In the past hour; My friend and I; in a group, have been forced into a new shard at least 4 times. We’re switching between Rare farming and Big Digs in Azure Spans. This is really getting out of hand.
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Do you need also the server you were on when it happened because there is no way to find this. Also is this due to population?
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I think any information you’re able to provide; character/time frame/date/zone/subzone would be helpful. Even providing what you were doing helps!
Multiple times in DF. The Treasure Goblin and the Time Rifts were the worst; oh and the Soup Event… How could I forget ? But also on the Dream Surges when the bosses were up, we’d have it down to like 25% health remaining and then poof, everything and everyone disappeared. I honestly haven’t played much patch content due to this stuff happening all the time. Gave up on time rifts after 3 days, didn’t touch Forbidden Reach or ZC. Did some of the Emerald Dream, the seeds would definitely shard after you planted if too many people were there; or the rare bosses would just vanish mid fight. Surprisingly the Superbloom was an event I never had trouble with other than lag, even though tons of people were participating.
Moon Guard. Characters: Multiple. Time Frame: Start of DF to present.
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I had this happen, just this week on tuesday reset, on the Emerald Dream world boss. Filled raid, got him to about 40%ish and it sharded our whole group to a brand new boss with full hp doing his normal patrol. Plant behind us was gone, completely new shard.
This has never happened to my account prior to DF (hell I rarely ran into bugs at all, but DF has been BAD comparatively) and its becoming super frustrating. I encounter sharding issues at least once every two weeks. I cant see a pattern, time, or replicatable event unfortunately. Its been very random.
Sharded doing the following that I can remember:
(please note: These have all happened both solo and in groups/raids)
- Emerald Dream world boss
- Superbloom (this one is ESPECIALLY FRUSTRATING to go from full to a green bag)
- Soup event
- Zaralek Cavern world bosses
- Zaralek Cavern rares and events (not consistent ones)
- Centaur Hunts (suddenly the hunt is in another area of the zone)
- Suffision camps (suddenly mini boss isnt there and the Fyrakk bar is back to like 20%)
- Time rifts
I havent encountered it yet with DF rares out in the wild not in the new areas, but I also kill those pretty quickly.
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Yes, but I only noticed it recently. Was doing the scarab event and someone was summoning the dudes that drop the items that you can turn in for a gazillon xp. As soon as the fight began everyone and the boss vanished.
I erroneously yelled at my son for kicking out the route plug again but noticed he was still fighting. He invited me to his group, everything reappeared and I died.
At least I got to loot the boss though. 
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I changed the title of this thread cause I realize not everyone was engaged with a mob or rare while being force sharded. Hopefully this pulls in more eyes.
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I’ve been having this problem way more in the last few weeks than usual, but I started getting this problem back in Legion while trying to do the “Naxt Victim” achievement. Back then, a guildy and I would farm the beacons for hours to get the epic versions to summon the various bosses, then activate it. And JUST as we were killing it, we got kicked to another shard. Had one we downed and got credit for on the achievement, but we were never able to loot it because of the sharding.
Since DF, it doesn’t matter what we try to do; world bosses (both IN and separate from other groups), farming herbs/ore, farming rares, dragon racing, events like Time Rifts, Fyrak Assaults and Dragon Bane Keep (among others) or just general amokery. Until last week I was just making marks on a notepad to count the number of times we’ve been kicked to another shard. That got up to 247 times from mid-November 2023 to until the end of January 2024. This was in a group w/ my pocket healer, who we grouped up before even leaving Valdrakken.
At no point did we invite others (nor receive invites from others) to our group when any of these instances happened.
Recently, I’ve been in 40 man raid groups doing world bosses and just as we were about to down the boss, the entire group got thrown onto another shard with either no world boss, or it rampaging and killing players.
It is getting out of control, but for us it has been a problem since about the last major content patch of Legion. In Shadowlands it had gotten worse. Since the last major content patch of DF it’s gotten considerably worse. I have gotten sharded sometimes up to 4 times in an hour that I have noticed.
The one good note about it, I had planted an epic seed and maxed it out and got tossed onto a different shard realm, but about 3 minutes later I was tossed back onto my original shard and was able to get my epic seed. Was ungrouped when this happened.
Since Jan 31st I started keeping a written log of all the known shardings I’ve gone through, if you’re interested or care.
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Rares at the Obsidian Citadel go poof on me a lot
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I think numbers help a lot. I’ve just been sharded about 3 times in the past 10 minutes.
While I barely noticed the sharding issues what I played of Legion or Shadowlands and most of Dragonflight, I have seriously begun to notice it this week. I know the most reports started happening after a “kill the zone” patch happened to Zaralek Caverns and Forbidden Reach. But to know this stems back almost 3 more expansions is wild!
It’s almost like the sharding code progressively deteriorates with each patch.
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My feeling is that while developers never read the forums, there is probably a low level employee who reads them and creates priority lists for their bosses to review and make decisions on.
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Jan 31, 2024:
@7:20pm - Grand Hunt on final boss, switched the hunt elsewhere and reset it.
