The game is supposed to be an MMORPG where everyone is in an immerse world together. I have another, more detailed, response to this in another thread but here’s the gist: putting people on different layers ruins this. I run by people in my guild and never see them. I never meet the same person twice because I’m always getting random people on random layers. It’s what makes the game almost a single-player experience because the community can’t develop when nobody plays together continuously.
So even if a realm was heavily sharded, we knew thousands of players were on the realm because they were talking. Many players asked in the chats several times, “Where is everybody? I know you guys are there.”
We eventually logged into realm 15 another high population server. I created a human paladin and my brother created a human warrior. We logged in at the same time. But when the opening cinematic was complete, we stood in the exact same spot, but weren’t seeing the same thing.
It was a so weird. It was like a strange case of deja vu. It’s like we were watching a similar movie but with different characters. We were facing the Northshire abby, but I saw a warrior run out, and he saw a priest. That’s not all that was different. We ran to Goldshire, and not once did we see each other.
We stood in the exact same spot in the street. There were duels going on in Goldshire. But, we weren’t watching the same duel. It was exciting but lonely. If we’d been playing on two different servers it would’ve made perfect sense. The problem is we were both on realm 15. We’d been sharded to a different layer of it.
I made some amazing friends in Wrath because sharding didn’t prevent me from meeting them. Although, I don’t speak to these friends today, I treasure the memories. And, those gaming buddies were good friends for many years before they stopped playing WoW and moved on.