Hey guys, I play on Illidan, one of the most horde dominated servers in the game, yet often times I can’t find any other players from Illidan around me but instead see 90% alliance from KT, Sarg and other top pop alliance servers. Other times there is not a single alliance in sight and is just a game full of horde. I have literally zero clue what the logic is behind any of this and was wondering if anyone had an inkling of an idea how phasing works and how you could change phases if you wanted to?
Nobody knows, its all magic. I too most of the times surrounded by Alliance when I turn on WM.
You used to be able to change the shard you were on by joining another player’s party (if they were on a different shard). But im pretty sure you cant do it anymore
This is Sharding. Phazing is when the game world changes depending on where you are in a story and Layering is a little different.
Servers don’t actually mean much any more. All they really are is a log in point so that Blizz doesn’t have to actually merge servers and deal with players losing their names. The only thing that really keeps a server a server is the auction house and Mythic raiding restrictions.
What happens is server side the game will start an instance of a zone called a Shard. It will fill that instance with players from just about all servers in a time zone. When that shard starts to get full, it opens up a new one. If two shards start to get low it will pull from one to the other or merge them. This is why when you are in large groups doing something like waiting for a rare, sometimes players will just disappear or appear out of nowhere.
Basically the game world functions like everyone is on one big megaserver but it keeps the illusion of there being individual servers so that Blizz doesn’t have the bad PR of actually merging all the servers into one big megaserver.
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Thanks for the in depth reply, I guess we can just chalk it up to bad luck if you get a full ally server or full horde server, still super annoying but I guess that’s that.
are you playing with warmode on? makes a huge difference in the answer you get
Pretty much. The sharding system is supposed to try and keep the factions as even as possible, especially in Warmode, but it has never really been very good at doing it.
I’m the opposite. Turn wm on and NO alliance cept for zerg campers in the maw. Turn wm off and I’m suddenly the only hordelet. I get that ally doesn’t enable wm as much as horde but sheesh.
As an Alliance player, I started questing in SL and I started to noticed that I saw very few Alliance players but a ton of players from the Horde.
In my opinion this phasing/sharding stuff is bad not only for me as a solo player but I find it almost impossible to get a group. I cannot group up with the Horde, hell I cannot even talk to them for the most part.
We are both doing the content and we are actually competing for it. If I tag the target, they get no credit for it and if They tag it, I get no credit. This is also bad.
I have no idea where this will go but I am not a big fan of phasing/sharding.
It’s due to sharding (which is poorly implemented). Basically Blizzard divides the game into a ton of cross realm servers within a server. The fact you’re on Illidan no longer matters. It places you in an instance with just about anyone, including other faction to “balance”. Another thing that ruined server pride/community.
It didn’t ruin server pride/community.
Classic is <----that way