Making sharding work

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

I don’t want sharding. I’d rather deal with queues and lag.

Okay. Now imagine you’re a Classic fan, but also an architect at Blizzard and were given a mandate to do something about queue times and server instability. What would you do? Only allow sharding in the starting zones? Create persistent shards at launch that could only merge (not split) and eventually end up as 1 shard per realm? Give individual players some degree of choice between shards versus queues/lag? As in all aspects of engineering, there are advantages and drawbacks to each decision. What would you do? Assume sticking it to the man and getting fired is not an option.

2

Nothing wrong with sharding, I would welcome it.
Only PvP bois are complaining about it as they wouldn’t be able “efficiently farm levels 48”

3

Already posted.

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4

Not a pvp fan. Not a fan of sharding.
Your argument is thus invalid.

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5

The stated goal of sharding is to not just deal with server stability, but also to handle long term server populations. From what I recall they didn’t say anything about queues, so I’ll be including that in my solution.

First off, sharding is only in the low level zones up to level 20 which is roughly the point at which the tourists should drop off. Sharding is eased up in the 10-20 areas, as we can assume tourists have started leaving.

Server population is also monitored. The population caps of each server is higher than normal to account for tourists, but if a server gets too high and it risks being an overpopulated server then queues are implemented on that server.

After 1 month evaluate how the zones are doing to see if sharding is still needed. If it is, keep it until 2 months.

After it’s gone, never bring it back. Use queues to prevent server stability issues.

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6

I’m completely against sharding 10 to 20.

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7

First time I’m seeing that and I like.

From everything they said as to why they might use sharding and the points you made it make sense.

The only thing I dont agree with is sharding in the barrens just because I’d personally be more comfortable to it being restricted to the 1-12 zones

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8

Well, with there being a requirement for 400 people in the zone before it activates, hopefully it won’t be needed. 400 people in the Barrens is still “overcrowded”, and there’s 3 out of the 4 races of the Horde being funnelled into the same zone at the same time. That’s the only reason the Barrens gets a special caveat.

Anything more than 30% of each race getting through 1-10, and you’ve got the same numbers of people in the Barrens that Durotar and Mulgore required sharding for.

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9

I’d keep it in low level zones until stability, population, and queue issues are hammered out. Chances are, most “tourists” who start upon launch will quit somewhere between 10-20. The rest will level out of the starting zones fairly quickly.

However, like any new game or any new, fresh server, you will see a steady influx of new character creations for weeks, probably multiple months. Now, this may be unpopular, but the low level sharding needs to remain until this stabilizes to preserve long term server health and quality. What we don’t want are 100 servers, more than half dead, again. (Obviously don’t know how many there will be, just saying don’t want a lot of dead servers).

10

Sharting ruins immersion. No way around it.

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11

The problem is that 1-10 really isn’t all that much.

If you don’t shard 10-20 you’ll just run into the exact same issue in Westfall that you introduced sharding to avoid in Northshire. In that case, you might as well just not shard at all.

20 is the point where the world both opens up, and leveling gets grindy enough that the tourists will be really dropping off in numbers.

12

Nope. They get 1 to 10 sharded. They can adjust to classic in 11 to 20.

13

I think that flow will reduce dramatically to a point where 400 players don’t need a shard in Durotar because they can all coexist.

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14

How many do you expect to transition from 1-10, to 10-20, just for reference, percentage wise.

15

Without having further data to go on, I don’t see much problem with going on your estimate of 60% wont make it past 10.

Which means the sharding at 10 - 20 should definitely be a lot lighter than that of 1 - 10.

16

Or just not shard past level 10. The more you shard the more they will ask to be shardec.

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17

And when that person gets done with Westfalll and moves onto the next zone they’ll ask those to be sharded. And then the zone after that. And so on and so forth. It’s a never-ending cycle when it’s being done for convenience. And once players get used to the effects of sharding they’ll demand it to continue. Part of the reason I’m so against it being used at all.

18

Then ignore them when they ask for more sharding, like they’ll be ignoring requests to make dungeons easier, add expansion features, or balance classes.

My idea was to try to solve the problems that Blizzard said they want to solve with sharding, not make people feel good about it.

Sharding isn’t something we’re ever going to be happy about using.

19

So in that case they should use it as little as possible.

20

So, you’re asking to be ignored?