Yup. I’m on a small server and I rarely see other players right now. I don’t know if they’ve heavily phased people or what but Bastion is extremely empty for me atm.
i’d agree, and my wife and I actually talked about it earlier today
this entire phasing change makes the game feel more like a solo game that has campaign co-op or something instead of an MMO
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I suspect things will change once more people hit max level and they aren’t all funnelled through the same content. I think that heavy sharding is a temporary measure. I actually didn’t have any problems leveling through there multiple times on beta solo.
Ok, well that makes more sense. I highly doubt that’s Blizz’s official policy, and I say this as someone married to a game dev and also as someone who used to work in games. From a design standpoint, it wouldn’t make sense to include and encourage the use of features you don’t actually want people to use.
Either this is a bug, or they implemented this change for some other reason (trying to fix an exploit, server stability) and didn’t think through the consequences fully. That’s a more likely explanation than “they don’t want people to ever group in this MMO.”
Didn’t read the entire thread, but if this is really intended as the wowhead article suggests, Blizzard needs to change their intentions immediately.
World Quests are garbage content currently. We have no flight whistle, which makes travel time mind-numbing and awful. We can’t group quickly to do world content anymore, which completely ruins that content for a lot of people.
If this was some developers attempt to force people to group up and be more social and stick in a group longer, get over yourself and stop trying to do whatever it is you think you’re doing. You’re not accomplishing what you thought you would, you’re just pissing off your playerbase and making an already lackluster expansion launch significantly worse.
I don’t even really want to do the world content to begin with, making it more tedious is an inexcusably ignorant design decision.
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Is there any need to do world content in Shadowlands? I thought you could get everything elsewhere.
Honestly, I have no idea how important it is later on.
I only discovered how annoying it was because you have to do 3 as part of the campaign. One of the ones I was going to do was an elite WQ and that’s when I discovered the sharding issues and traveled across the zone to do different quests instead.
I don’t know if you fall behind in anything if you just ignore it completely afterwards.
I lvled from 50 - 55 in Bastion and saw a total of 3 players, A spriest ( Alliance ) and 2 paladins ( Horde ) now granted I do have Warmode on ( lol 30% exp for free on Alliance OCE realms ) I expected a lot more as it’s an xpac release and my server list states that we are high / full.
Now I have no issue soloing content as I am in heroic gear and a Hunter but so many others are not so lucky.
Just a silly un-needed change. If Blizzard was bothered with punishing exploiters things like these stupid restrictions would not be needed.
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Guys this is CLEARLY on purpose, if it was a bug the tool tip wouldn’t say “go to a sanctuary to join the same phase”.
This was an intended and totally stupid pointless change.
Goodbye to ever grouping up for quests/events/rares ever again (aka the whole reason lots of us play an MMO instead of a single player game.) People will join in a sanctuary, fly/ride to the quest/rare/whatever to “join their team” who will already have long annihilated said quest/rare/whatever.
Wanna try again with a different group? Well back to oribous for you to rinse and repeat.
Once again tedium for the sake of tedium. Blizzard are unreal, they really have outdone themselves on this one. 
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GF and I are in the same area, on the same quests, in the same realm…log off for the night, come back today and can’t group because of this.
What is the intended “benefit” besides player timesink?
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Exactly. If it’s about World PvP, they need to make it only work this way if you’re in War Mode. It’s not that hard.
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I absolutely agree. I’ve always hated it on any MMO (like the failed Funcom games) and it has no place in WoW. What made Blizzard think this would work. I’m sure this is why Icecrown was so laggy. Even though we couldn’t see all the other players, the server was trying to handle 200 people killing each rare in different shards of one server at one time and couldn’t handle it. I’m sure that’s going to be a problem on max level world bosses soon too. And I really shouldn’t need to go to Oribos every time I want to group with my friends.
Yep. Exact same situation here.
Really awful and pointless.
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It seems to be fixed now. I joined a Humon’gozz group and everyone phased to the same shard.
I was just leveling with friends and had to go to oribos to be phased in with them, so i’m not sure about that
I’ll tell you, if I had known about this I so would not have resubbed and paid for 6 months 
At least Blue posted in another page about an hour ago that they fixed this except for the Upper Level Maw… not sure really what that entails. I really feel that my money was wasted
Whelp @Everyone… This was NOT INTENDED. This was changed as of tonight and hotfixed. Here is the blue post. Ty @Blizzard for addressing this. 
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/grouping-in-the-shadowlands/736070
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Classic had layering, which is a 100x better system than what CRZ and Sharding has ever been. I also never had any lag or anything with the classic launch.
I get the reasons for Sharding, but it should be for the connected realms only, or to be replaced with layering. As for CRZ that should be invite only and not forced like it is now. Then i would play retail again.
I want to play and meet people from my own connected realms, i don’t care for randoms from other servers as people really don’t talk with each other or interact with each other. The people you see from other realms not connected to yours might as well be NPCs, all forced CRZ and sharding has done is made the open world feel fake and it doesn’t feel like what WoW use to be like before these poorly made systems was forced upon the game.
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This is KILLING roleplay in cities right now. What were once filled zoned in WRA for Horde and SW areas on Moon Guard are now filled with maybe 5-9 people. It’s absolutely ridiculous. Now I figured Blizzard was just doing it for the invasion event due to the amount of people that would turn into ghouls and do all that jazz, but now that its passed and people want to roleplay… there is literally nobody to roleplay with. What’s the point of playing this game if there’s nobody to play it with? Seriously.
But hey, at least Moon Guard’s most famous inn filled with smut and ERP is still in working action, right? Thanks Blizzard, glad to know what side you’re on.
oh man, i tried to sync with someone doing quests in the maw. it was a nightmare. tried everything. it works in some places fine then sync just croaks for certain quests. it is the most frustrating system i’ve yet to encounter. when it works fine it is fantastic though.
the maw part was today, during EST afternoon.