Now watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xio19CieMc
This is WITH sharding. Imagine what would be without. If you think this is good and is “true vanilla experience” you are beyond stupid.
If you think sharding is going to “solve” that you’re fooling yourself. Sharding moves the problem into the next zones.
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Topic is about starting zone. Justify this.
Okay.
Say player cap is 3000 people, roughly what it was in Vanilla. That’s 500 people roughly per starting zone. It’s over crowded and hard to get anything done. Now shard all those people off into small easy to manage chunks. Now all 500 people in those starting zones are going to pour into their level 10-20 zones at roughly the same time. Yes there will be some ahead of the pack and some stragglers, but the majority are going to hit 10-20 roughly the same time. There is no sharding in the 10-20 zones. Now that problem in the video you linked, comes and smacks you in the face in the 10-20 zone.
So you get people on the forums saying that it’s too hard to play/level past level 10 because the zones are over crowded. So blizzard turns on sharding in those zones. Then the problem gets shifted to 20-30 and then 30-40 and so on and so forth until the entire game is sharded.
So you’re left with a choice. Where do you draw the line on sharding?
Do you tell people in the level 10-20 zones to just suck it up and deal with the competition? If that’s your answer why do we need sharding at all? Just tell people in the starting zones to suck it up.
The other option is to just put sharding in permanently.
And think about this. If Blizzard’s servers can’t handle a few hundred players in the most basic gear possible, how are they going to handle something like SSvTM, with 100+ level 60s aoe spamming and elaborate gear?
Because if the starting zones will kill the servers without sharding, SSvTM will cremate them.
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That is actually a very good point. I understand now. Thanks.
To be completely honest, I think you miss the point. It usually took 4 hours to level a dwarf to the point where he would be ripe for Loch Modan. Most people don’t have this amount of time to play in a single day. Honestly, it doesn’t seem very much that sharding the starting zones will create a chain effect and spread sharding all over the place. After a few days, the population will be all distributed (unevenly, for sure) throughout the world and sharding won’t be needed.
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Because tons of people never take days off for the launch of games they want to play.
Yes.
But 4 hours is a lot of time for a “BfA tourist”. There will be lots of them, and most won’t be present in the 10+ zones.
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You say that until you shard the starting zones and make it easy for them and then they realize they kind of like Classic more then Mordern WoW and decide to stay and they all start trying to make Classic better for them not what Classic was meant to be.
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Well if they use sharding after the beginning rush, people wont play. Its that simple.
They know what is at stake.
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We will never know how succesful the game will be until it’s 6 months past it launch.
They have though the steep subscription decline numbers after expansion launches since Cata. They have the profile of the “modern gamer”. We know a portion will indeed realize they just wanted a nostalgia shot. We know a portion will realize they are not truly gamers anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the game has an objectively better design philosophy, but there are so many things pointing towards a huge decline in the first month…
And sharding IS a switch. Some people are worried about Blizzard lying and using sharding not only in the starting zones… but they can just lie about “no sharding” and end up activating it. We have to “trust” them either way.
So…what is it that makes classic, well, classic? For me quests, professions, talent trees, zones, PvP, and class quests. So what if sharding will be a thing. I get to play the game I love. That all of a sudden means I don’t want it?
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This is TRUTH PEOPLE!!! PLEASE JUST BELIEVE US
All I can say is if sharding is in the game past starter zones for the first week or so, Blizzard will lose someone who’s been a subscriber for the most part of 14 years. I’m tired of modern WoW, and I have been hopeful for Classic.
It will be incredibly sad if I have to look to some Russian in his basement for a real Blizzard experience, but we do what we must.
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Yeah capital cities in general are a part of every starting zone quest line, and not just those questlines that send you to the next zone, so technically they could be considered starting zones. While (hopefully) people won’t be waiting in cities waiting for their LFD queue to pop, they are certainly hubs that draw more than 50 people at one time and could create the whole FPS lag thing they claim they want to avoid because apparently it makes the game unplayable.
I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I’m wrong, but capital cities are prime candidates for lingering shard-creep beyond “starting zones only in the first few weeks” promise that’s not actually promised but just put out there as a test balloon to see how it strikes people’s intuitions.
Where do people keep pulling this 50 person number out of, retail shards easily hold more than that.
I had a witty response to this post …
… but it ended up in a different thread.
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When the pre-patch stuff in Darkshore (a vanilla zone!) was happening, I would pretty regularly get sharded with the massive 40-man bounty farming groups. If I joined a defense group with people in the same shard we would often get moved to a different shard at that point.
It may be more than 50, but it’s not much more than that.
50 is just an easy number to work with. Low enough to be believable but large enough to be large.
I am comfortable with them using sharding for launch in low starting zones, i dont think they will be stupid enough to have it everywhere all the time
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