It really should have been that simple; there are a dozen different methods that probably require far less back-end management but they never attempt them anymore.
Reflecting on the pre-patch a bit more: I recall that in Stormwind they didn’t turn on Sharding for the initial release, because there wasn’t any new ‘playable’ content; Moon Guard’s Stormwind was really laggy for a week because so many people were using the barbershop and trying out the new abilities, but nobody was doing ghoul-invasion things because that was staggered by the expansion’s delay.
And you know what? That was a perfectly fine example that our servers can still 100% survive without sharding being on. Some people were miffed for the first few days, but the city was functional and a week later everything was back to normal.
I completely agree with the OP, sharding makes for a horrible experience and degrades server communities. LFD and cross realm content did a lot of damage to the community and this is just icing on the cake.
Remove sharding please. Lets us be on servers again with a community. Yes you will likely need to merge servers. Overpop servers will have queues and maybe that will promote free transfers to small pop servers.
I was legitimately trying to figure out why Stormwind was practically empty on a Sunday night and I check twitter.
Seriously Blizzard, Sharding in the new areas works, but in a major city that’s supposed to be populated? I thought you guys said in Legion you were going to disable it on RP servers! What changed?
Regardless of technical or gameplay reasons, paying $15US a month for a game that’s this heavily sharded/instanced is a hard ask, if not an incredibly strange one.
I was under the impression that the subscription fee was for ‘access to the servers’. Surely those servers should be worth those 15 simoleons, then, and able to stand up to the simple rigors of an MMO, no…?
There’s games now that can handle the maximum amount of players WoW allows in a shard, with ease, with much more complex things happening under the hood. And without servers hosted by a multi-million (billion?) dollar corporation. What’s going on?
Sharding to this extent just feels like an extreme cost-saving measure.
I’ll always request a removal of sharding in Stormwind. At the very least on RP servers. Once again, I roam around looking for people to roleplay with only to find it completely empty and desolate. So I get bored and log off. Hop onto my bank toon to check something and the city is just bustling with Roleplayers and normal players alike.
Why? At least give us a manual option to navigate sharding rather than asking strangers for invites HOPING they’re on a populated shard.
Literally every time sharding is turned on the entire RP community is basically in limbo until Blizzard turns it back off and it’s awful. Some people specifically play the game for RP to the exclusion of all else, and this ruins RP totally.
It really baffles me that, despite there apparently being enough of an issue to necessitate a system as harsh and all-encompassing as sharding, we’re continuously funneled into these two areas. It’s honestly getting kind of ridiculous.
We’ve got this gigantic world to play around in, but god forbid if we don’t absolutely flood the Human and Orc-centric parts of it. Would it be that terrible to have small groups of people in all parts of the world, instead of a ton of people in 1% of it, and the rest abandoned?
I would rather leverage the technology and repurpose it to encourage a stable community and revitalize various cities.
Individual players would set their home location. Guild leaders would set an additional location. This would be upon launch of the feature.
At that time, your character would be set to a shard number. Anytime you travel to your home location, or Guild location, the same players, set to your shard, would be there - or not, depending upon their schedule. If a player happens to be in a guild with the same city location, the guild shard would be automatically chosen. If a player joins a new guild that shares the same home city, they would be prompted for a decision.
Blizzard engineers would develop the metrics for shard limit/balance and coverage.
If you find yourself in a shard that does not suit you, or develop RP with someone in another shard and wish to shift to their shard, you simply target the individual and select to do so. That player must accept. At no time is the shard number displayed. (first level stalking prevention)
In this way, the player can have at least one, and potentially two stable locations with a stable population. Get to know players. See them at the normal times.
The shard number could be used in the future in the queuing system as the bugs are worked out.
Anyway. That’s one way I could think that would change the way sharding is implemented to the betterment of community.
Edited to add: Events could be assigned a temporary shard number in order to have everyone in possession of an invite access.
Yeah the whole walking into a portal room, that is inside Stormwind, is super inaccessible. Especially since you have to get to LEVEL TEN and do the 15 minute intro quest to unlock it. Or, if you’ve already done it before on that account then you can skip it.
Boralus is wasted on the Alliance. I wish Blizzard put effort into making Suramar a proper functional horde city instead. People are pretty desperate to escape Silvermoon and Orgrimmar. Dazar’alor felt like a friendly troll raid instead of an actual city which is ironic for me to say considering they did turn it into a raid.
100% agree with this post. Blizzard is already so bad at catering to the Roleplay experience of WoW. Sharding is just going to result in the death of Roleplay on World of Warcraft, and thus the death of their most invested audience.
Always hidden profiles with these “witty” sarcastic responses.
Anyways, Boralus is less accessible. If you understood what it meant for a place to become an established roleplay hub you might get why it’s more than just “take the portal”. It takes effort, consistent community presence, and development around the area. This was tried several times in Boralus and failed because there’s a lack of interest, or need to uproot.
