On a non-RP megaserver, capital cities are in a freeze frame mode.
Well they need to turn that back on in Stormwind on Moon Guard.
Yeah, we’re talking about the RP servers specifically though.
I have TRP3, I can see how many people are actually around on all the phases. It’s like tens of people in Stormwind at any given time, now, partially because people don’t see a point in going there with sharding on. And even with the small amount of people there, you can still only see like ten other people ping-ponging around the city at a time.
That’s an extremely light amount of people in the city, normally the server is fine with much more than that. Roleplayers are largely fine with a bit of lag if it means that our hobby is possible, though, I’m sure there will be some as the hamsters get spun back up. It’s not like we’re doing PVP or fighting raid bosses in the middle of the city, if it takes half a second for chat messages to post it’s no big deal.
Sharding was needed for sure right at launch, the Dragonflight quests bottlenecked through Stormwind and Org and people were having problems even getting on the boats. It’s three weeks later now though and things are fine, everyone who’s doing content has spread out to the Dragonflight zones. Sharding got turned off on RP servers for legacy content (including the capitals) two weeks after Shadowlands launch with similar issues with the expansion starting quests running you through your faction’s capital.
Other, normal servers will get to keep their sharding, it’s a special ruleset just for RP servers.
They never remember to turn it off unless we rabble, so we’re rabbling.
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They could be using a number of technologies (maybe containers?), but EC2 is a good choice for legacy server software like wow, which likely has a lot of old cruft from yore when the cloud wasn’t so lively.
I wouldn’t say sharding is cheaper. Sharding is a way to scale horizontally. Vertically will usually be more cost effective since you are wasting less on unused power, but this comes at the cost of player experience since you will be maxing it out and having the server performance suffer.
Of course, on RP servers, we don’t care that much about latency in our experience… we just care about seeing people… I’d also argue the same for any server. Back on Mannoroth I would hang out with a few people around the city between raids. Fun stuff.
I really didn’t mind the wait times to log in or whatever other drawbacks there were with the previous approach to help the servers. Having a consistent way to creep up on any other player was great.
Here’s hoping this garbage gets turned off today after maintenance. 
Please, Blizzard. 
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Looks like no luck so far. Need the bare minimum out of blizzard here please.
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Use the trp map feature and you will see hundreds of people there, so, not all that accurate. Sharding has made it bad there.
Are they for real still not turning this back on?
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so i just logged in and right now Orgrimmar on WrA looks more like a CRZ than anything. Is this how it is on MG-Alliance rn? If they divided us from rpers even more I’m going to cry lmao
I can’t really tell. There aren’t that many people around in SW on MG at this time of day. Will check later.
Still on, still annoying.
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I’m seeing more people than usual at a time this morning, but I may have just lucked into a fairly populated shard.
There are currently two shards that I can find. Both are relatively populated, so it looks like everything’s fine- it’s not. It’ll become more obvious as more people start logging in.
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It’s still not off?
Come on, Blizzard. Why do we have to shout your ear off and beat down your doors for you to do something as simple as a switch flip? 
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Still not off. Lole. Lmao. 
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Blizzard please. Unshard Stormwind on RP servers. I know you want people to do content but I want to get into a guild to do said content and finding an RP guild requires some RP and you can’t do that while in a ghost town.
Pretty please? With ice cream and gum drops?
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Pretty dejected by this 
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idea 
keep shards off always and make the non rpers leave the realm to avoid lag 
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Single-handedly ruining my DF RP experience. And I’m loving the expansion outside of this.
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(and orgrimmar / all cities)
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