I am very pleased to see this post. Blizzard can’t remove sharding from RP servers FAST enough. I don’t roleplay on a high populated server to not see anyone. We’re here because we want to be here and if we need less people, we’ll go to such servers. I hate logging on to not see anybody and missing out potential RP, cause they’re on a different shard. It’s why I play this game, the content is nice, but it’s not the full experience. And Zayn is right. RPers are the most loyal playerbase, we stick around when the game is at it’s worst (WoD and BfA?) and Blizzard just constantly treats us the most poorly.
11 Likes
You don’t think there’s a directional irony in advising people go to servers without these realm-community obstructing features only to turn those features on due to the vast number of people?
My sentiment, most of all, is that their “solution” has gone on for far too long; it’s at the point where it feels haphazard and logging on is dejecting.
6 Likes
I honestly don’t get why we’re still being so severely sharded after launch. The game has surely stabilized enough by now.
3 Likes
I have no idea what your point is - blizzard is stupid? Yes I agree. Having sharding is actually awesome for people who don’t like CRZ because they like farming rares and sharding makes that more possible, etc.
If they would make special servers that didn’t have any CRZ in old content like they do with RP servers and offered free transfers off the Moonguard, everyone could be happy.
From what I hear, Legion and MoP were the two exceptions to the “rule” where every expansion since Cata has been garbage… I was gone from WoW for 7 years since 5.0 prepatch so I wouldn’t know 100%… I honestly feel like they should have introduced UO style sandboxes in Cataclysm and just stopped churning out expansions, but then WoW probably would have gone F2P or shut down because of all the corporate horse ****… Steve Jobs gave his warning about executive meddling for a reason, too bad so many studios ignore it these days…
Stop replying to the throwaway forum alt guys.
2 Likes
And you’re not a throwaway forum alt yourself? Get to 60 hon! The irony… love how the sword is literally blocking your av’s face too!
I play this character I just have a lot of alts… too many. I’ve been posting on this character for ages now and anyone can find me in game if they so choose.
Well, not if I’m in Stormwind in its current state of sharding.
3 Likes
As someone who’s been playing MMOs since the early days, I can’t ever be against things like Sharding. MMOs die because of a chain reaction where the initial rush leads to them opening extra servers before the initial rush inevitably goes away. Then, people naturally move away over time. Now you have 10,000 players. That’s enough to still run the game, but they’re scattered across 100 servers.
Now every server appears empty, and more people start leaving the game because there’s no one left to play with.
Traditionally, the way developers would deal with this is by merging servers. This causes two further problems. People lose access to names and identities they were attached to, and it’s extremely bad press, essentially announcing to the gaming world “this game is dead”, so even more people jump ship.
Sharding means that this is never a problem.
That said, I agree that there are a ton of problems with Sharding (and Phasing), and I 100% agree with fixing those. At the very least, Sharding needs to be smarter. I’ve played other games with similar systems and I don’t notice them, but in World of Warcraft it fails to Shard me with people the game knows I know, which other games definitely prioritize.
For Phasing, when Party Sync was added, my friends and I were hoping that it would solve some of these problems, but the system was extremely confusing, and in the end we realized it didn’t actually fix the problem we had. The obvious solution to me (though I don’t know what obstacles there might be in them implementing it), is to either automatically put you in the group leader’s phase, or at least have a “join phase” button when you right-click the leader.
2 Likes
They suggested something like this in the wake of Nostalrius’ shutdown and WoW Classic was being petitioned en mass. It was written by J. Allen Brack in 2016 iirc.
So what can we do to capture that nostalgia of when WoW first launched? Over the years we have talked about a “pristine realm”. In essence that would turn off all leveling acceleration including character transfers, heirloom gear, character boosts, Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, WoW Token, and access to cross realm zones, as well as group finder. We aren’t sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community and it’s still an open topic of discussion.
I don’t think they should do that, if anything, they should make that the norm, though. For people just want their realms to be a community again, having to migrate elsewhere and forsake the one that used to exist just sounds absurd.
