So I made a promise to some people in General Discussion sometime last year that I would make a post about this concern in the Community Council forums. I’ve finally fulfilled that promise. I was going to make this post earlier before I made my CC post to try to gather more information to make said CC forum post but then today I witnessed the forced sharding first hand so I had all the info I needed to make it.
If anyone has experienced this type of forced sharding behavior while being engaged in any activity whether grouped or not; Please post here so I can make further adjustments to my CC forum post. Hopefully with these two threads linked we can also put more eyes on the situation and get it worked out.
Helpful information is when you first experienced the forced sharding (dates help: was it before or after a certain patch, ect.), the zone, what you were doing, were you grouped up at all, and if this was recently and you have the addon that tells you your shard, what shard you were in and which one you were forced to.
Edit: To keep track of the shard you’re in; I’ve used an addon called RareTracker(RT) by Melroy999
In Addition to keep track how long a shard you’ve been forced to has been up, Install the addon NPC Time by Yuyuli and find a friendly NPC(Thanks to Verelyse for this info)
I’ve had instances where a spontaneous group, i.e., people who happen to be there are fighting a world boss and then it dies or one of the players dies and suddenly I’m back to seeing an un-pulled boss and if I’m lucky, not within aggro radius.
Not just rares. I have experienced it at the end of the Superbloom. Two seconds form finishing a epic dreamseed. Clear out an area doing a quest and am about to kill the last guy to get the item I need… eveything respawns and then aggros down upon me with a fury unmatched by the Legion.
Everyone in the area of a primalist boss encounter, and we are standing around no boss, no event. These have all happened with the last week.
Yeah before a certain update that happened last year to kill Zaralek Caverns and Forbidden Reach even further, I believe in order to be removed from a shard you had to be inactive in that shard for some time. I think any type of activity: fighting a mob, being in a group, or engaging with events prevented you from sharding but now it’s a no holds bar cage match trying to stay on your current shard that you’ve been active on.
This is happening with the dream surge events too, magpies was active. All the sudden sharded to another effect instead of magpies, HUGE PITA mood popping issue
The community council has been nothing but bad ideas since it started.
Whether you want to call it sharding or phasing doesn’t really matter. It’s a different copy of the world. Stormwind is special because both warmode on and off people end up there, so of course it’s going to be a different shard/phase.
Shards have been another example of Blizzard fixing a problem the wrong way and just sweeping under the rug any subsequent problems it causes.
Still extremely unnecessary and uncalled for my dude.
Phasing is different than sharding, so it kind of does matter.
Same happens for Orgrimmar so Stormwind isn’t a special zone. It sounds more like they’re abusing a zone line as once they hug a wall they’re phased into that zone and out of the one they’re in. So these issues are not the same. It just sounds like they’re abusing a misplaced zone line.
Edits because I re-read your post of them being in the forest when this happens.
While I can agree with you there that sharding has caused more problems than it fixes over the years, attacking me for trying to make a post to actually attempt to get something done about it doesn’t make you look very helpful.
You also haven’t been helpful on when your situation happened as it MIGHT, very slim chance there, be connected to when they messed up sharding late last year.
Ugh, I remember some people on MoonGuard coming into Orgrimmar and I don’t know what it was that was phasing them, but they would go into the Broken Tusk (or up against it certain spots while still outside) and disappear. They kept phasing anytime we were close to killing them, or ran out of defensives I guess. Extremely annoying.
Which while not the issue you’re addressing currently, they should look into that. (Inb4 “clever use of game mechanics.” )
Yeah it just sounds like an abuse of a misplaced zone line or a “Void” pocket since both Orgrimmar and Stormwind seem to have them. It sounds like the pocket they’re phasing into is registered like an outside area while being the opposing faction players in enemy controlled city. The enemy player being registered for Warmode might be a key to it. But I think more testing for someone is needed to go into the pocket zone. Annoying for sure and it’s honestly the first I’ve heard of this.
Do you recall when you first experienced it? Like around what patch? Or has it been going on for years?
Yes, absolutely. Sharding is nice tech when it works properly but lately it’s been extremely aggressively buggy, which is just annoy as heck. I bet it’s happening even more than I realise, you just don’t notice it so much unless you’re actively doing stuff.
I was slow killing a huge rare on one of my tanks, and then someone invited me to a group and it pulled me into a different shard. Loss many minutes there.
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