Huge same. Also:
I’d love for something like this as a middle-ground solution for end-game content areas like Revendreth, etc. I don’t think the rest of Azeroth would regularly require it; Exile’s Reach might?
Funny enough in addition to being able to switch world in FFXIV, during the first few weeks of a patch any important zones gain instancing, which can be swapped between at an aetheryte in the zone. If you are unsure what instance you are in you can always just type /instance and it will tell you. This also goes away after a few weeks.
aaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAA 
I’ve not played much of FF14 (When I tried, I used my character name from WoW and people started making fun of me), but that sounds SUPER convenient; just having something actionable would be better than what we have right now.
I doubt removing shards will improve anything. I think sharing is a good thing for the game until they get realms balanced.
While I am not a fan I can understand the need for it during launch, but once realms stabilize they really should have it turned off. I would even agree to the aforementioned instance system where you have some control over where you end up.
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This happens every expansion and RPers have to remind Blizzard to fix RP realms.
It’s time.
Also thanks for the well-written post, OP.
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It would improve communities vastly for large-population realms by making it so their players could consistently see the same people regardless of which character they took to the same location, which might sound like a small step forward but it takes people in a direction that’s very, very important in my opinion.
“Balancing realms” is a near impossible-to-succeed task outside of self-moderating what servers a player wants to try and log into; the result is often an inconsequential environment and thus an unsocial one for the majority of sharded players’ experiences.
That’s why a lot of non-RPers go to realms like Emerald Dream or Wyrmrest Accord or Moon Guard; it’s expected to be a consistent environment in the capital cities like Orgrimmar or Stormwind.
I say expected because, unfortunately, it’s been left on for too long already. 
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CRZ was never a good idea. Nor was the idea of phasing. Had to deal with it on the Maw Quests earlier, because even after all this time it’s STILL screwed up. We had to go back to Oribos / Log out etc. This crap needs to go and I sure hope the developers who supported this feature, realize the damage they did to the game by defending this feature as an ‘improvement’.
To be sure, the ability to group based off battle-tags is great. But shards absolutely suck.
The simple fact is Tigole or Kalgan, I forget which it was; pointedly said they HATED shards in Everquest and that was why they designed WoW the way they had. It’s never done any good for the game, but it has detrimental and reduced quality heavily. It also killed the RP servers, which used to do amazing server-wide events. Now? Their capped by the raid size.
Despite it being forced down players throats and cited as an “improvement”, Players will never accept it. WoW was designed and different than other MMOs because it did not have shards. This was probably one of the first big blunders they made in the game.
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Thanks for posting this, Alison!! I really hope that a more lively Stormwind will return soon. 
It never really feels good logging on, running around Stormwind for a while to look for RP, and then realizing you’re on an empty shard. 
Personally, I just recently returned to WoW for the new expansion and it’s been a lot tougher finding an RP guild because I never seem to be on a shard with guilds recruiting. That, or most of the SW shards I get only have around 2-3 groups (with 4 or less players in those groups) RPing scattered throughout the city.
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The MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE genre is about sharing worlds with other players.
If I wanted to farm instances solo i’d play Monster Hunter
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The bitter irony is that unless a person has real-life friends, it’s very rare that they’ll find someone who they can add to their Battle-Tag contacts. 
I have a lot of respect for Jeff Kaplan’s work on WoW and I like to think that if he or many of the other devs still at Blizzard right now could go back in time and design a different system to solve these problems, they would.
For better or worse, though, I think we’ll have to send requests like this every year or two until they finally try something that isn’t as detrimental to community activity—Hoping at the very least that the community staff will share our sentiments with their peers and higher ups.
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And the ever tired and pathetic straw man is thrown up. Is that you Xanzul? No? You sure sound like him when you make such an illogical statement. It’s been said before a million times. No one said anything about not wanting to share the world with others. Players picked their servers for a reason.
It’s not unreasonable to want to see people from those servers, and be able to help them in the game. That’s how communities are built, not that I expect you’d understand that with such an attitude.
Just prior to SL pre-expac, I came back to WrA from a few months hiatus, swapped factions back to Horde and started a new RP guild. All was going well until the sharding hit. My recruits dropped off significantly because I like to find people and RP with them to ICly get them into guild. In Orgimmar during pre-expac, I went from seeing numerous people to 5-10. Now it’s down to 3-4 in the Valley of Honor. At peak times, it looks more like 4 AM. My recruiting has basically died and my new guild is suffering. Why am I bothering gearing my main for heroic CN if I can’t recruit raiders? Why am I bothering to build plots for RP if I can’t recruit RPers?
Alliance side looks pretty sparse as well. I tried to find out who was online in a specific guild to get a ginvite for an alt and couldn’t find them in the city or through /who (which is STILL BROKEN). I had to go spam Discord and I shouldn’t have to do that.
I currently have a friend on WrA that I specifically started leveling 2 Alliance alts to play with him and his guild. As of tonight, they’re considering moving to MG because they’re panicking over the way SW looks right now. How do you think they’re going to feel when they see MG’s SW looks the same way? Back to FFXIV and Conan Exiles? Most likely. And then why do I want to bother leveling my Alliance toons? My friend is gone, so that’s a big waste of time for me. Less hours online for your metrics.
When I look for RPers I know, I have to hope they’re in the same shard as I am. /who doesn’t work, so I can’t really check for them that way and I don’t have every single person I know on friend lists. I suppose I could check every few minutes with TRP, but that gets real old real fast.
I’ve also had disappearing nodes, disappearing bosses, disappearing RP, disappearing PvP encounters and all the frustration that comes with all of those.
Sharding needs to be turned off for WrA and MG entirely. ENTIRELY. If Blizz wants to kill off two high population servers, sharding is the way to do it. This has been discussed in the past and we shouldn’t have to revisit this every time an expac drops. Sure, a week is fine. A month is not. RP servers are not the same as other servers. We play differently. We recruit differently. Our priorities are different.
For some reference, I’ve been playing WoW since Vanilla 2006 and have been on WrA since 2 weeks after it opened. At the end of LK, I ran the biggest guild on the server for awhile. If the sharding keeps up and I find I can’t play WoW with friends, can’t recruit and can’t raid or RP, I’ll probably find something else to do, just like so many of the posters here will.
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What are you mad about?
I am saying MMORPGs are about playing with other people, in a shared open world.
I couldn’t care at all about cross realm, I care about people being crammed into private instanced versions of the world ruining the MMO experience.
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Walkup roleplay is the lifeblood of roleplay on roleplay servers. The more people who are out and about the healthier a server is.
When Blizzard shards our capital cities they look like ghost town. This will drive new players away and make it so we can’t find new people to play with.
This is poison for our communities and needs to be corrected.
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I appreciate the TLDR greatly
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It really does speak to how much this damages an RP community when I can be in Stormwind on a Saturday night and see at most half a dozen people in the various RP hubs of the city.
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As much as I would love to go back to the old ways of massively imbalanced server populations and factions Blizz wont ever revert back to that or even a similar system.
Too much time and resources spent over the years. Servers would have to close for sure and War Mode would be almost fully useless which means removing, rebalancing, or integrating pvp talents, which also wont happen.
I hate sharding as it makes the individual servers almost irrelevant but its def not going away. If anything they keep linking more servers together.
The sharding we’re discussing doesn’t even merge or link servers with each other, it’s present only in Stormwind and Orgrimmar on RP servers, and divvies people up into very low populated shards.
In every other zone of RP servers, barring current content, there is no sharding, RP servers aren’t linked with each other.
I dont think thats accurate as I have toons on WrA and only ever see people from other servers no matter where I go in game.
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