(This is a summation as an OP of stuff discussed in a dozen sharding threads, but none seems to start the discussion with this logic.)
Definitions:
- “Tourist” = Player who doesn’t get past L20. This assumes that the average player that gets past L20 plays for a significantly longer time, than just stopping a few levels past 20.
Assumptions:
- Non-Tourist population: ~500,000
- Tourist population: ~4,500,00 for first 3 months.
- Server Count: ~200
- Server Cap at 3 months: 3,000
- Server Cap at launch: Variable based on technology limits.
- 60% of tourists won’t get past L10
- 100% tourists won’t get past L20
- No dynamic respawns
- Average peak online players is 40% of active server population
My suggested compromise for Sharding is as follows -
At Launch:
- Durotaur, Mulgore, Tirisfal Glades, Elwynn Forest, Dun Morogh, Teldrassil are sharded.
- The Barrens is sharded.
- No other zones are sharded at all.
- Shards have a maximum occupancy of 500.
- Shards have a minimum occupancy of 150.
- Shards split at 400 members.
- Shards collapse when two shards together fall below 300 members.
After Launch:
For any given zone when the following conditions are met, it will no longer shard:
- Greater than 70% of a 24hr period, less than 400 members in zone.
- At least 2 weeks have passed.
- Hard limit at 3 months to be removed.
Reasoning
Shard Sizes:
Assuming 5 million players at launch “trying it out”, and 200 servers, that’s 25,000 people per server attempting to play. This creates upwards of 10,000 people trying to play during peak per server. Even perfectly splitting this up between the 6 starter zones by race, that’s 1666 per race, and 3333 in Dun Morogh and Durotar. That would be between 9 and 3 shards in any given zone, and double that in the paired starters. But it would still mean you’re seeing between 200 and 500 people in any given zone.
More than 500 people in a starter zone would destroy the ability for people to progress and drive people away from the game where they might otherwise transition from Tourist to Non-Tourist. The “authentic vanilla experience” didn’t see numbers like that in any given zone on day one either. Maybe 200 max in any given starter zone, but not 500.
Competition for mobs and nodes would be far more ‘authentic’ with limited scales of players, while ensuring that there’s tons of people in every direction.
The Barrens:
The Barrens gets a special callout here, and to some extent Loch Modan. With 2 races merging in the Loch, and three races merging in the Barrens, there may be a requirement for sharding to be enabled for those zones too. Assuming that 40% of each race makes it through to the Barrens, that’s still 120% of the levels seen in each of those starter zones that hit the Barrens at the same time. Which pretty much ensures the need for Sharding there. Same rules of disabling it should apply.
Server Numbers:
WoW launched with 89 servers. It would be ‘authentic’ to launch with those same 89 servers for US, and similar for the launch in EU. Even more authentic would be to use the same names.
However looking at the numbers after launch, if you spread 500k players over 200 servers, that’s 2500 per server. Perfect cap would be 166. That’s actually more servers than you really want, but its the trade off between too many and too little. Each server will have about 2500 accounts, meaning about 1000 active players during peak. Half that would be better after launch, with about 2000 active during peak (with room for a heavy peak to 3000), but halving it during launch would create even more shards.
Conclusion:
To me (and it seems many other posters), this seems like the most clean method of ensuring a clean launch of Classic, without driving away Tourists who might become Non-Tourists, without long boring queues (though there’ll still be some for the purists), and without leaving 500 dead and dying servers forcing server merges 6 months in and signalling to shareholders that Classic failed.
I know the #NoChanges brigade will demand no sharding, no dynamic respawns, and tens of thousands of people in any given queue, but I feel like that’s intentionally destroying the long term viability of Classic WoW.