At least two of the developers were developers in Vanilla.
It is sharding on a larger scale. That is all. One of the developers literally admitted “yes” to sharding then was corrected by the other guy. It is the same tech tweeked to work on a larger scale. You will be able to play with people on the same shard if they invite you to group, otherwise, good luck. It is garbage and shouldn’t be in classic wow.
It’s an instance of the server. It will have multiple instances based on player population at any given time, and you can move between them by being invited to a group by someone in another instance.
If it works how I expect it to, you won’t even notice anything.
You won’t notice a guy 2 weeks in with 3 boe epics and an epic mount riding circles around you saying “MUAHHAHAHAHAH IM RICH ***** (Dave Chapelle)”…
No one is doing that in 2 weeks.
Nobody has yet…but then again…nobody has had 3 shards worth of Devilsaurs and rich thorium veins.
I would wager the devs did not want layering.
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I agree. This was probably a limitation forced upon them by higher ups. It wreaks of $$$ being the driving factor. If they had no limit on servers to purchase/put up then there is NO reason for this.
And they won’t 2 weeks after launch. You think you’re the only one gathering? You can’t control what instance you log into. I’m betting we won’t even know how many there are, or which one you’re on.
You’re making a assumptions 3 months out without even experiencing it.
City of heroes did the exact same thing in 2004, and it worked fine.
Getting mixed messages about it still lol.
I sincerely hope it is as Ukcus says. It still sounds like sharding and that when I run to SW where people are I will not see half of them. I find that to be a very big problem.
I’m confused but not too appalled about it yet. Especially if it only lasts a very short while.
My concern is mostly seeing the same people all the time. I’d like to always be able to play with my guildmates and friends in or out of party. Whenever they log in or whenever they made their toon.
Bit confused why they feel like they need to do it. Their servers seem to have gotten worse at taking any kind of heavy load instead of better. BFA suffers major lag issues on it’s own even with sharding.
It might be easier to implement something that lets a player choose their layer. That way someone can say ‘oh we are all playing layer one!’ and everyone goes to layer one to play together. If there is too much mob competition they can switch to layer two etc? Ah but world pvp problems there. ![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
I have repeatedly stated that the primary concern economically is for those who get ahead and have all shards to their self.
This speaks nothing of the PvP implications and immersion problems. This is just economically horrifying.
The Lead Dev and the Senior Dev who do all the interviews probably decided that they needed a better option than sharding and this was the choice.
That said, they want to keep their jobs.
This is basically my question also, and my concern.
How are they going to have friends and guilds all be on the same shard despite logging/starting at different times.
Will they just put all guild members on the same shard by default? There are some pretty large guilds and just a couple on the same shard could destroy/monopolise a shard.
Will they put all people on a friends list on the same shard by default? Friends lists are connected in crazy ways and this could end up spiralling to everyone on a realm.
How do I actually play with the people I want to, to see the people I want to and create friendships and rivalries?
Do I get set a shard and that is my “home” shard and I can switch to another, but if I log out and log back in, I will always be set to my home shard?
How are pvp rivalries supposed to form if one party just decides to skip to another shard and do so every time there is pvp?
There are so many questions that I don’t know the answer to, and I don’t think anyone does (if so please post the source) that the more I think about it, the more sharding sounds worse and worse.
I have an open mind and if the devs can come out officially and provide some more information on the specifics of how this is going to work, it could allay the fears of many. I hope Blizzard aren’t so stupid as to just let something like this drop so informally without very quickly explaining in great detail just how it is going to work.
Right now I am excited to play Classic, but right now with the uncertainty about this new announcement of “alternative sharding” I am looking to delay my entrance into Classic until it has ended.
But then, myabe it will take months or maybe it will become a permanent fixture if it makes the servers stable (as this is their main concern). I really want to play Classic, but I want the community, it is my primary reason I am so excited. The announcement of this long-term splitting of the community is something that has me really concerned about the entire project for the first time.
Blizzard really needs to clarify this very quickly.
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In 2 weeks there will be next to no one farming end game mats. If some guy does manage to get to that point in two weeks they won’t need to change layers, they’ll be able to farm to their hearts content on just one.
The number of guys that would possibly reach that point in two weeks shouldn’t even need multiple layers because there are multiple locations to farm, with routes that supported multiple people.
Did you even play vanilla?
Lots of questions for sure. I am more concerned about the gameplay and economy effect, but I can see how others would be more concerned about the guild/friend issues.
Blizzard responded on the forums a while ago…to a thread about pre-ordering the 100$ Ragnaros statue…You know…the real crisis.
Sure. And Brack said “We want a smooth launch”. So they said “Here are all the options, and we think we need to build new tech to get the best possible option”.
The fact that they built new tech instead of just using plain sharding, says to me that they came up with something that’s better than sharding.
You realize the shards layers are continent wide? I can party in Ungoro with a teammate in Barrens and it shard me out.
Yes I played Vanilla, a lot. I played private servers also. If I had the days off work and incentive I could hit 60 in about a week or so.
As long as it is used for launch purposes only. Layering though in order to use one server for more people I don’t agree with. Too much abuse on nodes… not the same game.
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I’d rather have nothing, but for the sake of long-term population stability and short-term server stability, I’m alright with it.