If Blizzard offered both sharded and unsharded servers

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
161

To be honest, the thread itself is off topic to the forum section. They are not going to have hugbox and real servers.

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For me, I’d say 50-ish would be the sweet spot, but no more than 100. The starting zones simply weren’t designed for more than that at one time, and that would be closer to keeping with OG Vanilla launch conditions, not insane ridiculous private server launch inaccuracies.

The other hundreds of people would still be reachable via chat and those people could still be grouped with. As my wife, daughter, and I will all be grouped up no matter what shard we all start in.

50-100 would still give plenty of opportunity to see fellow players and give some of the competition some people crave, but not be crowded enough that it would be unplayable.

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I assure you, sweetie, you won’t get sharding. You see, if blizzard fails to follow through on promises then Classic will cease to exist. Along with it will go BFA. Your eyes are playing trucks on you on retail the population is mockable. I would actually not be surprised if blizzard has to add AI players just to make it seem less dead soon. Classic wow is the only thing Blizzard has to lean on.

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I assure you, darling, that we will get it, at least at the start. Hopefully not beyond that.

No it won’t. Remember the line so many non-sharders like to parrot out? “We don’t care if it’s hundreds or tens of people playing Classic”

I don’t play retail. Haven’t since halfway through Legion. Did the 3-day BfA trial, but haven’t purchased it yet. Your bias is showing again, sweetie.

Actually, they have games like Hearthstone and Overwatch that are doing just fine. But that’s ok, just keep fear mongering. The fact that unreasonable people like you seem to make up a good portion of those returning for Classic doesn’t bode well for the state of the community.

165

I hear you, but at the same time I’m also wondering if Blizzard can even allow a huge WPvP brawl, say 200 vs 200 in Hillsbrad or a 300-strong Alliance assault on Orgrimar to be met by a bunch of Horde who come in to defend, without the obvious drawbacks of sharding and without a no-sharding server stability issue with the infrastructure they plan to use for Classic.

I mean, I guess I’m resigned to the fact that they are not going to use the single-server-per-machine approach that allowed huge populations in a small zone in the first place, but I don’t have a feel for just how limiting it will be and whether this sort of thing will be a thing of the past and never be able to be replicated with the cloud-based infrastructure, even if sharding is turned off.

Dunno. I can see both sides of this issue.

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166

Hearthstone and Overwatch are no longer bringing in the dough, sweet pea. They are trying to save wow subs as they are laying people off. So some research on the matter. Many employees that used to work there are leaving over wages. They are focusing on art asset sales as a company now. Pet and mount skins + the dying BFA sub is all they have and it’s getting worse. If they could stealth a reason to put a monthly fee on overwatch they would do it in a second.

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Didn’t they do…something that pissed off a lot of Overwatch players recently? Or am I thinking of a different game?

(I do play Hearthstone, but I don’t spend money on it; pretty much a null value, as far as Blizzard’s concerned.)

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Blizzard is dying a ugly death atm. They are trying to sell discontinued micro X bundles with a 150 dollar sign crossed off for 60 bucks.

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50-100 people trying to get troggs, boars, trolls, not to mention the troll boss, warlock feathers and Felix’s item spawns is going to be just as frustrating be it 50-100 in the zone or much more. And what happens when the masses suddenly find themselves all fighting over yeti, bears, etc in the next area of Dun Morogh?

As someone else mentioned earlier, the leveling up into the 20s to 30s was pretty linear. People will not be dispersing as much as they think. The ONLY way to avoid it is to log in during off-hours of the server or start later in the week.

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I understand as well. And you’re right about the wPvP issues that may crop up. I haven’t played BfA, so I can’t speak to how the server technology handles those numbers.

But, I’m also not advocating for sharding to be everywhere all the time. Just during the launch period that is absolutely going to be INSANE.

Some people have this misguided belief that the launches of private servers were good things and representative of how it was in Vanilla, but that’s simply not the case.

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My ideal server would be Oceanic PVP No-Shard 1.1.2
With progression over time to 1.12.2

But I dont hold my breath for that. However non-original AV would be the deal breaker for me.

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The “hopefully not beyond that” is my biggest issue, well that and they have not defined what they are calling a starting area

Blizzard has already demonstrated on several occasions that once something like this is turned on they either cant turn it off or do not want to turn it off.
My guess is that it wont go away but it will have the limits turned up.

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:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::beers::crazy_face:

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Not sure is they are doing all that well they did just cancel their esports events and have been buying out dev contracts and turning them loose.

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Yeah, I can understand that.

My thing is, though… I can’t control what they do with it. I want to play Classic, and sharding simply isn’t a deal breaker for me, so I am not going to worry about it. If that means we get fewer whiny players crying about every little thing that is different (and there will be differences, it won’t be a 1:1 copy), then so much the better for the community. And I say that about retailers and returners alike.

Sharding is baked into the server software they are using to run Classic, so my best guess is that it is something that will have to be dealt with in one way or another whether the players like it or not. I don’t see them returning to the 1 realm per server hardware that they used back in Classic/TBC. Far too expensive to maintain.

I used to want things like class adjustments, etc… But the more I played the demo, the more I realized that it wasn’t worth it. I’m going to play my druid the way I want to (mostly resto), and anyone that complains about my spec can go take a long walk off of a short pier. Point is, my mind was changed on wanting balancing, but it won’t be on sharding. I want it at the start, after that I don’t, but it won’t kill my interest for Classic.

Truth be told, no developer (outside of perhaps Nintendo) is doing all that great right now. We’ve kind of hit a pre-crash gaming recession, much like the early 80s. Cheap, addictive cell-phone games and MTX cashgrabs are a major reason for this, IMO. Much like how a lack of quality control sent the gaming industry into a tailspin back then.

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176

I remember doing azerite quests that had like 20 people doing it at the same time as me in the phase…shard…w/e. The lag from 20 people was noticeable there. It was input lag, not graphical either.

With this being said, maybe it was some server lag at the time. It did happen multiple times though.

AV is a 40v40, which I assume runs fine, so it doesn’t actually make sense that 20 people killing quest mobs would cause input lag. They way the servers are built for world are designed so that they limit characters in specific areas.

200v200 hillsbrad is something that is a expectation. Being reasonable, 1000 people on a starting zone will be a whole new monster. This can easily be controlled with a server Q and a server that slowly increases in pop cap over time.

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For some.

Server queues are unacceptable in 2018. This isn’t 2004.

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Current year is a argument for the inept.

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Dismissing the fact that time has passed and things are completely different now is a tool for the desperate.

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Luckily for me we are talking about bringing something back from 2004 so i supppose the current year argument is irrelevant.