How Sharding is Antithetical to MMOs

Community General Discussion
183

I’m sorry but your whole post is a pretty bad take.

Stormwind is the city that new characters visit before going to Kul Tiras; it literally comes first and is thereby more accessible, let alone how Stormwind has had 14 years of groups establishing it as a hub. People shouldn’t be forced to move.

“If the Alliance had any decency, they’d X” is an absurd sentiment. This isn’t a partisan issue. Not only is it ignorant of how people actually do use Boralus in their own private groups, but it completely departs from the heart of this issue.

It’s not just Stormwind; Orgrimmar is sharded, too.

Furthermore, I very much believe Blizzard cares about RP servers because they’re the ones who established that our communities aren’t supposed to experience these systems in the first place. The lack of answers, disappointing as it is for me personally, is something that I assume comes from a lack of internal communication on their end.

2 Likes
184

Just my two cents/whining, but yeah. I’m on Moon Guard, and while I won’t deny that Goldshire here earns the horrid reputation it has; one can also find good RP here and there, and reading TRPs can at least kill time while waiting to queue for a dungeon.

Now, for me, Goldshire is desolate. Empty. Maybe one or two people here and there. But because of this sharding, RP of ANY sort is out the window, with a lack of people to interact with.

Which, isn’t part of MMO “multiplayer”? If I don’t have other players to interact with, why am I paying per month when I could be playing a single-player game?

185

World

  • The capitals [Stormwind] and [Orgrimmar] will once again no longer shard on Role Playing realms.
6 Likes
186

Yay! Glad they reverted it.

187

oh my gODDD :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes:

Thank you SO MUCH for sharing that. Idk how to express in words how happy I am to know it’s going away from RP realms; there’s a little disappointment that no one who works at Blizzard responded to the threads on here or Twitter, but I’m still EXTREMELY relieved.

I know they at least saw this thread because they changed its name, so maybe they’ll take and debate the feedback regarding Sharding as a system in general quietly :sweat:

3 Likes
188

Sharding in MMO have always existed. Either the population is so low you can’t tell or the game does a good job hiding the sharding. (sometimes not so good)

189

Source, for anyone who want to read it:
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/world-of-warcraft/23580183/hotfixes-december-7-2020

Glad blizz fixed this!

3 Likes
190

Because in 2020, an MMO developer with billions of dollars should be able to produce hardware that’s capable of housing all its players without having to load balance in the game.

Load balancing usually takes place seamlessly across datacenters not in the game itself. Blizzard literally does sharding for this reason and this reason only.

191

Only on roleplay realms? I mean, I’m glad to see that since I only play RP realms, but they really should consider the non-RPers dealing with the sharding issue when they want to meet up with their friends.

192

Yes, historically the no-crz, no sharding has only applied to roleplay realms. I know a ton of people would like to see it go away everywhere, me included, but at least they reverted the change on RP realms. I think if the topic continues to come up, maybe they’ll look at reverting it everywhere?

193

Welp, time to start calling it Lagwind City again.

I remember before the Pre-patch, where I went there once for a quest, I think it was one of the BfA quest lines and I would click an NPC, and wait 5 seconds, then click the Accept button and… nothing.

Close the dialogue, open the thing again, nothing…

Log out, log back in and there’s the quest. And then when I went to turn it in, I’d click Complete Quest and… it takes 15+ seconds for it to actually go through.

And this is all caused by the hundreds of people sitting in SWC doing nothing but sitting around at tables in the inns (as if the dozens of people in Goldshire wasn’t enough…) doing jack-all but just sitting at the tables or slowly walking around town.

If you’re going to remove sharding, then give us portals to Ironforge so I can at least use the fricken AH, and put major quest objectives there instead of SWC so I don’t have to deal with the insane lag.

