As a WoW Portal Room Community Partner, The Warcraft-RP Tavern Discord has the opportunity to gather and share feedback with WoW! And we are asking for your help right here on the forums.
We need RPers (and others) to share clear and concise feedback on sharding on RP Realms and specifically to how it affects roleplay and RPers with regard to SMC and other hub cities.
We’re looking for any comments, opinions, screenshots, quotes, or summaries that are relevant to your negative experiences with sharding, what you think about it, what suggestions you may have, etc.
Please keep language positive. Do not post jokes. Please stay on topic. Once we have enough feedback, it will get forwarded to Blizzard and they can review. I can’t promise results, but we’re being urged to send them our opinions. So, let’s go!
(If you’d rather post directly to the Discord, here’s the link https://discord.gg/w8U7yWfuDY Look for the WoW Portal Room Feedback channel.)
12 Likes
Blizzard has been consistently destroying Roleplay opportunities with capital cities in expansions doing sharding for a long time now, specifically I remember how bad it was with Boralus. But with Silvermoon, it was more frustrating because we lost a Roleplay hub for Horde-Roleplay, even if people can access old SMC. Everyone wants to use the new toy,but the new toy doesn’t work properly because Blizzard is allergic to letting current content areas have their own server population, and limiting the amount of characters to a certain amount. The result is that you go to a content zone and you have 100 people, most of which aren’t Roleplayers or will grief roleplayers if they see them, so even though I selected the Roleplay server option, there’s not guarantee that I will ever see that from other players. It’s why Stormwind and Org are the only places to find Roleplay on this Roleplay server, and that isn’t right.
Sharding in general has been a nightmare for any organization or running public events in anything remotely adjacent to current content. Even older content and areas that are used for the World’s Faire or ToA gets hit with sharding issues regarding Timewalking and Chromie time. It’s gotten more and more difficult to have open Roleplay out in the world with events because of how many layers can exist at once, not to mention being shunted into different server states with a group invite.
Why there isn’t just a dropdown menu to select a phase like every other MMO that uses this system, I don’t know. Cryptic figured this out in 2009, Runescape even earlier and pretty much every other MMO that has shards or phases simply allows you to pick. In WoW, you have to fight with sever/battlenet/raids/LFG just to figure out the magic switch to get into the proper phase for an RP event, and even then, god forbid you join another group that may shunt you out of said phase.
17 Likes
Bring back world defense channel!
2 Likes
An RP phase would be amazing.
7 Likes
Well, I don’t know if this is the kind of post that is being looked for here but…
I don’t see what the point is about adding all these super cool immersive cities, with ‘living’ NPCs and little events and creative little hidey-holes that are ripe for RP…If Blizzard isn’t going to make them usable for RP.
Normal players don’t care. They don’t. They’re fixed on raiding and pushing keys, maybe PVP. All the immersive stuff that is being added, the bulk of the players DO NOT care about. They’re not even reading the quest text and they’re only sticking around when dialogue script runs because the quest requires them to do so. If they’re not just tabbing out or taking a bathroom break while it all plays.
If the effort that was put into all the various locations, the level of detail, the scripting, the imaginative thoughts behind all of it, is to be enjoyed and made worth the time (and money) that was spent to make them…Then allow the playerbase that cares actually be able to utilize these spaces. Roleplayers care. Roleplayers claim spaces for events and bring attention to all these spaces that have been put in the game, sometimes even unconventionally…Or long after the era that content was added in is long over.
It INCREASES the game’s life for the individuals that participate in the events. That like to log into WoW as a ‘second life’ or even as a social platform. Which for business means that person is gonna keep paying that subscription.
Sharding what is essentially the single most immersive, RP-friendly city in the game is such a bad idea and it needs to end. I get there’s technical reasons why it was happening, but launch is over. It’s time to make the city usable for RPers without forcing them into convoluted ways to circumvent it.
Otherwise, why even bother with the effort in the first place?
Apologies if this is disjointed and rambling. I’m tired.
15 Likes
Half the joy of rp is just encountering people in the world, especially friends! Unfortunately sharding negatively impacts this as we’re often shunted together with folks from other servers, sometimes at the expense of folks on our own realm. A special rp mode would separate those looking for RP from those just looking to game without removing the benefits of sharding to server stability and so forth. That’d be my suggestion. But to put it simply, sharding makes the world feel much emptier than it is and kills spontaneity in roleplay
7 Likes
As a guild leader of a Role-play guild, and someone who’se primary joy in WoW is immersive RP, I would LOVE for cities to be sharded/phased for RP.
You enter a city and you are transported to a phase with others who are walking around, interacting together in-character.
And, in this phase, having an option of removing NPCs from shops, restaurants and other buildings would make those spaces useable as set pieces for those wanting to bring life to cities as shopkeeps.
It is very disruptive to be playing out a scene and having a bunch of players who aren’t interested in RP, mounting up, running through scenes, putting down toys, spamming chat.
9 Likes
All sharding/layering etc is bad and should be removed from the game, just my opinion which is the correct opinion heheheheh. This includes even the non-RP realms. I will once again complain about the time in warmode when my friends and I tried to do warmode quests only to get camped and killed by an Alliance raid. So we decided to form our own raid, only for the layering to kick us into our own layer and there was no Alliance raid for us to fight. Then the moment we dropped raid, we’d get pushed back into the layer with the Alliance raid and PVP didn’t happen. It sucked and was not fun! I hate layering! It’s the worse thing to have happened to this game.