Boralus is pretty for sure, but it would take the entire consistent portion of the Alliance roleplay community to uproot themselves and move somewhere else and away from what Blizzard has clearly established as the Alliance’s melting pot hub.
Stormwind is accessible. It’s the place you know you can swoop down in and maybe meet someone new. It’s where the slice of life roleplayers like to drop in to see their friends and meet new people, and it’s the place people know well and are comfortable with so they always gravitate there. Expecting people to be able to, or even want to uproot themselves from the established Alliance hub doesn’t mean other prettier areas are “wasted” on them at all. It just means they know what they like, and know where they can find the roleplay they want.
So I circle back to my original stance here, and at least now I got to elaborate more on the importance of why Stormwind on roleplay servers shouldn’t be sharded. We’re not asking for much. We just want to see our friends in the place we’ve known as a reliable hub to sync up with them for years. I get it’s the start of the expansion, and this is considered current content right now! So even an ETA on when the sharding might go away would be appreciated.
There’s always a push to RP in new city hubs every expansion but there’s always the same problem that it fizzles out because of sharding in new content.
People tried to RP in Legion Dalaran but sharding made it difficult.
People tried to RP in Boralus but again the same issue with sharding caused that to fizzle out.
Sharding sucks.
I consider myself a casual roleplayer as I probably spend more of my time just playing WoW but what I like about RP servers is when I’m out and about and seeing people RPing in the world. Even if I’m not a part of it, seeing the interactions makes playing more enjoyable.
It’s disheartening to log into WoW and hop over to SW in the morning to see a ghost town. It’s even worse when it’s evening and peak hour for the server. I’ve seen at most 4 other people on the same shard as me unless I invited them over to my shard.
I can understand why sharding was implemented for pre-patch but I implore Blizzard to fix this for at least RP servers. Seeing each other and random walk-up RP is the lifeblood to the server. Without it I’m genuinely afraid that RP servers will slowly whittle down to everyone RPing in private groups.
If you must keep sharding for Shadowlands content because of server instability, fine, but sharding has been turned off in SW on MG and WrA for the majority of the server’s lifespan (with the exceptions being during prepatchs usually). I see no reason why it’s still turned on there.
Even Guild Wars 2 will give you the option to hop to a more populated phase if the one you end up in is empty, this doesn’t even have that.
And the ‘populated’ shards right now are maybe ten people in one given area with another dozen in Trade, at most, and then all the other shards have maybe two people in them. And the populated shard only became such due to pulling people over to it.
Trade is probably even less populated than it would normally be since many are on their Brutasaurs in Oribus and so people don’t need to leave that city for the Auction House.
Would it be so hard to disable sharding on WrA and MG with Tuesday maintenance tomorrow? It needs to go away now for RP realms. Come on, devs - don’t any of you RP? I’m done gearing my main for PvE content and would like to get back to RP.
At this point, my guild is talking about taking its RP off server and into Discord. We’re actually going to give this a try this week since the sharding continues.
This. A transparent answer on when Sharding might go away in the places that it’s not even supposed to exist feels like such a “gimme” whether they want to touch on the system’s other issues or not.
People being left on read after reaching out is a part of why I started the thread.
The game is an MMO man we should be in a thriving world seeing hundreds of players if not thousands. I run around and do not see that at all because of sharding. FF14 and other MMOs have instances but they somehow manage to keep the size large enough to not feel dead or underpopulated and give you the option to switch instances.
With all the money they make I see no reason why we can’t have that other than them just being greedy.
Lol what are you going to do? Check my item level to see if my opinion on RP hubs is valid? What does the profile have to do with anything?
Boralus WAS more accessible. It was actually an inconvenience to run back over into Stormwind. The second the prepatch hit and everyone was crashing the servers to go to the stormwind barber shop want to know where it was easier to try out your new customizations? Boralus. Yes, it had a barber shop. There was no lag.
So you made one sorry attempt to shift RP there back when the city was sharded when it was new content. Guess that’s it huh? That’s more of a Blizzard problem than a “oooh you can’t move an entire community!” problem. Right now SW is sharded and people still want to go there for some reason. You got an entire heavily detailed city just being ignored.
Dalaran sucks because of its physical location. It forces everyone’s PC to load the entire broken isles into their ram which is why it always has the worst load screen. Plus the fact that there’s two dalaran’s and people always get confused over which one to go to.
If the Alliance actually had any decency they’d buy those potions in the dalaran sewers and you could have cross faction open RP then it might be worth it to make Dalaran the new RP hub that the ENTIRE SERVER can participate in. But they don’t, they pretty much ignore horde 95% of the time. They just want a hub all to themselves and the best one for that would be Boralus which isn’t sharded anymore.
It certainly is a much better use of all our time than trying to get Blizzard to actually do anything when it’s obvious they don’t care about RP servers.