And before someone says “Why did you roll on Moon Guard?” I’ll explain that:

Way back during Vanilla, when I first started to play WoW, I had trouble settling down on a character because the leveling experience was so terrible, it was hard to feel the motivation to get past Lv15-ish. Then, one day, I re-united with an old friend I fell out of contact with, and apparently they had a Lv45 character and they asked me to come to Moon Guard so I could play with them.

And so, I did. I arrived at Level 50 a couple weeks after TBC launched, and away I went. During that time I made a few other characters, and by the time Wrath came out, a family member began to play and they, too, rolled on Moon Guard, and we had started a guild together.

This was back before the massive lag and explosion in RP popularity would rear its ugly head, back before CRZ was a thing, back before they started dumping ALL RP realms onto one single server.

Nowadays, the Lag in Lagwind City is unplayable, and I was wondering why after the launch of the Prepatch I was actually able to go to SWC despite the new quest thingies and actually get crap done… now I know why.

And apparently that won’t be a thing anymore. We’re gonna be back to Lagwind City.

I would move from Moon Guard, but Blizz’s stance on moving multiple characters and a guild is just asinine; it would take hundreds of dollars for us to move the guild and all of our characters off of Moon Guard (something I’ve been wanting to do for years for other reasons, the junk in Goldshire being one of the bigger reasons).

Either that, or give us the ability to visit another server willingly, or maybe an RP-On and RP-Off mode. RP-Off would shard us to Non-RP servers so we can play the game, and RP-On would send us to Lagwind City for the people who actually want to do that (I suppose Lag is no issue if all you’re doing is sitting at a table talking).

194

Your TLDR needs a TLDR.

2 Likes
195

Thank you, Blizz! It’s really appreciated by the RP community!

196

Thank you Blizz :purple_heart:

197

This post aged well.

https://i.imgur.com/vkGF7n7.png

Thanks for turning off the sharding in the capitals!

2 Likes
198

Sharding is awful for an MMO. Only the mind of someone who doesn’t play this game could ever come up with an idea so stupid and think it was an acceptable solution to a non-existent problem.

Oh and let’s point something else out while I’ve got your attention.

“We don’t have enough players!!!” -> Cross-realm worlds

“We have too many players!!!” -> Sharding

Phasing is also a problem. Ever since wrath started phasing has always sucked. Why the hell can’t you tell a story without phasing the world? You are creating so many invisible shards, phases, and layers that it’s damn near impossible to know where you are. There could be 100 people standing in the exact same spot as you and you would never know it. How is that even remotely acceptable in an mmo?

199

Nope, sharding works fine. Even if it has a few warts to it, it’s better than the alternative. I’ll happily take zones with a normal player saturation, than deal with overly packed zones.

From a technical standpoint, on the server and netcode side of things, it also reduces a ton of lag related problems as well. Relevancy can be a PITA for netcode when you have hundreds of players around.

200

it stopped being a MMORPG ages ago and has morphed into a live service since Ions master plan has been enacted.

201

I’m curious as to how this works, then. For a couple days, I only saw TWO people in my phase in my covenant sanctum (from other servers, none from WRA). My friend had 3-4. Then you get into certain zones and it’s so overpopulated with people from other realms that people are literally fighting to loot certain quest items that only one person can get.

It seems like it’s working against us to force environments that are overcrowded for population, but reducing the players you see on your own server. I literally never see but maybe 1-2 people when I’m questing/doing dailies from WRA. No friends. No guildies. No one that we used to walk up and rp with.

Forcing servers together like this instead of linking more only creates environments that are toxic and makes players feel less obligated to actually do anything together or play nice. What are the consequences? You don’t see them 5 minutes later or ever again.

202

Thanks for your anecdotal evidence. In my playing, I see dozens of players per session while doing WQs. At each WQ, it’s not uncommon to have 5-10 people running around doing objectives.

So what? Who said you’re entitled to help or ever seeing them again. Same crap happened before sharding as well. You’re looking through the goggles of nostalgia and optimism. The same players that didn’t help you, from another server, would be the same players that wouldn’t help you if they were on your server.