They may have been pulled over by friends, which is possible. If you mean in Shadowlands, then that’s current content and is currently sharded and cross realm and will remain so for the expansion, same as Kul Tiras and Zandalar were.
If it’s in a capital then they were pulled over by friends.
The expansion just released. Sharding will go away. Just be patient. Surely the majority of you wouldn’t wax poetic about being Blizzard’s most loyal fan if a few weeks of sharding is enough to make you quit the game forever. I also can’t help but notice that plenty of people in this thread are providing decent enough temporary solutions but they get shouted down by whiners saying they shouldn’t “have to make those concessions.” Is RP important to you or not?
Sharding prevents server crashes and realm ques, they are good.
It’s one thing to shard temporarily for a (rather poorly planned) prepatch event, but another to ignore a good chunk of the player base and delay fixing a glaring issue in the face of the fact that everyone is now scattered about the current content zones now that they’re released instead of being huddled into one city.
As for people saying “just move to other places”, literally all cities that could be hubs are also experiencing the issue. That includes places such as Boralus.
We shouldn’t have to randomly ask for party invites just to see people to interact with them for roleplay, let alone just for anything at all in these afflicted zones.
I’m also miffed that they dismissed a ticket on this issue that a friend of mine submitted as being a non-issue since they didn’t personally see the issue themselves I guess, but here we are with a very charged thread about the issue. That should be enough to show there is an issue alongside the evidence of just… Going into the city knowing there should be dozens of people but you see a whopping seven or so.
Oh, additionally, I’ve seen the issue firsthand. Ever interact with someone only for them to randomly disappear mid sentence? Yeah.
Mad? No, not mad.
Dismayed perhaps to see you trying to shift the discussion into a dialogue about me.
Far more accurate I think would be to say I am weary, and quite tired to see the same tired and false excuses and platitudes trotted out by apologists, who for some baffling reason feel the need to excuse and defend what was always a significant reduction in the quality of the game. The game and the RP servers were better without CRZ. If a concern on there being too small a number of players on the servers was truly the issue, then some servers should of been merged.
Were you there when they added this feature? It’s not a crack or slam on you but rather an honest query. I ask because plenty of veteran forum-posters know all of the things Blizzard did to try and spin what was a detrimental addition to the game in a positive light. Here we are 8 years later, and guess what? It’s still coming up, like threads about playable High Elves were until recently.
As a feature, I suspect it will continue to come up and be looked on with extreme contempt by most players; for as long as the game lasts, or until the new-bloods at Blizzard undo what should of never been added to the game.
I’m happy to wait for things if I have an estimation of how long I need to be patient for; unfortunately, there still hasn’t been a confirmation of when it’s going away. Every person that I know who’s reached out asking for that information has been left on read. Beyond the lack of transparency there, I think that the system itself has a bad effect on the entirety of WoW, not just RP servers.
Server merges are probably the best longterm solution, but they probably do have to continue doing them in the battlegrouping-style that they’ve done thus far. I don’t think sharding is a requisite alongside that, though.
We already have massive imbalance across many normal realms and I think that exists in part because systems like Sharding distribute people away from each other in end-game content areas; they don’t often physically see or realize the weight of their own server so it doesn’t occur to them that they might prefer moving to a Medium or even a Low population realm. Factions and War Mode are already hotly debated tbh. 
sharding makes me HATE this f’ing game and rage so hard. stupid devs, bad company, losers who cant make a decent game and bandaid problems rather than be decent people and create something worthwhile. Ion is a loser.
This is a huge mood but we really should be civil; the devs work hard and, tbh, I like how Ion tries to deep dive a lot of design decisions in interviews and Q&As where they come up. It’d be interesting if we got a discussion like like that for solutions on this topic too, but that’s a pipe dream I think. 
I pray they’ll resolve this. Or give us a way to flag for rp sharding (like war mode) for our respective servers. This is making finding anyone difficult.
they can shard and save money on servers or spend infinite amounts of money and still have the same issues because theres jsut too many ppl 
put yourself in their shoes. theres a solution they like more than the other.
i agree that it sucks… but realistically you cant ask them to reinvent the internet
its either aggressive sharding or 3-5 seconds delays on every action…
*what they could do is smarter sharding. make sure ppl in the same guild are on the same shard. no more 2 guildies in the same spot that cant see each other.
