Phasing is out of control and breaking this game

Community General Discussion
1

I don’t know why this is happening but every few minutes for the past few months, I seem to get phased into a different instance of the game. It’s not just happening to me either. Everyone in general chat talks about it when it happens. It is extremely frustrating for several reasons.

-Many of us are still trying to get the Elemental Lariat design, which is only possible from Elemental Storm rares which only spawn every like 30 minutes in an elemental storm, each of which happen only last 2 hours. Multiple times now, one has spawned and we all start gathering to kill it and poof, it disappears! Maybe as a side effect, I’m also often seeing the same one spawn like 3 times in a row, whereas before this phasing nonsense started, they seemed to rotate properly. Maybe that was always a problem and I just got lucky by coincidence, so I’m not sure on this one.

-In Dreamsurge portal events, we’ll be killing and killing and killing the fire peeps, and we got to like 95% on the bar and poof, we phased into a shard where no portal was even happening. Wasted like 10 minutes.

-In Researchers Under Fire, I’ve been working some with a good group of people, and suddenly, poof, we get phased into a shard where no one was working on it. We switch from being in say, part 4/12 back to being in part 2/12, with no increase in time to finish it, making us have to redo the parts we’d already finished and doomed to not being able to complete it.

-In Dragonbane Keep, it takes a long time to kill enough stuff to make those keys. We were working on Morchok Reformed turn-ins just now. We were at 6/10. Poof! We phased and it was back to 0/10. All that wasted effort. Remember how people were always working this area before? Now I understand why all the key turn-ins have been showing 0/10 recently. We can’t get to 10/10 before they all reset.

-I haven’t seen this myself, but I’ve heard people mention they’ve lost planted seeds in the Emerald Dream due to phasing. I’m sure that’s frustrating too.

-There’s probably a ton more problems due to this feature that I haven’t witnessed.

Blizzard, you mentioned at the beginning of this expansion that you were going to try to serve higher quality content like what was done in Legion, where there was always something fun to do. A big aspect to that though was the content was more fun and felt less grindy and the story was better written. But now, we can’t even do the grindy stuff because of this phasing when we are in the middle of this content. It’s breaking the game. Please fix it.

31 Likes
2

the best is when you’re in a group with a bunch of player for a super bloom, then 2 second later it’s you and 1 other person.

especially given u have to progress the bar for cache

14 Likes
3

I had figured there’s a ton more stuff that I just hadn’t experienced myself. That’s rough! All the more reason to fix it.

2 Likes
4

I have experienced this myself and see it as a huge problem Blizz has not figured out how to manage server shards on a level that a novice network administrator should know how to do. I understand there are algorithms to combine shards/server space when population changes over a certain percentage and that makes sense in the areas of profitability and business, but in the overarching delivery of the product of gaming it creates problems like this.

Perhaps don’t let Business Executives dictate policy on system management when it affects the product delivery?

4 Likes
5

What they did was switch a lot of servers to CRZ grouping from server/connection specific which means a lot more players in the area and a lot more shards. It really is bad. On my server the game almost isn’t playable in the mornings because they want to fill up shards (I am guessing) and they don’t really care what you were doing.

This happens probably once a week to me and it is annoying.

2 Likes
6

One fix would be to lock to the group leader’s home realm. It could be a problem if the group leader suddenly leaves, I suppose, but it would be something. It would also be great for people stranded on tiny realms with lots of rares up, people would rush to join their groups.

7

This happened in Legion, where they went through multiple attempts to make grouping for world content tolerable. The issue was that when you joined a group, it might be on a PvP realm, and you would stay on that realm indefinitely. At one point they had it so the entire group would phase to the new leader’s realm after the previous leader left, and that meant a lot of people suddenly on a PvP realm with no idea what had happened.

2 Likes
8

Well there are no more strict pvp realms, so maybe worth another look? At least now you could hearth and turn of war mode.

2 Likes
9

At the time the problem was that people who had no intention of doing PvP were put on PvP realms without their knowledge.

2 Likes
10

It is a problem, but will never be fixed since Ion and Co don’t care about open world content and it’s problems. Might as well just get use to it. We have to accept this current Dev team doesn’t care about quick fixes unless it’s dungeons or raids.

5 Likes
11

Definitely had it happen, lol.
I dont do any content that matters so its just an annoyance on my end, though

12

My favorite is starting a new purple dreamseed, getting it up to 50ish dewdrops, then phasing while putting in the dewdrops and suddenly I’m adding dewdrops to a new one— and don’t get my first one to loot. So I’m stuck with a 10 dewdrop green seed and wasted the purple and didn’t get the rep.

5 Likes
13

Don’t forget the you can’t do that because you have a nearby chest to loot still message that follows.

14

There’s another thread where folks are reporting instances of this happening:

15

I remember getting stuck on Oceanic servers with the resulting lag.

16

This wasn’t happening until they switched from connected realm only to CRZ zones this expansion. All they need to do is not CRZ the areas then there will be less people in the areas and little to no need for extra shards.

It is so annoying that the people who claimed the world was dead which resulted in CRZ were mostly on RP servers and they don’t experience all the problems everyone else has to deal with with CRZ.

1 Like
17

I feel like there are multiple dev factions:

  • One which feels everyone who does world content should have to solo it to prove they earn their rewards, and it should be challenging;
  • One which feels the only valid purpose of world content is to force people who don’t want to join groups to get used to helping the people who really matter achieve their goals;
  • One which feels that world content should be boring, tedious, and give no rewards, believing this would push casuals into elite content.

None of these are having their intended goal realized.

2 Likes
18

I don’t begrudge people for phasing into new threads to talk about this issue.

2 Likes
19

we got phased 2 times in around 5 minutes earlier this week. was on the emerald dream world boss and he was down to around 25-30% and the whole group phased to another shard and we pulled new boss lol. he gets down to around 60% and we phased again.

5 Likes
20

The phasing is really starting to get a bit out of hand. I have lost several purple dream seeds due to phasing. World boss phases, Time Rifts phase, Dream Surges phase, superbloom phases, World Quests phase. There really isn’t much of anything I have done in game in the last several weeks that hasn’t phased in one way or another.

I have watched a group of druid bots use phasing to their advantage for tacklebox farming. They phase in at point A, fly around looting tackleboxes at points B, C, D, E then fly back to point A and immediately phase out. They phase back in about 5-7ish minutes later, fly around looking for tackleboxes then fly back to where they started {Point A) and phase out again.

This isn’t fun. I really do not like having to do the same thing 2 or 3 times just to get credit for doing it when 1 time should be enough.

2 Likes