from waht I have seen, and I watch blizzcon they did not say sharding will be limited to the starting zones. not saying sharding will be in the higher zones. This is something that needs to be addressed for clarification.
As for my being pretty libral with something I hate, I understand that comprimises need to be made. Saying yes to sharding blindly is bad, but saying no sharding at all is bad too. I am for server merges, but if you are going to merge servers, blizz needs to take into account that faction balance needs to be set as closely as possible when merging. When blizzard merged the realms on retail they threw off faction balance of a few realms, and they could have done a much better job of balancing the factions by witch servers they merged with witch.
I donât think merging servers are an answer. I think server shutdowns are. If your server gets shut down next time you log in you have to pick a new server to move to. Just let players work things out for themselves.
Just to note, for people talking about sharding making retail zones ghost towns, in some cases this is when war mode is turned on and there is no âbalancedâ shard to throw you into (which is very common for the overpopulated faction, currently Horde).
If you have War Mode turned on, it attempts to put people into faction balanced zones (there was a blue post talking about this change at one point). Itâs basically either youâre in a balanced shard with both factions OR you end up in an overflow shard where itâs seemingly just your faction (I donât think the blue post was that specific about this side of it, but you can infer it from what they said and from your own experience in War Mode zones). When I go into a BfA zone with War Mode on as Horde, I can typically go around the zone never seeing another soul (unless I join a group for an elite WQ or something).
Prior to the changes to how sharding is managed, I would sometimes find myself in a Horde dominated zone most of the time (this was all War Mode on), but occasionally would end up in an Alliance dominated zone. Once I was in the middle of killing a WQ elite and it randomly phased me into a new shard mid fight surrounded by a dozen Alliance. I died.
I imagine non-WM zones donât care about faction balance and tend to be more populated regardless, but I havenât been in one recently so I donât know from experience.
(The relevant part is from start to 4:30 )
*I donât affiliate my views with those of the person who made that Youtube video.
The language used by Blizzard (both Ion and CM) specifically mention sharding regarding server launch and the zones most populated at launch. Ion goes out of his way to communicate that he understands the concerns people have against shards. They fully understand why phasing and CRZ canât be in Classic, it seems illogical to believe to any degree that Blizzard would go wild with shards throughout the world post-launch.
Blizz will not merge servers. That would mean a loss of character names and guild names. Connected realms are just server merges without these downsides.
I would rather have a queue and/or some initial server instability than sharding.
I played WoW from Vanilla through WotLK heavily (stopped playing heavily shortly after ToC was released) and apart from server queues and lag/disconnects on launch days, I do not recall any major lag or server problems. I do not see why, years later, they would not be able to get it at least as stable as it was back then. The only thing I can think of is that sharding is a cheaper way out, so they can use multiple cheaper servers instead of investing in high end hardware.
Hoo boy, yeah that was a mess. Our scarab lord was trying to make his little speech and it was just d/c after d/c. I donât see how they could shard it though. Thereâs only one scarab lord, so only one ceremony.
I donât feel a need to censor other peopleâs opinions if I find them contrary to my own.
The topic is open for debate. While I donât agree with every opinion out there, Iâm willing to listen to it and take it into consideration and maybe even see if there was something I missed or didnât consider
Grab a coffee or a tea before attempting to read through the following post
This is the strawman argument I see time and again against sharding.
Where is this âtoo heavilyâ sharded world coming from? Has blizzard stated numbers on Classic shard size for each zone? Iâve seen no indication of anybody wanting shards in order to make the Classic world feel empty. Iâm OK with shards in the starting zones but that doesnât mean I want empty zones.
Pick any starting zone:
Ask how many players can the zone handle at a given time before performance is compromised
Ask how many players can the zone handle at a given time before resources (quest mobs, etc) are over-camped to the point where players arenât able to complete quests in a reasonable amount of time (this exacerbates over-camping)
Ask what is the threshold of players between a bustling launch and something which feels relatively devoid of players
And there you have some numbers to work with when structuring a shard system. Do people think this isnât something Blizzard looks at?
Regarding âRetailâ
Iâve also seen much correlation regarding sharding as it relates to retail.
So there are significant differences between Classic launch and retail that I just want to address because people seem to think thereâs a 1:1 translation:
Retail is very old and the population is dispersed all over with a higher representation at the maximum level.
