It for sure is, but the point is made somewhat moot by the fact that sharding is active in current content anyway. The crux of this post is just about Stormwind and Orgrimmar being sharded on RP servers, which completely hamstrings the entire purpose of those servers.
They even added sharding in Icecrown for the pre-patch, and as far as I know have already removed that, but it remains in Stormwind and Orgrimmar, when it shouldn’t.
Honestly, I feel like this issue is as much a problem for normal servers as it might be for RPers; there’s evidence to that in how Classic players reacted to the idea of temporary Sharding / Layering. They saw it as an unfortunate necessity but really lauded its removal.
It’s as much a plea to iterate on the system in the future as it is a plea to disable it where it isn’t supposed to be active presently. 
Do you want massive lag or constant server crashes?
This is the price we pay and I will happily pay it every time.
Honestly, yeah.
In the lead up to Shadowlands everyone was making memes about their queue times to come. I was fully prepared for it, even knowing that I’d be going into a sharded Oribos regardless of how poorly the authentication process might perform.
We survived server lag in 2008, we can survive it in 2020.
This is the most comprehensive and well written article on this subject.
I find it disheartening that I get invited to groups every day and then I cannot play with them. It’s a lost cause and not at all in the spirit of this game.
We have more connections on these forums than in the game.
I joined a new guild the other day not knowing what to expect. They have welcomed me with open arms, chat with me all the time in guild chat. Crafted and gave me 151 gear for this Mage and encouraged me to tackle the tough content.
But sometimes I need a little help with something and I get frustrated that I cannot ask anyone for help. I cannot group with anybody anyway.
The difference is striking. Had a small group in Oribos and the other members were going to help me with that Torghast quest I need to finish to get my Covenant started. 3 days now and still no success on it. As soon as we all plummeted, together into the Maw I could no longer see them and they could not see me or each other. We had to abandon the attempt.
I don’t really care about the content. I want to play with my new friends and I cannot.
Hopefully the Monday maintenance will fix things.
A list of what needs to be removed to make the game better in my opinion.
1: Sharding in any shape or form need to be remove.
2: Better stronger servers, stop being greedy goblin and make servers who can handle 100 vs 100 world PVP like some private server EASILY can handle.
3: Level and Ilvl scaling, all of it remove it.
4: Stats Squish, level squish and ilvl squish, everything need to be unsquish since the old content original stats made the whole leveling process way more enjoyable since there was a clear noticeable power progression which no longer exist. (I know that will never happen though but MoP private servers exist for a reason.)
5: Mythic difficulty for raiding. Since they balance the game way too much around them due to the 1% of serious mythic raider who play WoW for a living.
6: Mythic+ I just hate this speedrun garbage its bad for the game in general and since they added Mythic+ this go go go rush mentality only became worst.
7: LFR remove it the gear it drops is literal trash anyway its worthless and the fight are brain dead mode, remove it or make it more worthwhile and somewhat more challenging like it was back in Cata or MOP one of the two.
8: Time gating in any shape or form, just stop with the time gating, if the content is ready to go then release it all in one go, do that or make time gating more fun like what the Isle of Thunder was.
Wait Shadowlands didn’t have these issues at launch? A friend of mine has been keeping me entertained by posting a lot of pictures from various forums across the internet during the launch week, it seemed like some EU servers just couldn’t play the game for a solid 4 days, and I seem to recall the posts of bigger NA servers having these problems for days, so what did sharding even solve?
It was only like 6 servers which are extremely full. The ones Blizz was offering free server transfers from.
So do they just not matter then? It didn’t fix the problem for those 6 servers in question. There has to be a better solution then this if 6 servers just can’t play the game for multiple days.
Its because the population is just so sheer massive. Many people were coming back for since they left at the very start of BfA. Servers like Area-52 just have to many people on them, thus the server transfer options for free.
Other than those few servers everyone else had a smooth launch I didnt DC or see any lag on Whisperwind or Dalaran.
If they aren’t going to remove sharding they should at least remove it from the realms they said they were going to do it to leave unsharded originally - RP realms.
To further exemplify the issue: Here’s a screenshot of Stormwind City for me right now.
https://i.imgur.com/otOAiyJ.jpg
The blue dots are players who have the RP Profile addon installed, TRP: 3; a feature (that’s disable-able, of course) is being able to use the in-game map to see where other players who RP are clustered at.
According to that reference, there should be players in front of the building at my right, by the fountain to my left, and inside the Cathedral itself (I checked, it’s empty for me).
Naturally, it’s really disappointing (re: frustrating) to know how many players that I can’t see; it’s even more disappointing knowing that most of those parties probably can’t even see each other.
Meanwhile, I’m also online in the same location, in a different shard that has more people, and can’t see her.
GUH.
It’s actually awful—Sometimes there are people recruiting for their RP guilds in dead-empty shards and I wonder if they know how few people are going to hear them.
It’s annoying enough that blizzard said they will not shard the RP Realms at all other than the current day content. I get it for Pre-patch as it was laggy so much but I would have rather delt with that than deal with it still being sharded after such event was over with and we’re in December coming up on the third week for the expansion where M+ and PVP season starts. There is no reason for this still be sharded.
I mean even with sharding is there any reason for it to be as devoid of people as it is? I can maybe see the argument for it on pre-patch but looking at that picture most of those people would be loaded in just fine before this system was implemented, heck I remember seeing my server during of old expansions with no issue at all with more people then are present there.
World of Warcraft is a very old game and no matter how much effort they put in there will never be any good sense of stability during very high traffic events, be it community or game events like patches and such. I barely played SWToR, but they implemented a very good system for this on that game; you select your own shard.
Have a dropdown menu stuck to the minimap, click on it and have it offer a handful of instances, IE: (Moon-guard(1), Moon-guard(2)). If you’re playing the normal game just switch to a lower populated shard. If you’re trying to host a large server event (ToA, Flames of War etc.) tell everyone you’re on shard 1. We already do something similar with joining peoples’ groups, but this way is far more user friendly for multiple levels of play.
There really isn’t. Before Shadowlands’ pre-patch there were far more people in the whole city and, because it’s an RP server, it WASN’T sharded at all; people are split off like this entirely because Blizzard has left it on for too long. 
I’d rather lag than be sharded on my RP realm.