Having sharding in classic will destroy this franchise

[Shimy-khadgar]

Can’t wait to have sharding in the starter zones, it’s going to be fantastic… in the starting zones.

[Nescience-tichondrius]

Blizz announcing that sharding will not be used would be a great way to weed out the tourists to classic wow, allowing them to use less realms at start and leading to less realm merges in the end

[Travellus-dalaran]

@Ohshiftson-area-52

@Travellus-dalaran

I see you used selective quoting to avoid addressing my point.

Not really. I responded to the sentence that summarized your point best.

You’re exactly right when you say we can’t trust Blizzard period. We don’t want them adding ANYTHING. We have to tell Blizzard not to add sharding because we don’t trust them. If we trusted Blizzard, we’d be able to rest easy knowing Blizzard won’t add sharding.

@Nescience-tichondrius

I don’t know what to laugh at more, the fact that you believe there was an achievements system in vanilla, or that your still trying to talk on a classic forum at all.

There are titles you can only earn in vanilla that achievements were added for after the fact.

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/moon-guard/eloraell/achievements/legacy/player-vs-player

Please learn what you’re talking about.

You are well aware that is nowhere close to what I stated, which was that if you don’t trust Blizzard, why do you still intend to play the game.

[Sidearm-exodar (Sidearm)]

Thanks for the link, and the added quote for balance. FYI The blue post you linked was after the one I linked from 2016, and does discuss some level of zone specificity added, but no evidence of complete disablement.

Your linked post actually strengthens my nagging suspicion that they will not totally abandon sharding after launch.

h ttps://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20758556541?page=9#165

So, we’ve recently applied a hotfix that should disable realm sharding in the vast majority of the outdoor world on RP realms. That includes Kalimdor, the Eastern Kingdoms, Northrend, Pandaria, Outland, Draenor, and all related sub-zones.
…
Similarly, when the game itself points players toward a specific area of the non-Legion world (such as for a holiday event or new patch content), we may temporarily re-enable sharding in that area until things settle down.
…
There are still limits, of course; we don’t want playing on an RP realm to mean you can’t properly experience core game content due to low FPS or heavy input lag.
…
Our goal is to follow the general rule of thumb that RP realms do not shard, except in current-expansion zones, or when temporarily necessary to support gameplay.

Hopefully I end up being wrong, and sharding is temporary and insignificant.

[Nescience-tichondrius]

I unfortunately doubt that it will be temporary or insignificant

[Travellus-dalaran]

I unfortunately doubt that it will be temporary or insignificant

If you believe Blizzard will ruin the game, then go find another game.

[Nescience-tichondrius]

Because of it being a population control algorithm, it will fracture the experience of the most memorable events that we want to relive on classic. Such as city raids on stormwind or orgrimmar, doom lord raids on cities, basically any large scale player assault open world.

Imagine if a game like fortnite decided to add sharding (obviously they don’t need to). You get down to the final 30 players, and if they are all too close together then half of them phase into a different game where someone shows up suddenly next to them and just blasts them in the head.

[Eloraell-moon-guard]

Even in Classic, they’re not going to rip the Sharding code out branch and root. They can’t because its running on their modern cloud infrastructure and sharding is integrated at a lower part of the stack.

That said, if there are 41 world zones in Classic plus 6 cities (and whatever instances) and all 47 toggles are switched to “Sharding: Disabled”, its the same effect.

The quote above is relating to Retail where Sharding and game performance took a front row seat vs the community. Which is why we all want Classic, and they’ve said they understand that completely.

Once its turned off I think they’re going to avoid using sharding because they know they’d have mass walkouts if they sharded the AQ event or whatever.

[Nescience-tichondrius]

Currently trying to do both, prevent them from doing so, and searching for the one.

[Ohshiftson-area-52]

You are well aware that is nowhere close to what I stated, which was that if you don’t trust Blizzard, why do you still intend to play the game.

You don’t have to trust a company to like its products.

I don’t trust Blizzard to make the right decisions, but that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy the products they make if they do make the right decisions, nor does it mean I won’t implore them to make the right decisions.

If you believe Blizzard will ruin the game, then go find another game.

That’s exactly what some people have said they will do. Until Classic is out, we won’t know for sure, so telling people to go find another game before the one we’re interested in is even out is pretty asinine.

Stop trolling.

[anon94200297]

And that philosophy is apparently to set no actual limits, leaving sharding throughout the game in perpetuity open as an option.

No it isn’t. They said they know its antithetical to the server community of Classic. I’m sure if they could find a better way to do it without sharding, they will. Which is why I’m interested to hear from them. But since none of us can come up with it, we’re working on the basis that their investigation came out the same.

No-one arguing against sharding (including yourself) is actually proposing something that will meet their stated diametric goals of a smooth launch and long term stability without sharding. They’re literally just saying “I’m going to have a tantrum if the server doesn’t burn”.

Have they set any definitive limits for sharding? NO, they have not.

Have they consistently REFUSED to set ANY definitive limits? YES, they have.

Have they stated that they number of servers will be “on the lean side”? There have been claims that they have, although I have not seen any links to confirm that claim.

If they do plan to keep the number of servers “on the lean side”, what exactly is “on the lean side”?

Even if they estimate the population stabilizing at 100,000, that would require at least 34 servers to keep server caps at 3,000, assuming an even distribution of players.

I suspect that the stable population will far exceed 100,000 players, which would require even more servers to maintain that vanilla pop cap of 3,000.

