. That said, there are scenarios that fall so far outside the realm of “normal play” that deliberately opting for “game becomes unplayable” because expecting Blizzard to pay to maintain sufficient resources to handle “a once in a server’s lifetime event” is nuts. It makes zero business sense on any level, it actually accomplishes very little, and costs a lot of resources to setup/test to ensure it could handle that “once in a server lifetime” event, even when most servers won’t be likely to encounter it. The cost/benefit simply isn’t there for “ruggedization” to withstand 500+ players popping over to Silithus at the same time to watch the AQ gates open up and engage in World PvP.
The “Better” option is to shard them off into blocks of say 200 or 300 players each and partition them away from the realm/continent servers as well so if they crash their shard, they’re not taking everyone else with them.
Ideally I’d hope their “Default” state is having the ability to handle a PvP scenario of up to about 240 players in a WPVP scenario. (that 6 full 40 man raids) Which if they accomplished that, would actually fall into the realm of “Not truly Classic” as it stands anyhow. I remember seeing what happened in World PVP when each faction brought (roughly) 2 full raids worth of players against one another in classic at a location which wasn’t a Capital(such as: world raid bosses). It typically meant unplayable lag, and disconnects/crashes.
By all accounts, it sounds like 120 v 120 would also be not-retail as sharding appears to try to avoid that kind of player density happening in the first place. In some respects, I guess that would be an interesting “focused test” for a Beta, give everybody premades and restrict them to the Hillsbrad Foothills. See just how big SS/TM can get in real world internet conditions before it brings the test server to its knees. Internal testing at Blizzard with everybody enjoying near instant Ping isn’t the same thing, as a large part of the problems seen revolve around issues specific to client latency.
Problem is you have to deal with the realities of human nature being what they are and Blizzard’s inherent promise that “your player character is safe with us” which makes Server Merging highly problematic. Because server merges either force a character name change(your character isn’t so safe after all), or you get the Server-Surname thing going on.
So that said, it is “easier” to deal with a Overpopulated Realm than it is to deal with a dozen underpopulated ones. Which takes us back to “you shard the starting areas” and hope most of the Retail tourists will quit before they hit level 10, or level 20 at the latest. After which “normal” server operations can handle the rest of the load.
If they’re still around by level 30+ that’s when you start capping realm populations, introduce server queues, and offer free migrations to new/other servers to “spread the load around.”
But we’re in broken record territory here. Your desire for classic in the most strictly literal way possible is well documented. You seem to be hide-bound and determined for players to see people running around with server-surnames 6 months after Classic goes live because “the tourists” were not handled at all because “Vanilla WoW didn’t have a tourist problem large enough to warrant designing for it.”
Time will tell, we’ll see what Blizzard decides to do, which side “wins” that round of the argument, and ultimately which side was right in the longer run.
In some respects, it’s potentially kind of moot anyhow, as the initial servers are likely to be safe either way. I expect the “stable population” is likely to be larger than what Blizzard is likely to initially provision for. So sharding will likely be more of a tool to allow people to play the game rather than sit in queue while Blizzard goes about adding additional servers for them to transfer over to.
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I surely do not want to see sharding used to 30+, unlike some, it seems.
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I don’t want Westfall sharded, Barrens shouldn’t be sharded. Sharding at that level makes “organic grouping” harder to happen as lead-ins to running the dungeons in those zones. (RFC is a bit of an odd-duck in that regard)
The initial starting zones should be the only ones to get sharded, and only if needed.
I can see a scenario where sharding becomes a needed population management tool. I’d rather see people able to play the game rather then watch a queue timer/counter. Their being able to play the game also helps “weed out the tourists” before Blizzard has added eleventy billion realms to handle all the people trying to log in.
Being able to play the game is a very pro-Classic position to take. Forcing players to sit in a queue when there is no technical reason why they shouldn’t be able to do so is both anti-fun, and anti-Classic in my book.
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Or when two raids run into each other going to MC, BWL, ZG, etc and instead of a fight all of a sudden one shards out of sight of the other because 80 people is too much for one area.
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I jumped on the server in question about 2 hours after launch and sharding wasn’t even needed in the starting zone anymore. The dynamic spawns they are using were actually hurting us when trying to do Milly’s Harvets because mobs were respawning too fast in the vineyard.
My problem with sharding is their “~2 week” claim. If they go with Vanilla server caps, sharding will only be needed a few hours to accomplish what they want. If they go with pserver mega servers it would be needed for much longer, and for more than just the starting zone to accomplish what they want.
Why should a vanilla community even listen to you?
Phase is bad I know you started in wrath but for vanilla type game it’s bad. Mkay…
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Sharding is unnecessary for a successful launch of Classic.
Sharding is unnecessary for a stable launch of Classic.
Sharding is a QoL change that is unauthentic to the Vanilla Experience.
We don’t know server pop caps. We don’t know the number of servers. We don’t know how many players will be there at launch.
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As far as I’m concerned, if you don’t want to deal with the initial zerg in the starting zones then wait a few days to make a character. Let those who want the chaos enjoy the madness that launch night will be without sharding.
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