Phasing Seems Broken

Community General Discussion
1

I just rolled up on a dream portal event that was 60% done and joined it.
I was immediately phased to one that was only 10% done with no one around.
I spent 10-20 minutes working that one up to 100% alone.
Right after I engaged the boss, I get phased to a shard where a different boss for the event had just been killed and everyone was mounting up and taking off.

Today alone, I have engaged 5 or more rare spawns only for them to immediately phase out, often leaving me in an uncleared shard surrounded by enemies, sometimes elites, but never with the rare spawns I was pursuing.

I also suspect that I’ve flown to rare spawns and been phased before reaching them, because I’ll get there seconds after it should have died and find no corpse, no players lingering, no cleared mobs, etc. Very rarely, I’ll kill a rare, get phased, and the rare will be spawning again in front of me.

This is driving me nuts. It’s like the only permissible way to play the game is to fly around looking for zergs that have almost killed something and then jump in and tag it and hope you don’t get phased before you loot the corpse.

The strict timing of all these events, the zergs that are completely uncoordinated, the feeling of being pulled in 5 different directions at once by timers and spawns and then still getting the rug pulled out from under you by phasing all contribute to this feeling that I imagine is similar to how my dog feels when I toss 5 treats into the air to distract him while I slip out the door.

That is, I feel like all of this is just a “clever” way to try to control the speed at which players make their way through content. A subtle way of delaying progress by adding immense travel time, and obscuring the RNG of much of it by making the events periodic.

It doesn’t feel great, imo. I miss when I could just spend a day exploring every nook and cranny of a zone and completing all of its content without having to worry about the 12 other timers going off that I’m incentivized to do immediately while it’s current instead of waiting until it’s a slog in a past expansion.

I feel like there’s zero coziness in Dragonflight. There’s always a timer or something adding tension to anything you do.

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2

You’re not the only one I hear complaining about this and I’ve had very similar experiences although not as often as you’ve described. With the high frequency I hear about these incidents I believe you.

I’ll add that Phasing in Warmode On is terrible, I know there are players in other shards all around me who are also alone but we can’t play together/ kill each other due to sharding and phasing restrictions. I’d like to see some of these layers peeled away to increase the Warmode On player count per zone by about 30% in Current Content Dragonflight Zones.

Leveling up in Legacy Zones with Chromie time feels like a ghost town, you might encounter 3 opposite faction players between level 10 and 70 and odds are good you won’t be the same level. I would suggest removing Sharding/phasing/layering whatever all together in Legacy Zones while both Chromie time and Warmode are active.

Not entirely related to your post but I wanted to add this example to showcase that Phasing as a whole is in desperate need of reform.

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Just to clarify. Phasing is a state in the game where a player is in a different phase of the game due to the content they are currently doing (like a quest that takes you into another reality of the game). Sharding is when a shard of a part of the server is created to decrease the population and a player or players are shifted to that new shard.

So I’m assuming you mean that you feel sharding is broken, not phasing.

And I tend to agree with you. I turned up at Razor Hill to find it completely empty, except for NPCs and the eggs. Not long after another player arrived. While I was there, we were the only two players in that location. Obviously, that shard was dysfunctional. And similar things as you described have happened to me, where an Elite disappears in front of me, or suddenly shifts to full strength again with different people.

Phasing wouldn’t be removed, due to certain quests that require a player to be in a different phase because of the storyline the quest follows. An example would be a character levelling up in Stormwind where Anduin is in the throne room for a quest - obviously now Anduin isn’t in the throne room.

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Everything is broken at the moment. The state of the game across the board is a mess.

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Good point. Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. I have had some issues with phasing for years, probably going back to WotLK, where I’d go for a mob or an ore or herb node only to find it was on the edge of a phase boundary I could travel back and forth between. It usually seemed to be related to quests in the area.

And the Razor Hill thing tends to happen to me at events like the Big Dig if I relog or change characters. I’ll be there 5 minutes early with 20 other players, then decide to check an alt real quick or come do the event on an alt instead, but when I arrive the shard will be empty or have only 1 or 2 other people in it.

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6

Just had a Dream Surge fire portal despawn, likely due to phasing problems.

Also have had dream seeds despawn as everyone around me diaappeared, completely wasting time and reaources.

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7

World of Warcraft and bugs.

Name a more iconic duo.

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8

Dang I had that happen when it first came out I haven’t been over there in months now…and still they don’t fix bugs…

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This is actually a sharding issue that many players have noted but zero blue responses on it despite sharding issues being existent since legion.

I have a GD thread linked to my CC thread when I was still on the council in hopes some day a dev will notice it. Feel free to post every experience you have with sharding issues here as I can no longer update my CC thread with additional found threads on the topic:

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But…but plunderStorm.

LMAO.

:man_surfing: :surfing_woman:

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There is an add-on that will show when you swap shards, it’s one of the rare tracking add-ons but I forget the name. Used it when I was tracking down the druid forms in Emerald Dream.

EDIT - and you’d be surprised at how often you DO get swapped.

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12

Happened to me a lot when farming Cobalt rep. Especially annoying if you mowed down a bunch of mobs and phased before you could loot them.

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13

I’ve lost out on a bloom I’d planted because I changed layer before it finished growing.

Just waiting for the day when I finally find that last rare I need from Zaralek or Timeless Isle and then get screwed out of it at the last second…

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14

Also, what about Plunderstorm?

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15

They should of fixed sharding instead of spending time on Plunderstorm . Sharding has made my mind up about next xpax I will not buy it tell Sharding is fixed .

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16

Sharding has been breaking open world events all expansion but it’s been particularly bad lately.

My record is 3 times in 45 minutes waiting for Karokta.

And no rares spawn in ZC for the first 45 minutes of a shard, so if you keep getting bumped to freshly generated shards every 15-20 minutes you could stay there for hours and literally never see a rare.

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17

I suspect what’s happening is sharding used to be balanced by hand. Servers X,Y,Z use this shard for this zone. Originally done to cut down on server costs since every server doesn’t need it’s own shard for every area. So unless you were cross server grouped you were on the default shard you were assigned to.

The increasing focus on open world group content created zone lag problems by focusing a lot of people into a small area. So now they’re working on dynamic load balancing and learning all the nuanced problems that can create.

Again with the extreme speculation here, I think they focused too much on the existing ability to shard hop toons that we have with cross sever grouping. Instead of trying to predict when a shard will get too busy and then spinning up a new shard and throwing new comers onto the new shard, they’re just load balancing us across all the existing shards in a ham fisted way.

And to be fair, I haven’t been seeing the zone lag problems we’ve been having since at least BfA. ( other than elwyn forest with the event ) But it is creating a lot of other problems like this and frequently being on a different valdraken shard then same server, same guild, bnet friended players.

And if this is what’s happening, it’s not a trivial problem.

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18

Sharding is objectively terrible and shouldn’t be fixed, it should be removed.

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