So I, and people like me, aren’t really against opt-in. You made some excellent points, and I’m not blind to them.
It’s clear to see you’ve had frustrating experiences with lag and node competition, and you’re definitely not alone.
Just for discussion’s sake, if you could have five hundred people in a city without lag (whether or not it’s actually possible), would you prefer that over a population cap?
No thanks, don’t want to deal with lag so Night Elves can naked RP.
Do they RP on Normal realms? I haven’t been on a Normal realm in a long time.
Not if I had the choice, even if there was no lag.
The reason being, all of those nameplates, or even all of the characters moving around tends to give me a headache when there’s just too many bodies moving around, I much prefer just seeing a few here-and-there and/or just a few NPCs, etc.
Drats, that’d be annoying. Sorry to hear that.
This is probably no help, but there is a way to turn off nameplates… Could be annoying to constantly change the settings, though, when you want the plates for combat.
I understand your position! For me, personally, I’d prefer the lag to the emptiness. So hopefully the developers have a compromise in mind.
Well, not so much the nameplates (I don’t have those shown for PCs), but the names moving around, all that text on the screen and all of those bodies moving around… probably some sort of data overflow problem that causes headaches, too much stuff going on at once or something.
I get similar headaches when I play new games, esp. newer games with complex UIs with lots of stuff going on until I get used to it.
And yeah, the only compromise I can think of, is optional sharding. FFXIV has it, it’s called World Visit. You can, at any time, choose what world you want to be on at any given time (though you retain a ‘home’ world, which has your player house and your FC (aka guild) but you can move freely between worlds on a datacenter anytime you want (though only in town). While in town, you can specify what world to go to, and you stay in that world and can go anywhere until you decide to go back home. That would be awesome.
I mean, we have War Mode… I don’t see why we couldn’t also have a world visit system because you can do that if you form a party with someone on another world, so I know the tech exists.
Suddenly this old thread is relevant again. I don’t want to copy / paste everything from the original post to make a new one; I think it still stands very well as its own point still.
Why do we need to go through this for EVERY expansion launch, now?
An oldie but a goodie! Kind of sad that the new threads about the current issue haven’t gotten anything like 170 likes even though sharding has been on longer now than it was at the time of this original post.
I think part of it was just the level of outreach we could muster at the time; being relentless and imploring support. I also, honestly, don’t have the patience to write big posts like the original one here, anymore. LMAO
Can’t they make that the unpaid interns’ task? “Get the coffee, turn the sharding off, through the darts at the ‘nerf of the week’ board”
Beg to differ.
i assure u that when it was written there wasnt any acrimony in my heart
1 Shadowlands expansion & 2 years later, tho . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Own it, it is what it is, and I think it’s valid to have.
ouch. op is correct but this was written in 2020. blizz please acknowledge your rpers. we’re the people who give you free advertising by commissioning & drawing our characters and posting them on twitter and stuff.
the issue feels so trite now 
They would need to connect more realms for shards to be reduced.
? where are you getting this from
Basic math.
Or they could just disable sharding without needing to connect realms.
As they have done so in the past.
On low pop servers you would be alone most of the time.
High pop is about right and medium ok, but full need to be split up and players caused that imbalance.