I still remember in the ye olde days when servers still felt like they had an identity and community. I remember hanging out in Orgrimmar and recognizing certain guild names and character names. Remember when bad behavior actually had consequences because if you were a ninja looter or guild bank thief, people wouldn’t play with you.
I know there’s technical/performance issues having everyone shoved into a single layer instance but it’s not 2006 it’s 2026 there has to be better hardware and programming that can resolve for this.
Otherwise, I do like the idea of being able to select the layer/shard you are in. I figured if we had something like that, the community would naturally drift towards prefer layers to RP in and if people disrupt/troll you can bounce around to avoid the disruption.
7 Likes
The ability for players to choose the phase they occupy would go a long way towards improving how rpers deal with it, even if there isn’t one or two specifically reserved for rp. Simply being able to designate and visit a phase/shard for people looking to roleplay to congregate would solve a big problem folks face regarding it.
I personally would prefer this than to remove the system altogether as, at least in cities, I imagine the latter would cause problems with the general playerbase; especially on high pop servers during busy days, where people are definitely going to complain about lag. We simply need a refinement of what’s already in place. Something to give players a bit more control over the instances of the world they occupy.
5 Likes
I would also like to add, I don’t mind cross realm sharding too much but wish it would limit RP realms to only cross with other RP realms. I know folks get tilted at the idea of realm mergers but my thought is mainly towards open world game play reasons. Another reason RP realms always appealed to me was seeing other RPers in the open world, whether they’re just RPing or doing content.
Plus idk I like seeing my RP homies from the other smaller realms like Feathermoon, Sentinels or Shadow Council when I’m out and about doing stuff. I play on an RP realm and I want to be around RP players, not randos from PVP/PVE realms. I want RP randos!!
7 Likes
Just thought I’d toss out here that I’m just starting to do an in-depth analysis of the feedback I’ve gotten about this.
If anyone has any anecdotes, suggestions, frustration, or other commentary to share, now’s the time.
I probably won’t have a workable report for about a week.
1 Like
The fact that there’s sharding in the city at all really ruined my hopes of ever doing any form of RP in the zone. Part of the allure of SMC is that it’s an old school icon in Warcraft history made new, and it’s one that BOTH factions can visit now. All of that would have been amazing to roleplay in, but experiencing the sharding issues deflated all of that.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that it genuinely slew any desire to try RPing there, because it constantly seemed to put me in shards with players from WILDLY different servers. One of the joys of being in cities on RP realms is being able to people-watch folks who are in character. Really helps with immersion, you know? The roleplay groups I’ve participated in all wanted to host major events in the city, and all of those plans were struck down the moment the sharding functionality was experienced, and it feels pretty terrible that such a cool zone is engineered in a way that finding RPers consistently is made a difficult task.
It’s a very defeating feeling : \ A lot of these problems could easily be solved by giving players the ability to elect to phase into an RP-specific shard. It would be great if it could function like War Mode does with PVP.
5 Likes
I don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been said, but I wanted to contribute my voice to everyone else’s because yeah, sharding has killed SMC as a potential RP hub. It would have been really stellar to be able to indulge in some cross-faction roleplay with the defenders of the city, but by the time the city is unsharded (if it ever is) we’ll be past that point and on to a weird “is the alliance even allowed here anymore if you’re not an elf” status. Still, it would be nice for the belf guilds and horde mages to have a city to go to. Orgrimmar ain’t it.
I’d also really love if blizzard would consider taking a look at giving us emptied out versions of cities that we’d all love to rp in. I’d give anything to have a version of Suramar that isn’t packed full of enemies. Same for a significant part of Boralus!
5 Likes
I’m REALLY sad Boralus never became another RP hub. Upton Borough was one of my favorite areas in the town and I only found RP a few times there. : \ Still, would absolutely love to see more things to bring life into old cities.
4 Likes
Uptorn Borough has a lot of very cute little shops, and comfortable little gathering spots. The whole city is just chock full of interesting little spots to rp in, and so many of them are intermittently under attack, or always occupied by hostile npcs. Even if sharding is never fixed I’d love for an npc like the one in the Arcantina or Gilneas that I can talk to, and send me to an empty version of major cities and subzones so my friends and I can use them.
They experimented with this in Gilneas, with an NPC you can speak to that sends all NPCs away for a day, clearing a space out. I wish they would add this option to other locations, towns, villages. This would be amazing for RP purposes.
1 Like
Yesssss. It’s an example of phasing that’s actually really helpful for RP. If we could choose which phase we were in so people can better coordinate then being able to empty out major hubs could be a god-send for RP out in the world.
Phasing negatively impacts the social part of the game, especially RP. While not an RP-story per se, I was trying to find my brother in old Silvermoon one time and realized that I could never find him since he was on a different shard.
Choosing your shard should be an option.
3 Likes
I have to agree wholeheartedly. Sharding should be nixed for RP servers. Additionally, the time is past due to merge all the RP realms into one. A game only needs one for every 2 million players these days.
The best solution is to get your Battle.net account saved to the default phase ahead of the event. Often times the event host is maxxed out on micromanagement resulting in some players getting left behind. This way when joining later, you will not need to use the LFG too due to your character still being saved to default phase. You will be able to act as a secondary anchor picking up those left behind by accident too.