Classic will be pointless if they shard every thing
2 Likes
Using your numbers, what happens when those 1600, or a large portion of them, move from Elwynn to Westfall and there are hundreds of people competing for that Defias messenger or the Defias traitor?
Even worse, What happens when a good portion of those 1600 people in Durotar and 1600 in Mulgore move into the Barrens and there are hunreds or thousands people in The Barrens fighting over zhevra hooves?
IMO, it is far to spread the population out via additional servers and NOT sharding.
I repeated a suggestion made by another poster that could accomplish the goal of reducing that competition while at the same time reducing many of the negatives of sharding.
Instead of having “fluid shards”, what if Blizzard could create “stable, semi permanent, shards” by dividing the larger servers into smaller “subservers” until the initial rush is over.
As an example, the server Elwynn with a total population cap of 10K is “divided” into “subservers” Elwynn 1, Elwynn 2, Elwynn 3 and Elwynn 4, each of which have a population cap of 2500. When a player chooses the Elwynn server, a list of available “subservers” is presented to the player and they choose a “subserver”. These “subservers” would not be subject to further sharding and would remain separate from each other, as if they were completely different servers.
Every player who chooses, for example, Elwynn 1 is always on that “subserver” in the same “shard” and never has to deal with seeing players, mobs, quest objectives, resources, etc. disappearing or reappearing. This should address the issues of server stability and competition for mobs, quest objectives, resources, etc. while also promoting community and player interaction.
If the population drops precipitously on any of the “subservers”, for an extended period of time, they can be merged with another “subserver”. For example, if Elwynn 1 drops from 2500 to 1200 players and Elwynn 3 drops from 2500 to 1100, Elwynn 3 can be “merged” with Elwynn 1 and Elwynn 1 would have a population of 2300.
The naming rules could be set to apply at the larger server level, rather than at the “subserver” level, such that there can only be one BillyBob, for example, between the subservers. This would prevent naming conflicts should one or more “subservers” need to be “merged”.
How difficult would it be for Blizzard to work something like this out? I don’t know, but I believe that Blizzard could do far worse than looking into whether such an idea is feasible.
2 Likes
You have a point, but there’s a reason I didn’t address where people went after elwynn. They’ll inevitably spread out. People won’t clear the zones in the same time frame, which will help. They’ll also spread out towards redridge mountains, and duskwood. They’ll do dungeons. Some will slow down to grind their professions(I’m likely to do this). Some will begin their alts. Some will leave after the first zone, mostly the tourists now satisfied that they’ve seen the game and will wait for the low levels to calm down. As for the barrens…yeah that’s just gonna suck, but barrens is real big and I get the feeling that many of those who rolled Kalimdor horde are actively looking for the barrens chat that will result from such madness.
As for the subserver ideas, just no. Creating artificial chasms in the community by never allowing people to interact until one part of that community is too small to sustain itself, then clumsily jamming the two parts together, doesn’t get you a whole community. It gets you a main group with a bunch of outsiders glued on.
It’s not, and never was, about the names: if you have to change a name it probably means it’s not really all that inventive, personal, or unique anyway. Look at my own. No one else is out there running around with Provengreil. It’s never been taken, anywhere, ever. If it is when classic drops and I make my main, my first assumption is that someone’s trolling me over this very post.
However, Night Elf hunter Leggolass is gonna get taken every server.
No, It’s about competition for server firsts, about knowing who your opponents and allies are, and then a progression guild just shows up one day pushing twin emps out of nowhere, or an unseen guild name suddenly smashes arathi basin. You geet everyone on the server suddenly asking who the heck those guys are/were. It’s inorganic, jarring, and much more disruptive in total than a couple weeks of extra fluidity.
3 Likes
Sharding or not I will play the game. I don’t want sharding but I’d rather play an official wow classic instead of a private server imo.
1 Like
Honestly i would rather deal with sharding than tweaked re spawn timers or dynamic re spawns.
Its annoying as heck to clear a cave get to the end and then have to clear it out again just to leave. I am not talking a big cave either, something the size of the yeti cave by tarren mill
2 Likes
Sharding is death.
This is a quote from elysium private servers community manager. If blizzard doesnt feel the same way the private servers have good reason to stay up.
“Its a community thing. What drove [vanilla] was the individual communities of each server. We knew who the great players were. We knew the great guilds. We knew the ‘personalities’ of each server. Who to look up to, who to follow, who to avoid. We had rivalries, adversaries, etc. This was all lost as Blizzard merged this and that and blurred the lines of our server communities,” says the community manager. “Classic will devolve quickly in to a competition of numbers crunching guilds whose sole purpose is to achieve server firsts, then fade away as the community factors that kept people logging in after the server firsts have been accomplished are completely absent.”
6 Likes
How far can people spread out in Westfall?
And here we have the root of the desire for sharding, folks:
“It’s about competition for server firsts”
That’s all it is. Some people see all those other players (in an MMO, mind you) as nothing but obstacles standing in the way of “server first” that should be sharded into oblivion. They want nothing more than convenience and a fast track to level cap.
What happens when they realize that they cannot level as fast as they can in retail? How long do you think it will be before the first cries to nerf and “speed up” leveling hit the forums or even in game chat?
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BC was awesome. Hellfire was full to bursting, and I loved it.
Sharding would eventually kill WoW classic, because it completely removes any server community, and I believe this game will only survive off the strength of a tight community.
It may be hard for any modern players to realize how important it was, but in vanilla you would often run into the same people while leveling. Because you spent so much more time in each zone, and the same people on that level for each server would be there too. Running dungeons, you’d run into the same people.
Sharding would be just as bad as Group Finder. It changes the game so 99% of the people you see will never be seen again. Turning an in game community into a random mess.
BC was terrible. It was far too many people questing in far too small an area. I hated it.
I am thoroughly shocked at that, Fallanaa.
2 Likes
If they go with servers big enough to warrant sharding your not going to have a tight community
To Whoooooooo?
BC was one of the best versions of the game, backed by sub numbers.
People had so much fun with the Damage Increase Eye Boss at Ogri’La that they nerfed it!
People had so much fun bugging the arena guy for gold that they nerfed it and actioned they accounts involved!
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After 14 years I expect Blizzard to have a handle on how many people will fit nicely into one server, and not require sharding. The questions comes down to will they support enough resources to add more servers, and will they accurately not make too many.
Sharding would only be necessary if they had too many servers with low population. So I’m fine with them “highballing” the number of servers they’ll think they need and using some sharding to start, but over a couple months merge the low servers.
Because the alternative is too few servers, with all of them being highly packed, 1 hour ques to log in, where sharding doesn’t even matter.
They don’t have one server per realm anymore.
They use cloud services.
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I dont think you fully understand what sharding is or that the log in server is different than the game server
I’ve been around since the beta. BC was the absolute worst launch of the bunch since the entire community was crammed into a single zone. you couldn’t get anything done.
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And in Classic there will be six starting areas. Sharding is the least necessary in a Vanilla launch.
2 Likes
Sure you could, just group up with people (preferably those with instant damage abilities) and get er done. Unless you’re talking about the population being too high and the zone lagging in which case that would be on Blizzard for not taking advantage of the massive hardware and software upgrades available over the last 12 years. Servers shouldn’t be choking on a few hundred people in an area.
Not for me day 1 of bc it wasn’t as big of a problem as wrath as.
Couldn’t complete quests in wrath starting area and all my herbs were taken from farmers.
BC wasn’t even bad day 1 but then again I play on pvp servers so if you play on pve its only natural there won’t be any lions killing sheep in your group.