but without sharding what do you do when some streamer decides to take all his peons to the same place in the world?
even if we were all millionaires on 15k machines and blizzard had the best servers in the world… it’d peform like poop
i like the idea of a truely open world without sharding ; but i think its impossible with the current state of technology
The problem is that the servers couldn’t handle everything if they didn’t shard.
I’m looking at a week before Shadowlands dropped, where we weren’t forced into this. At least on RP servers, which are now taking more impact because the community is struggling now to even just see anyone. When I played on Proudmoore, it wasn’t such a big deal, but here, it is.
But the way you worded your response gives me all the detail I need, thanks.
Just once I would like to see an MMO buck even some of their streamers now and then… hey, any publicity is good publicity, RIGHT?! Let’s see how wild with emojis their chat goes when they get temp-banned for intentionally crashing a server like that…
It would be ideal. We were having multiple streamer raids per day on SW that would crash the server for anyone in the zone.
They tested removing this again on classic and it went horribly, horribly bad.
The only way it’ll work is if they open about 60-75 more servers and force people to transfer
You mean “Thanks for making SWC so laggy it’s unplayable* again”.
By Unplayable, I mean, “rip-your-hair-out-in-frustration-as-you-wait-10±seconds-to-turn-a-quest-in” unplayable.
You know what has consistently led to me quitting the game, even if I had plenty of enjoyable content available to me? The periods during which my server felt EMPTY, like towards the end of an expansion or at the end of and before the release of a major content patch.
I hate that most of the people I encounter organically in the world in the NEW ZONES that should be heavily populated are almost always not actually on my server, plus fading in and out of populated general chats greatly impacts your ability to down rares or have a chance at certain mount drops that require groups or special items.
TLDR: Sharding is game breaking, it shrinks down the game for many of us, prevents us from engaging with other players in a natural way, or meeting people by coincidence. It breaks my immersion and limits my experience in game, and I hate it.
Can’t we at least have an opt in/opt out approach? If servers are too full people can sign up to phase into a new shard with a controlled population.
What a good write-up
Automatic load balancing > your RP concern that can be fixed with a simple group invite.
thread done.
Are we playing on different servers? I’ve been to Stormwind a ton since they changed it last reset and its been fine.
First off, excellent post. Well-written and outlines a big problem I have with WoW.
This is the best compromise, I think. Or at least have RP realms exempt from Sharding.
if fortnite can have 100 ppl on the same place without lag ; why cant wow do it? 
anyways were stuck with sharding because as soon as you get 50+ ppl at the same spot using actions, everything start to get delayed
in the same vein i dont get why ashran is still a thing.
Games like Vindictus and Tera allows players to choose what shard “channel” to be in from a drop-down menu. I wonder why we don’t have something similar here.
One example I saw it at work was when some griefers were camping and killing a mob that was needed for a quest objective by people in Tera. When I got to that point, I simply changed my shard channel to one where I was the only one there with the mob. Once I was done, I changed my channel back to the one that was populated with players.
Given the quest design in SL, Blizz appears to want players to compete with one another for quest objectives, though I can’t say I understand why because it only breeds animosity and toxicity between players.
If they wanted players to coop with one another, then they wouldn’t design quests where other players’ presence is detrimental to your success. We have had such systems in place since Cataclysm but here we are, the 5th expansion later, and we’re rolling back on that.
Many quests’ items you pick up are not shared amongst players, some enemies do not share credit very well, or at all, some quests give you items with long cooldowns that must be used on enemies that only one player can do at a time, blah blah blah.
Signed - remove sharding when it’s not necessary for stability.
And what would you consider “necessary for stability”?
Because last few times I’d been in SWC on Moon Guard, it can take upwards of 10 seconds to turn a quest in because you click the button and nothing happens, or you hit your mount button and your character stands there for 2-3 seconds and then suddenly poof your mount appears and there’s no cast bar at all, etc etc.
I still think we need to have voluntary sharding. We have all the tech, let us choose whether or not we want to be somewhere there’s lots of players. I shouldn’t have to make friends with someone on a low-pop server to join their group just to get away from Lagwind City, and similarly out in the field, I don’t like having a World Quest that wants me to pick up 12 of something, there’s only 20 spawns and there’s a dozen players trying to pick them up.
I think that’s just the first few minutes of logging in. It takes a bit to fully load. Happens to me all the time, even away from cities.
I don’t think more sharding will make it better.
I see players all over the place on Stormrage. Like literally everywhere even run into some in obscure places in older content.
Sometimes when they’re moving away from me they disappear and even when I catch up, the player isn’t there anymore.
Is this what you mean by sharding??
Nope.
I didn’t have this problem during the Sharding Days of SWC and as soon as they turned it off, it started happening again.
And I’m talking about after I’d already been loaded up and I play from an SSD drive and I do not have this problem anywhere else in the world, at all.
Just face it, jamming 500 some people into one area is just a plain bad idea. It causes massive lag and it is just plain unpleasant.
I still don’t understand why you and people like you are against optional opt-in sharding. If you’re a roleplayer, surely you would want non-Roleplayers or people not currently RPing to go away so you guys could RP without a bunch of randos running around questing.
Is there some reason why roleplayers want to force everybody to have to deal with their lag or something? Is there some kind of value in seeing people without RP transmogs speedrunning around back and forth while you’re RPing or something?
Help me understand here, because I just don’t get why you want 500+ people in SWC. I just don’t.
And out in the field… the way they design quests in SL… having other players is, more often than not, a detriment because they take your enemies, they take your quest item objectives, and sometimes they take your gathering nodes. I can’t think of any sane person who would want these things to happen any more than it must.