This isn’t asking them to reinvent the internet.
WoW is a 16 year old game that survived most of its lifespan and its peak in terms of “overpopulation” without Sharding; I was there in Shattrath, in Northrend Dalaran, and in Classic (albeit at age 9 lul). Was it laggy in those cities? Yes. Was it unplayable? No.
Sharding and its iteration in Classic, Layering, is something that can be MAYBE be consigned during an initial bump period for some realms and most have already moved past that period already. Its only purpose going forward is to divide players and disrupt any chances for social experiences.
Instead of “smarter” sharding, they should do something that’s smarter than Sharding.
I feel bad for people here in Moon Guard who can’t even RP in SW now. Time to turn it off already. Plus I like seeing people in the world. Kinda lame seeing like 5 people in a zone forever because of Sharding. /:
What’s even more annoying is that Blizzard helped to create this problem in the first place, by making other cities less important or convenient, forcing everything to flock to two cities for everything and thus creating a need for sharding during major events. They keep heaping more and more importance onto Orgrimmar and Stormwind while removing things from cities that used to have them, or could have them.
Their servers can’t handle too many players in one place, but they keep piling all the things players need into one place, every pre-patch, and then we pay the price for it.
And they seem to be getting harsher with the sharding too, no clue what they were thinking this time, it wasn’t nearly this bad in prior pre-patches. If the Square has even a handful of people in it, guaranteed Mage Quarter will be totally empty, and vice versa.
True, but then again, a lot of things WoW does are antithetical to MMOs.
I’m going to repost what I wrote in another thread but I really hate sharding, it isn’t just RP that is affected but RP tends to suffer the most from it.
Back in BfA doing an invasion in warmode.
I’m in a 5man group trying to complete the invasion objectives but an Alliance raid is camping the area. So using Blizzard’s logic of confronting a PVP situation with PVP, we formed our own counter raid to address the Alliance raid only to get moved to an empty shard with no Alliance raid to fight. Yet I still can’t do my objectives since I’m in a raid now so our original group drops raid and reform a new 5man only to get dunked back into the shard with the Alliance raid hahahaha!!! So we reformed with a new raid only to get moved back to the shard with no Alliance raid AND PVP DIDN’T HAPPEN
It’s honestly hilarious when you think about it, two raids running around trying to find people to fight but there’s no one around so PVP didn’t happen 
So not even just RP but thinking about like, missed connections seeing a friend or someone running around out in the world and stopping and saying hey what’s up and not having that anymore because we’re all split into our own weird parallel universe.
I suddenly am remembering all of the horror stories of Warmode’s entrance in BFA being completely lackluster because of things like this. Sharding absolutely contributed to the factions dominating a space uncontested because of how much it’d switch around the population trying to compete.
Thank you for your post!
Yeah this game feels dead on my server. Get rid of sharding. Save it for the servers that have 20k+ people but MG is not one of those servers. It’s high pop, but it’s not LOCKED pop.
I’m to believe some private servers can have a server up and running that has 1000+ people in ironforge with 0 lag. But a billion dollar mega company can’t have a “legal” server to host 200 people in stormwind?
Maybe if we didn’t have so much of the hardware wasted on dead realms this wouldn’t be an issue. We don’t need 500+ different servers. Start merging them. Balance out the populations. Focus your efforts instead of scattering us around. Having entire server farms wasted on ghost towns does nothing for us.
I don’t know if they improved it later since I stopped PVPing and playing when flying became available in BfA (since that sorta takes the fun out of WPVP) but I remember a lot of shenanigans with shard hopping to avoid raids from other factions full of off-server randos. Which also basically ruined RP-PVP altogether.
Otherwise going back to the main issue of sharding but if there’s concerns about performance and stability they should make it so a lot of the quests that force everyone into Stormwind or Orgrimmar also have the option of going to other cities to start or complete.
I posted already in the thread on my realm page but when pre-patch came out. Some of us in my guild logged out in Netherstorm or Ironforge so we could avoid any potential lag bombs and crashes with everyone rushing to Stormwind to get a haircut.
Shadowlands for example, they could have just added Death Knight NPCs in Thunderbluff, Exodar and Ironforge since all you do is accept a quest to be teleported somewhere else before getting chucked in the Maw. Yet we’re all funneled into SW and Org and heavily sharded and now seeing the communities fractured even more.