Just call it what it is, it's sharding

Onions have layers, stop trying to confuse zoomers that weren’t around back then with new words for the same thing.

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Except that it isn’t. Go back & learn about it. Watch a video. Here is one from Soul

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“NEW! AWESOME WoW Classic Feature”
Ya thats a yikes from me dawg.

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Because we’ve yet to receive a post from blizz about the specifics of Layering my numbers may be incorrect here but to my understanding each “Layer” will be about 3000 people, which is nothing to scoff at, that’s the size of a healthy private server’s pop. So unless you’re going out of your way to play on an overcrowded realm you’re rarely going to really notice the effects of layering. Also consider the fact that 3000 was about the cap of realm pops in vanilla anyway.

Any way there’s enough of these threads already, Layering is a temporary measure so cool off.

You’re calling people zoomers talking like that?

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I remember a year ago when posts like this would get you laughed off the board. This is why blizzard is able to get away with it, because you blizz drones will lap up any scraps they toss you from the table.

Any sharding/layering/onioning/toetapping/hopscotching/quantumleaping, whatever you want to call it goes against the very spirit of classic mmo’s. Just the fact that blizzard is leaving it open ended when they will supposedly stop doing it shows that they give zero oopsy poopsies about the spirit of the game and what people have been wanting.

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“GRRRR I HATE BLIZZ, I HATE BLIZZ DRONES”
I wonder why Blizzard doesn’t listen to your input.

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Not just healthy… that is what is estimated to be a full server pop.

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Ya and when classic dies in 6 months because of all the changes you and others like you will be on here singing the same old song as the communists. “Real classic hasn’t been tried.” We tried to warn you, no changes or else. You just had to have your inch and blizzard will take a hundred miles.

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The problem is that you can move/communicate between the shards.

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Mkay, cya in august I guess.

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It’s not sharding. If it were sharding, then you would phase in and out of different shards as you went around the world. Layering you never phase unless you are invited to a different layer.

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I’m learning so many new colourful words since being on the Classic Discussion forum.

What’s a zoomer?

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It’s not “sharding” it’s “layering” because…words.

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What sharding is, is a system of ensuring that any instance of the world has a number of players within a certain range. Within heavily populated servers, this means that dozens, if not hundreds of players on that server in any given area get split into multiple instances. On the other hand, servers with low pops, which have a number of players in any zone that is below a certain threshold, will have their instances clumped together with another server, to try and create a single instance that has an acceptable player count.

Now, I don’t know much about layering, but if what I understand is correct, it’s literally sharding that’s been restricted. So, it still splits large player populations on a single server, so that the players within a certain area are roughly evenly spread among a certain number of instances. However, this system will not clump together the players of low pop realms to get an instance within this unknown threshold. In other words, it’s sharding that is not cross-realm.

Honestly, I would’ve preferred a multi-tagging system, or something similar, to this, but it’s understandable why Blizzard is doing this. After all, two instances with 20 players each will require only half the bandwidth on Blizzard’s end as would a single instance of 40 players. If you assume that a hypothetical 40 man instance required each player to receive data representing the actions of the other 39 players, and that each player took a packet of fixed size per update, the total data would be about 40*39 packets, or 1560. On the other hand, two 20 man instances would require 20*19 packets each, for a total of 760 packets. In effect, you have the same number of players, but it takes a little less than half as much data to handle the two 20 man instances as opposed to the one 40 man instance.

If I’m being honest, I don’t think Blizzard’s current server architecture can handle massive player counts anymore. Literally just join an Isle of Conquest BG, and when roughly 30 hordies and 30 allies rush mid, you’ll see the entire game grind to a halt. The sad thing is it’s not even your PC that’s the main problem, it’s the servers. When you have those 60 players dog piling on one another, the servers throttle, and it can take a dozen seconds or longer for a single spellcast to go off. If the servers can’t handle a 40v40 BG anymore, why do you think they could handle +100 players running around in Northshire grinding Defias?

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Right - sharding that you can manipulate to avoid pvp.

If the pve guys want this - fine. This shouldn’t be on a real pvp vanilla server.

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Someone far younger than you that you don’t like.

Synonyms include: Youngin, Kids these days, Millennials

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Zoomer because they’re very fast paced from the perspective of the older person?

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That’s what they’d have you believe, though actually it came from old people getting called boomers so they called kids from Gen Z zoomers out of retaliation, like boomers… but with a Z.

Clever innit?

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Would it make you feel better if they just released multiple versions of the same server and then collapsed them as populations dropped off?

Oh wait, thats what layering is.

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The point is that whining about layering don’t solve the problem, but arguing about it does.

You can avoid pvp yes, but you can also seek pvp by hoping to a layer were players are doing world pvp.

My solution would be that if you are in combat or recently died via pvp, then you can’t hope layers for certain amount of time or until you go to a capital.