After a month following the launch of an expansion, active player participation drops substantially. Unless youâre observing the players in the new content right when it comes out, I wouldnât put much stock in a âlivelyâ retail world.
Zones in retail now scale with your level. Not everyone progresses through the same zones at the same levels now (and itâs a big world!)
Many quest hubs now use phasing to drive the story/evolve the world from your actions. As a result, players are bound to a world relative to their quest progress
War mode also now segregates the population to a degree
Players can still just queue up for instances anytime, anywhere.
All of these points contribute to an âemptyâ feel, few are due to shards and none apply to Classic at launch.
Putting a âbusyâ world into perspective:
Regardless of how many players are in a zone, you are limited to âseeingâ only what is in close proximity to you. Wherever you stand, youâre not going to see everyone anyway. Now those you can see will still only be a ratio of shard size to zone population, but at what point does that become noticeable?
How else do you feel that the world is busy with players? Zone chat. What if chat is global through all shards? If youâre in The Barrens and you can see all players contributing their oldest Chuck Norris joke (for nobodyâs amusement), does the world not feel just as big?
If you type âlvl 20 Mage LFG WCâ into chat and all the players across all the shards can read that, are you not still forming groups with players from a global pool?
People want to interact with others around them and I get that. But thereâs a big misstep in the assumption that youâll be building friendships on launch day with everyone around you. Without any population cap, the #1 thing players will have in common with the people around them is that theyâll all be waiting for quest objectives to spawn and likely competing against fellow players and not in co-operation with them. It all becomes a race of who can tag what first. Quest items (which donât drop every time) are not shared across the group and players who have the ability to instantly tag mobs from a distance have no incentive to group up⌠and even general kill quests become a race of group vs group for tag ownership.
For better or worse, Iâm all in. I love the hustle and bustle of a vanilla launch but Blizzard (from the companyâs perspective) still has to deliver an experience which is up to their standards. Realistically, you can expect that to exclude world server crashing, long queue times and an overall negative experience due to an antiquated game design which didnât take hundreds of players in the same zone into account. Even with shards, I anticipate early questing to be a point of frustration for a lot of players (even some who might consider themselves diehard vanilla fans).
The last few characters I leveled in retail, I rarely saw anyone. A query would show that there were plenty of people playing in the zone, but none of them were apparently in âmyâ shard. The world was dead.
I played in Vanilla, back when youâd log in and go make a sandwich while you waited for the queue. I remember being on vent and loudly complaining about it with my guildies. And yet I INFINITELY prefer that queue to the lifeless husk of an mmo that sharding creates.
Being able to chat with other players is not even close to the same experience as seeing active characters out and about in the world with you. And the social experience is NOT just about making friends.
Blizzard, and a portion of the player base, has it stuck in their head that we are here to kill boars and that there must be no hiccups to each of us going out and killing boars. Sharding is AMAZING when it comes to getting people smooth access to killing boars.
But I donât play the game to kill boars.
I play the game to kill boars with other people, to steal other peopleâs boars, to murder people killing boars, to save people being killed by boars, to watch people being killed by boars (and laugh), to join an 80 gnome raid to kill boarsâŚ
Sharding creates empty worlds where itâs just you and the boars.
your explanation of retail is wrong. Most zones wile leveling in retail are not sharded, they are merged. Blizzard does not merge the zones enough to make them feel alive. If the magic number for how many players to merge into one zone and the magic number of players should be in a zone that has sharded is the same then we will be seeing alot of empty zones. sure not everyone does the same thing in the zones in the game, but taking that into account blizzard could up the number of players in the lower level zones alot without people tripping over each other.
Take the bullet points from your post, I am just stating my own contextual viewpoint that favors the lower end of the sharding spectrum when doing such analytic evaluations. Obviously numbers must be interpreted within some context.
I expect gameplay challenge at launch, and find it desirable.
For example, group vs group mob tagging sounds interesting as a temporary condition and could build teamwork, contacts and memories within a group. Yet to your point, if no one can complete a quest at all despite effort and ingenuity then not good or desirable.
If world PvP is affected in contested zones, then too heavily sharded in my view.
Servers shouldnât crash, I totally agree. Shared group chat does help to a degree. Queues are another areas where people disagree. No easy answer only trade-offs.