I doubt that they would consider even 50 servers to be “on the lean side”, but that is just my opinion.

I am concerned that they will not have enough servers to handle the number of players without extensive use of sharding, especially since even retail cannot handle more than 50 or so players in a given area without problems. If it were possible to simply raise the shard populations to 200-500 players, why would they not have done that for retail?

If they can shard that means they have the overhead to add REALMS.

Realms aren’t tied to single machines. This is why you see clusters going down instead of 1 server at a time. A server isn’t a realm.

Today’s server structure is setup to distribute load on a grid/mesh system. Your HDD on your computer can store more than 1 file and making new or copying files does not interfere with your current files provided you have the HDD space.

New REALMS can be brought up quickly with a few clicks. If there is infrastructure to shard for population, that means they have overhead to add additional realms.

Now the catch here would be latency, depending on where their sharding servers are located. They could effectively bring up new “realms” quickly in, say, US Central on a shard farm in US East, then when they add more hardware to Central, move the database during maintenance. Nothing changes on your end.

I think they will have realms pop up in batches as realms begin to fill in various time zones.

I wouldn’t worry about REALMS. They obviously have the hardware in place to handle the player loads and if they can pop up shards instantly then they can create new realms instantly.

I don’t work for Blizz but I’ve shipped games on PS4, Xbox and PC. Netcode wasn’t my number 1 specialty (that’s physics and AI) but just looking at how their sharding system dynamically creates shards and seeing as they have the overhead for load distribution, I would be incredibly shocked they don’t have systems and plans in place to handle an influx of players. You see all those REALMS during the Blizzcon demo? Don’t think every one of those is a “server” and don’t think they had to do much to get them up and running.

Sharding isn’t so much used for realm loads as much as it is for overcrowding a zone and players not being able to get anything done.

They have to strike a balance between overcrowded and crowded enough that spawns MIGHT be a problem occasionally in the starting areas/early play time.

[Dimitriy-steamwheedle-cartel]

You’re not going to make tons of friends at the start. People have grown older and miserable.

Well, aren’t you a ray of sunshine.

[Fesz-cenarius]

Being able to “spin up” new realms easily does not mean they will “spin up” those additional realms.

I’m not saying that they won’t, only that we do NOT know that they will. We can HOPE that they will “spin up” additional realms, but that is all we can do.

Additionally, “spinning up” new realms does not address realms that may already be excessively overpopulated.

[Wickess-emerald-dream]

The only limitations they’ve explicitly given was no sharding around world bosses.

[Priapis-proudmoore (Priapis)]

And rare resources that sharding would cause economic instability.

[Gloryholadin-elune (Gloryholadin)]

If you like sharding and playing the game that way, there is this game that has been using it for quite some time now. I believe its current expansion is called battle for azeroth

This is a pretty naive statement. Nothing about Retail is Classic or Vanilla. Sharding may make the launch and implementation “different” than Vanilla, but sorry - not everyone who has been championing Classic for years agrees that they want to RELIVE staring at server queues on overpopulated servers for an hour+ a night during peak times. Nor does everyone who played on private servers necessarily want to re-experience what its like to have massive populations with one set of resources (mobs, herb/ore, etc), without even some kind of modified dynamic respawn (hell, and even with, some of those launches were CHAOTIC)

Nor does everyone agree that, once the “hype” dies down, without sharding, we want to suffer through several (and let’s be honest, people – it will be several) servers with then-lower populations which will impact both the ability to have multiple guilds running end-game content, and the server economy.

I think we all understand that we don’t all agree on sharding – that should be clear – but don’t just tell people to go back to Retail. Cause guess what? The likelihood is that sharding will end up in Classic, in some form, and unless you want the opposite faction (in the sharding issue’s) response to just be “well, don’t play then, har har”, we should all just stop this pissing contest.

[Cauchy-bloodhoof]

I’m personally fine with sharding. Here’s why:

Guild Wars 2 has multiple maps for zones that have a high population. As far as I can tell, it only has positive impact on solo play. It greatly reduced the wait time for respawns when a lot of people were questing in the same area. Things got a little messy the first time I tried to group up with folks on a differnt instance of that map, but once I got the hang of it, it was fine.

Since WoW has a first-come-first serve model when it comes to tagging mobs and resource nodes, It’ll allow for more people to progress through the earlier levels, and have a more fun time doing so.

Edit: Let’s not forget stupid log-in queues we’d face whenver new content launched.

[Cauchy-bloodhoof]

Minimal impact, at most.

[Cauchy-bloodhoof]

I orginally rolled on Shattered Hand. It had a relatively high population, and I’d be slapped with log-in queues whenever new content launched. The server was always Horde-heavy. Once Blizzard started offering free server transfers, Alliance players jumped ship to more ballanced (or more Alliance-heavy) servers.

Sharding could help stabilize the server populations so we won’t have a crazy mass-exodus like I’ve experienced in the past.

[Hotchickirl-zuljin]

Your view is through a significant amount of squinting. Blizzard is going through meticulous detail to simulate the original experience of vanilla. This includes things like phased content patches, batching, etc.

Getting hung up on something like phasing in the beginning of the release is pointless. Of the 1000+ people trying to kill the same boar that you are, you will literally remember none of them. You will have no positive interactions with any of them, only negative as you all fight over scraps. It’s pointless to argue over this small item that after the first week will be forgotten.