Only if SW is the onmy sharded area and only if you do rp in SW. Whereas multiple events have multiple anchors. For people outside of the server but also in the server.
Sounds like you CAN do this other places outside of SWC and that sharding only happens when the population gets ridiculous, like yanno, in SWC.
You can hold performances n crap in lots of places.
And again, blame Blizz for yet again funnelling the new expansion through SWC and then being forced to turn sharding on for SWC because of it and also blame all the RPers for choosing SWC to do all of their RP in when they had lots of choices from the start.
These two things combined led to your predicament, and one or the other has to change, and I doubt the answer is “turn it off” because there’s just too many people IN SWC because of these two aforementioned problems.
So therefore, you gotta find a way to get some of the people out of SWC and Blizz likely is watching the population of all the shards and it is likely too high for them to turn it off just yet.
Menethil Harbor. Still there technically but thoroughly waterlogged.
In Vanilla through WotLK my alts would stop through there in the late teens/early twenties for a few fairly easy levels so more Redridge and Duskwood quests were yellow instead of orange or red.
I think what’s more likely is corporate processes preventing anyone to do anything for RP servers. “review and turn off the shards on rp realms” is probably somewhere low priority in their gargantuan backlog, and of course this would be a manual change since they aren’t going to invest development time in automations.
It may seem ridiculous that they can’t just flip a switch, but I have worked for companies where you are treated like a robot in an assembly line and cannot work on anything else that is not directly assigned to you, with everything weighted with business value and lowering operational costs. I sure hope that’s not how blizzard operates under their new capitals and I hope devs continue to have some freedom, but 
, being in the dark on our end kinda sucks, so we can only hope to be noisy enough for them to expedite literally pushing a few button (and logging the changes, and not ‘breaking production’, etc.).
As for the argument that sharding is OK, just organize things in discord: hard no. Big disagree!! WoW having a city with literally a hundred+ players roaming about to check out is UNIQUE to the RP megaverse.
- You can’t observe player actions freely and then approach people in-character in a discord community. Instead, you are stuck with, “hey anyone wanna rp with me??” - i.e. a shallow end of begging and random 1-on-1 pairings with little chance of group interaction.
- You can’t easily create a character and spend time in virtual rooms in a discord community. Instead you’re stuck with mostly out of character banter and difficulty finding a place to actually write in-character.
- You can’t have completely organic interactions when everything is orchestrated and organized in a closed off group in a discord community. Sure, you can do cool things, but you can do that anywhere in any game - to think that SW RP is irrelevant for this reason is a glaring oversight.
Turn sharding off and you CAN have a massive community with natural engagement in Stormwind. This is a MAJOR part of WoW RP realms, and anyone saying otherwise is big dumb!!! 
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I just want to thank the one Dracthyr with a trash PC/weird fixation about specifically SW lag for continuing to keep this thread bumped, so we can remind Blizz to turn the dang sharding off.
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“Doing RP in the game where everyone can see and interact with each other is bad, somehow, so why don’t you all mosh pit into Discord instead with no visuals, not using the game that you pay $15 a month for, with no way to make heads or tails of the giant spam wall of people talking and emoting?”
Discord works fine for arranging RP on a lightly populated server or among projects and groups, not for actually holding large-scale events or casual encounter RP.
They do, for walkup RP - the RP that is most common on MG Alliance and WRA Horde - to be possible at all. Sharding has been off on RP servers this whole time aside from brief periods after expansion launches. Walkup RP is a great way to have your character exist in a populated world and have random encounters and meet new people in ways that aren’t preplanned OOC.
It’s nonsense to pitch it out now because…/checks notes…one person has a bad computer and one person gets anxious doing walkup RP and wants people to spread out into the world and use Discord instead.
Sharding is on everywhere, I went to Ironforge and was sharded away from my friend. It’s just that it’s noticeable in areas that people gather for walkup RP.
Having to pre-plan events that can hold 40 people max to RP at all is exactly what makes the ease and lack of fuss of walkup RP appealing. Additionally, when an entire community relies on Discords and people arranging large events, a handful of gatekeepers are empowered to control vast swaths of the RP that happens to make it according to their preferences and standards, which is historically something that has been a problem in the RP community.