1 Like
Today my friend asked me to come help him with a raid boss that needed to be separated to kill. He invites me. I go over there. Zone in. First 3 bosses are dead. I run to where he says he’s at. He is not there. We spend the next 10 minutes zoning in and out trying to get into the same instance until we decided its probably the stupid shard crap and both hearth then run back. This should never, ever, ever happen in an mmo. Its ridiculous. Not to mention all the herbs that disappear as I run up to them, and the imbalance of factions in any given zone. It is just so terribly done. Its insane this is an issue in 2020 when you have games like GW2 being serverless.
3 Likes
That was an alternative to classic, they aren’t going to do that now.
And people who make characters on RP server with no interest in RP aren’t playing their for the community anyway from what I can see.
I was hoping that Moonguard would have had a queue and I could transfer all my characters off of there because I hate the lag in that city but I would again move them to another RP server to avoid CRZ. When I made my character on Moonguard back in MoP, it didn’t have the population/lag issues it has now.
An interesting fix that I’ve seen suggested is the idea of implementing multiple layers (like what they had in Classic WoW’s launch) that can be actively switched between every 15-30 minutes by players.
As an example: a player could be on Illidan and have access to 2+ versions of Revendreth depending on how many players are in that zone. By making the layers manually accessible, it’d alleviate a lot of the randomization that scorns people’s ability to search for friends.
Regardless, they need to iterate on the issue severely; one solution creates several new problems and, in my opinion, Sharding has more consequences than convenience. 
3 Likes
You’re speaking to things that aren’t relevant to the crux of our main issue here. People come to these servers for roleplay, or because the communities are generally nicer and people want to be part of that. Yes, Moon Guard and Wyrmrest Accord generally have nicer and more cohesive communities than other servers, and that’s because… there’s roleplay there and it creates a domino effect.
They already have this in sharding, wherein you automatically join your leader’s phase, it doesn’t help all that much. Communities are built on casual interactions, organic ones. Remember how much we all liked the Legion pre-patch event? Where everyone was killing the big rares, flying en mass from place to place? To the point where Blizzard tried to talk up the Shadowlands pre-patch by saying it would be similar? With sharding, that would have been impossible.
RP servers are for RP, people go to them for RP, or for the community RP creates. They sure as hell don’t go to them for competitive PVP or PVE. Sharding damages the entire reason people go to RP servers, therefore sharding is bad for said servers.
5 Likes
They don’t. A whole lot of them don’t. A lot of people are on RP servers to avoid CRZ because that is the only alternative for collectors in some cases.
I am currently leveling up a character on a deadish RP server. My character is lvl 40 now and I have yet to see a single person in the questing areas. Every single rare is up, most of whom I have never seen in my 10 plus years playing.
So there are people who come to a FULL server with no sharding created almost entirely for RP so that they can collect things more easily? And so this vague, big group of people deserve to have sharding in an RP server they deliberately chose so that they can make their collecting easier?
That’s such a contrarian mindset I assume anyone with it also says the sky is green.
The day I logged into a max level char to take care of a trouble maker and got into a different shard was the day WPvP died for me.
4 Likes
Stormwind during Mists of Pandaria had more players in it than it did during the entirety of BFA. I was there, having started on the server just before Patch 5.4 launched. If you want to avoid lag, you play on a low-medium population realm.
That shouldn’t mean playing on an RP server, too, if you want to avoid CRZ.
They should make an alternative for modern WoW, much the same as they did for Classic. Iteration is a necessity because the current idea doesn’t work.
2 Likes
They came BEFORE the server was full.
I feel like letting us choose what shard we are on, a feature common in older MMOs that adopted this technology decades ago, would go a long way to solving a lot of what feels broken about this. A simlple clickable [SHARD 4] at the top of our minimap is all it would take and suddenly there’s coordination with friends alongside a sense of permanence in the world again.
5 Likes