People are through the initial bottleneck now. Players are more spread out. It’s been a few days, it’s time to turn sharding off.
I’ll take ‘how do you murder active roleplay’ for $100, Alex. Unless the entire server picks one place en masse, it’s not going to catch on and provide the kind of active walkup ambient RP that MG SW does. I mean, feel free to go wander around Moonglade or Redridge or the Barrens hoping to run into another person, but I’d rather RP in the setting I’ve been doing RP in for like ten years now, thanks. I had plans.
I already arranged all of my storylines around their artificial timeskip, and I wasn’t even one of the many people who was jazzed to bring around their new Dracthyr who can’t even hardly see but a few people around at a time to what-is-this-dinglehopper at.
You’re also assuming that they’ll even remember to turn sharding off when it’s no longer necessary (according to TRP3 maps I don’t see a critical, server-crashing glut of people around compared to your average weekend so that time is likely now) if we don’t rabble-rabble for it specifically, so here’s me, rabbling.
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Just role play that your parents went on vacation and left you home alone and now you have to defeat the robbers before they catch you.
Also you’re Macauley Caulken
I try to /dance in front of the SW AH. 
Sharding is enabled on RP realms only during high traffic periods to preserve as much server integrity as possible. It’s unfortunately a necessary evil at the moment, although when things start to calm down then sharding will be disabled as it normally is.
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;-;
I’ve been /dance 'ing to an empty AH all day.
I am on a high population server with shards and there is still plenty of people in those areas even at 4 am.
Plenty? Yes.
More than the server can handle? I have doubts.
That’s from midday yesterday. While it’s certainly true that not everyone has TRP3 and some might be set to OOC/undiscoverable, that’s true all of the time. And that doesn’t look any different than a normal day in Stormwind, especially if there was some kind of marketplace event in one area and the server can usually handle that just fine.
Only if us who aren’t on an RP server can exclude RP servers from our group finder ques.
they have tried this before and the game wasn’t playable - I am pretty sure they have the necessary information to know when they can turn off sharding and when they need it.
I’m confused on what this has to do with anything. What does being on an RP server and requesting no sharding have to do with LFG, a system based around pulling people from all realms into content like M+ and random queue content?
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Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
I don’t deny that the first day or so it might have been needed to keep people from being stuck and unable to progress with a lagged-out Stormwind. Those kinds of bottlenecks have caused problems before, sometimes, but not always.
But I don’t think that they know when to turn it off, because every other time they’ve introduced “temporary” sharding to RP servers they’ve forgotten to turn it off again until people made enough noise about it.
I’m not saying that they’re hoping that people will go out and do primal invasions and M+es instead, but if you DID want to put an arrow in the knee of a weird hobby that you don’t understand to make the neeeeerds improve your content participation metrics, that would be an excellent way to do it.
That’s just my least generous thought about it, though. Occam’s Razor says that more likely there’s just not anyone in a high enough position who actually does roleplay to nudge the server guys to remind them to turn it off internally.
Many people will be doing those quests when the expansion starts I because they aren’t playing now. So should they turn off sharding for a week and then turn it back on in 10 days again after the expansion starts and people can’t even start the new area? That sounds like a terrible business practise.
They should turn it off now, because it’s not needed now, and turn it back on again if it’s needed later. Yes. That’s how it should work.
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I don’t really play on RP servers anymore, but I had a friend on MG invite me over to see this for myself. It is pretty depressing seeing a lot of the old ‘hot spots’ I remembered hanging out at being empty due to sharding.
I agree with OP, no or significantly less sharding for RPers. It only hurts them.
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What’s funny in a stupid way is that I can see my friend on my warrior but none of my other characters unless we party up which isn’t always an option.
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I almost hesitate to say anything just in case, but…
This looks like it might be fixed 
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Stormwind got sharded again with the launch of Dragonflight - WHICH I AGREE WITH!
I know the servers would have melted if all of Moon Guard congregated on the dock Monday night.
Now that we are nearly a week past the expansion launch, is there any ETA to unshard Stormwind so the city can be lively once more?
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Maybe consider the other side of the coin there. Do you realize how bad the faction imbalance on some realms has gotten? You just about need sharding to fix it at this point.
??
Sharding has nothing to do with faction imbalance.
They don’t create shards to make things equal between the Alliance and the Horde. They create shards so that when there’s large crowds, people can still play the game functionally without dealing with server lag.
On top of that this post is clearly about turning off sharding on RP realms like Moon Guard, not all realms.
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I’m well aware of what sharding is. I am observing that the faction imbalance has gotten so awful that it should be turned on and left on - yes, for RP realms as well. The sharding, short lived though it was, provided a brief glimpse into what it was like when major cities still had people in them. Sharding has a happy side-effect of making it possible to actually see other players, for those whose faction is dead on their server of choice.
Have you been to Orgrimmar on your own server as of late? 99.9% of the time it’s nothing but bots and the occasional troll (no, not the tusked kind.)