Not that you’d know that, since even though you have a lot of opinions on what RPers should and shouldn’t be okay with, you don’t RP at all.
As shown by this here. The Tournament of Ages typically has hundreds of people in attendance at a time. We use addons like Listener to help us sort out conversations when the chat is moving too fast, or if there’s an area event happening the person doing announcements will often do their part in /yell so that the red text stands out over people having their individual conversations.
Again, you don’t get it. You don’t understand the hobby, you don’t participate, and you don’t know how it works. So maybe…sit all the way down, before the Blizz devs think that your opinion is at all common.
Although I guess I’m medium amounts of grateful that your lack of understanding is keeping the thread bumped.
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I mean, that’s cool and all. I’m happy for you playing how you want, and discovering a new interest in a different style of RP.
But walk-up RP is jacked because Blizzard can’t be bothered to tell Larry the Intern to flip a switch in a database. I’ll stick up for you if they jack up your RP, because you’re cool. So why would you come here and argue for jacking up someone elses thing?
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keeping this alive, pls let us get back to rping 
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If you want people to RP in other areas, make public reasons and invite people to them; hubs don’t spawn out of wishful thinking. They’re incentivized through constant activity—which is why people are annoyed that their sharded Stormwind feels DEAD! 
Wanting World RP to flourish, by the way, is NOT mutually exclusive with wanting an unphased Stormwind. Sharding would be (and has been) a pain in the 
for RPers in the world before—It should be rebuffed EVERYWHERE, because it SUCKS.
There is NO good reason for sharding / phasing to have been on for this long; it’s stupid negligence at best. The reason I stay subscribed is to RP with friends and find new ones for that hobby; this backwards, anti-social, asinine system is 
ing suffocating.
TURN IT OFF!
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This is correct. It’s why we begged for sharding to be deleted in the first place.
I really wish it didn’t have to be on a list at all, seeing as how this happens every expansion. 
I’m honestly not sure why these two are being so contrarian.
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I don’t even understand why there’s an argument about it. Blizzard said themselves back when shards and cross-realms were implemented that RP realms were intended to be exempt from it. They just have to keep being reminded to turn it off.
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Just posting here to keep this near the top of General Discussions until the RP realms get the sharding turned off. It’s beyond time for this to happen. We’re getting people asking in trade daily what’s happened to the RPers, or if RP is finally dead. Blizz needs to turn off sharding ASAP before we lose more of the community.
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Hi. Chiming in here that sharding in capital cities is a very dumb idea. I’ve done plenty of RP in the past and it hurts to see the RP community struggling like this when literally every other playstyle has so much love from Blizzard right now.
Here on Moon Guard, Goldshire remains un-sharded. Goldshire! — So why is Stormwind?
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Aaaand it’s still not off.
I guess it wasn’t an ACCIDENT so is Blizzard trying to really go for the “We want to piss the roleplayers off award?” Find out by next Monday.
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TURN IT OFF BLIZZARD!
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Not even sure why Blizzard went the sharding route to begin with. Just combine servers already. Leave just enough so there can be a couple small servers for those that like low pop and one or two RP servers.
Probably because merging servers has bad optics that can set aflame self-prophesying doomsaying (remember how back when sub numbers were still being made public, every tech/gaming news outlet imaginable would report on it and act like the game was on its deathbed? yeah, that).
Also likely because sharding is cheaper — it allows them to turn off empty portions of the world entirely to eliminate their server load, plus the remaining chunks of the world can be run on cheaper Amazon EC2 (I think that’s the right service name, devops peeps plz don’t kill me) instances since each one is only running a small zone with a handful of players who aren’t doing anything intense, whereas to run a whole continent they unavoidably have to scale the instances up which costs more.
What’s even more annoying about this is that they just promoted a documentary about fan creations, including the Tournament of Ages, and that couldn’t exist with sharding. I still assume it’s just an oversight, given recent things they’re probably putting out fires constantly. Just means we need to keep poking to get it removed.
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Don’t worry, I am giving daily reminders with increasing levels of disgruntlement. 
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That’s just the fact that barely anyone plays anymore lol.