Feb 2, 2024:
@12:00pm - Singing Fen Dreamseed
@12:03pm - Switched back (above dreamseed)
@5:39pm - Dragon Race in Fen
@6:15pm - We Have Returned wq (I think it was a wq anyway.)
@6:18pm - Switched again on above
Feb 2, 2024:
@7:00am - We Have Returned wq
@7:20am - Dragon Race: Ysera Invitational
@7:36am - Dreamseed (didn’t write down which one)
@12:03pm - Herbing. Killed npcs near the node. Node disappeared and all the npcs were alive, again. (no idea where I was, didn’t write it down, because I’m lazy like that. But was in the DF continent, not ED or ZC).
Feb 4, 2024:
@3:30pm - Forbidden Reach Dragon race (didn’t write down which)
@4:14pm - Sulphur Sprint Dragon Race
@8:01pm - Massive Magmashell Rare (I’m not sure if others completing Dragon Bane Keep cause the rare to just despawn or if we got sharded, but putting it in here anyway because it annoyed me)
Feb 6, 2024:
@4:40am - Herbing in Mount Hyjal (mobs reappeared at full hp and node disappeared)
@9:40am - Zaqali Elders WB while ina raid group with about 15 players (group was NOT inviting new players when this happened, was delisted prior to pull)
Feb 7, 2024:
@1:55pm - Reclaiming the Hold wq in Tyrhold.
Feb 8, 2024:
@9:30am - Fyrakk Assault (while fighting the disciple)
@9:44am - Dragon Bane Keep Assault (mid-assault, it completely reset, and myself and the 2 other non-grouped players got sent to the new shard and had to restart)
These are just the ones I wrote down the times. There were more I didn’t.
Had several events like Researchers Under Fire slowly sharding other people out until it was just me and my pocket healer. Then we were at 10/12 at that point and sharded to a realm w only 3/12 done. Happened several other times with other events, but I didn’t mark the times. But they were in the last month or so.
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Yea, trying to do that achievement in Legion was sort of fun, until we got to the point that every time we spawned a boss we were kicked off the shard. Almost ALL of the fights WE summoned the bosses for we ended up getting tossed to another shard. We should have completed the achievement, but the sharding ruined it. We tried going back the last 2 xpacs and same thing happened. So the Sentinax beacons (green, blue and purple qualitys) are just taking up bank space. Waiting for the day they fix sharding.
They should put a system in so that if you are ACTIVELY FIGHTING something, you stay on that shard until it is dead and looted. Thats the other problem we have. We’ll wipe out groups of npcs, and as soon as we go to loot we get kicked to another shard. It’s annoying having to loot multiple times mid-fight, every fight, we get into because we don’t know if we’ll be able to loot once we stomp these mobs to death. My pocket healer’s a beast! Half the time all I can do is move the live mobs so we can loot before we get forced onto another shard. Sometimes as soon as the first couple die, we’re on another realm. And those I don’t really keep track of because it happens so much.
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I can’t speak for how long it’s been there, I only experienced it this season, but before 10.2.5. I was on a toon in Warmode as well.
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From my understanding this is how sharding is supposed to work: When too many players are in an area, the game automatically creates a new “shard,” a copy of that area. Players entering the area will be placed on the new shard. (copy pasta from wowpedia page on Sharding)
And for a time, for myself, thats exactlly how it worked. But now it seems that its forcing people who have been in a shard longer to be pushed to a new shard. It seems there are no parameters that can be met to staying in a shard, anyone is fair game.
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Thanks for the response! 
If the other guy had ever come back to answer my question on when his incident happened we could probably determine if it’s always been there or a recent development.
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In all fairness, with that Legion achievement we started out in a guild raid group to do the bosses, and more and more players did start showing up as we slowly whittled them down. I’ve no doubt those people were forming parties and raids to down the bosses, as well. But considering how many hours and days we spent farming those beacons, just to get the epic beacons to spawn the bosses, we should not have been forced from that shard. It was our guild who spawned the bosses, we should have gotten credit for it. And, from our experience, the GM’s told us they could not help, that we just have to farm the beacons, again. Which we did. Until we ran through all the bosses on the list multiple times, to only get credit for a couple of them. (I haven’t looked at the achv in years, so I don’t remember how many I actually got credit for).
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Yeah I totally understand the frustration. Sharding was introduced in WoD if I’m not mistaken and it feels as though its a technology that requires maintenance and upkeep on the code to ensure the sphagetti’s don’t turn into worms and wiggle away with each patch/expansion. It feels like this might be the case. I’m no expert but that is my honest 2 cents.
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I was thinking it was Cataclysm. Because when flying got added to the world it was messed up to the point that my healer would ride around on my passenger mount and get dismounted to her death crossing between zones. Frequently. Sometimes inside a zone, between different sub-zones. And the constant phasing issues just randomly popping up. She still gets dismounted flying between zones like Mount Hyjal and Azshara. As recently as the last anniversary.
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That’s a phasing issue rather than a sharding issue. To this day I still don’t understand why it does that. I think being on the same quest completion/progress alleviates it a little but not much.
Phasing is based on quest progression usually changing the environment for the player.
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