Could part of it also be because everyone is doing the new prepatch stuff? Like I get it shouldn’t be this dead and stuff. I’m still just rather new to the rp side and would think something like that would have some effect, even if less.
Log out of your account and log back in. Should show up then.
As much as no sharding would be nice, it’s set up that way so things don’t crash. So the smart thing to do would be rp with people you know in groups and stay away from the event zones and cities.
No, like Jalanili showed in that screenshot, Stormwind is as full as it always is if you check with a TRP scan of players. You just can’t see anyway because of sharding.
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The map of Stormwind above is about what it looks like on a weekend and the server is fine. I can see turning on sharding for the first day or two while people get past the Stormwind quest bottleneck. But most of us are willing to put up with a little lag if it means that the hobby that we do is possible at all without a bunch of hassle and already knowing people.
I was really looking forward to seeing the throngs of new Dracthyr wandering the city, talking to people, I was looking forward to things seeming different. It’s a great conversation starter for meeting new people. Having heavy-handed sharding really took the wind out of the sails of new characters on that.
Add to that the fact that we usually have to rabble pretty hard for them to notice and turn off sharding even when it’s not needed anymore at all, and my wheel is going to keep squeaking.
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I just ran through SW in the Sharded version.
3 People in Mage District, 2 People in Cathedral, 1 Person in Lion’s Rest.
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Which is a NONSENSE low threshold for a new shard, but that’s about how many people I can consistently see around - maybe 10 to 20 in the entire city. Meanwhile, in the elemental invasion zones, there’s forty people at a time standing on your head flashing spells around, you can hardly loot mobs before they despawn and take your items with them because the game is running like a slideshow, and that’s fine?
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What is Gnews?
A nightly news program hosted every night in Stormwind at 9 PM server
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Another day where I log in to an empty Stormwind. I see maybe 3 or 4 people in the entire city.
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Yep. Stiiiiiiilll going.
Three days in, I’m pretty sure most people are through the bottleneck now. C’mon Blizzard!
I wonder if the plan is to leave it like this through the whole prepatch. I wonder if the plan is to leave it like this even after launch 
You know…as I wander the largely empty Stormwind despite my addon map telling me that there are plenty of people around, I think I finally figured out what really feels like one of those moves where people used to take off their glove and smack someone on both cheeks to insult them…
And that’s that there have been a FEW signs lately that the current development team thinks little to nothing about roleplayers. For example, my friends and I have been SCRAMBLING to get ready for the prepatch because Danauser blithely wrote a three-year timeskip into the plot For Reasons ™ without a single concern about how it would affect the ongoing storylines of roleplayers. The fast-forward button universally got pressed on the story of every single roleplayer and they needed to work out how and if they were going to work it into their ongoing stories. Three years of events that I would have rather played out, lost or skimmed over or forced into artificial stasis.
Then, there’s the ongoing disregard for having legacy content be easily soloable. Roleplayers spend TONS of time going and getting the transmogs out of old raids and dungeons.
But most of all, this sharding issue. Some people didn’t hate the timeskip, they were excited to work it into their storylines and jump back in and play out what had changed with them and the people around them. People were super excited to debut their brand new Dracthyr characters and play out their reactions to the cities and the people in them. People were excited to find out how their characters would react to having a billion quasi-dragons underfoot and the looming of a new threat.
That excitement is quickly turning to ash as we wander around mostly-empty cities, at most populated by forty people at a time, spread out, when people manage to find a raid group of huddled roleplayers. Extremely heavy-handed sharding in the city makes the day to day RP that people do outside of their existing social circles functionally impossible, and a new race and world events would have normally been an excellent jumping-off point to spark new interest, new stories and new interactions.
Overall, taken together, it forms the impression that current developers seem to have forgotten the lesson that past teams have eventually given at least grudging nods to, and that’s that roleplayers are the epitome of the game’s bread and butter subscribers:
- We stay subscribed during content lulls
- We don’t really care about having enough fancy, expensive raids and dungeons to do
- We don’t really care about fussy, difficult min/maxing or class balance but we’ll go nuts over neat unique abilities with a cool visual or that can be used in RP
- We buy cosmetics, toys and mounts like crazy
- We are VERY engaged with the IP and post our stories, art and chatter about the game on social media
- If there’s a really neat mount or pet that we want in current content we’re pretty likely to buy a boost with gold to get it
- We grind up time-played numbers like no other group
I don’t want to ascribe actual malice to people when the far more likely cause is just casual, it-didn’t-even-occur-to-us-to-think-about-this-because-none-of-us-RP-and-we-only-invited-a-couple-of-European-roleplayers-to-the-Community-Council disregard, but if I was a developer who was hell bent on forcing people to get into current prepatch content, raids and M+ dungeons I might get the bright idea to purposely disrupt the people ‘just standing around in the city doing nothing all the time’ on the assumption that we’d all just shrug and go kill elementals instead.
The thing is, they’re already making bank off of us for very little effort. We ask for almost nothing in return but that they leave us alone to our sandbox so that we can play Nerdy Barbies With Swords, and in return we will continue giving them fistfuls of our money at every opportunity and promoting their brand for them.
But if you upend our sandboxes in the hopes that we’ll go play on the expensive playground equipment instead, we won’t. We’ll just leave and find a new sandbox.
It’s been a few days. Stormwind on MG normally holds even more people than the number showing up on the map with a scan right now, or more on a busy weekend. The biggest glut of people are past the quest bottleneck.
Turn off phasing and sharding.
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Listen up Blizzard, The Serial Hugger needs to HUG people in Stormwind, I can try to do it out in the Badlands but not sure if it will be efficient with the lag PLEASE STOP THE SHARDING FOR HUGS!!! Vote for Hugs.
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no one could complete the quests in SW if they didn’t create shards. I have been on there when it wasn’t sharded and you couldn’t even turn in or pick up quests.
Take a vacation and RP elsewhere for a month or two.
Spoken like someone that hasn’t ever RPed or doesn’t care about it. Stormwind is the big RP hub, and people would take lag over NOT being able to RP for a month or two on our RP servers which BLIZZARD promised wouldn’t be sharded in old world content as to NOT Interfere with RP server events. But, low level classic alt-trolls wouldn’t know about that.
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I have over 10 characters on moonguard. I pay $ as well - I want to be able to play the game and you can’t without sharding in SW for these events. I can’t change where the quests are but you can choose where to RP.
Blizzard did not promise there would be no sharding in SW - they always said they would for patches and starts of expansions when necessary.
You could, on every other server, even via accepting a group invite from someone on another server. Your problem is fixed, and the RPers problem is fixed because Stormwind in the RP hub, especially walkup RP and random event.
They said there wouldn’t be any sharding in old world - which includes SW. Bye bye, back to classic you go~
not true. I took an interest in the issue
I agree prior to prepatch stormwind had people lining the streets, now it’s a ghost town, feels like im playing on a dead server again.
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I haven’t seen a city THIS dead since that time I went strolling through wrecked Gilneas… I am Legend, but British…
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