Please - No shards in SW on RP Servers

Community General Discussion
141

The problem is, I have 16 characters on Moon Guard, plus a personal guild.

I came to Moon Guard many years ago before its population exploded, and I came here at the Behest of a friend, though even if I hadn’t I would have eventually wound up there anyway because my first friend that I knew when I started my very first character was on Argent Dawn which later merged with Moon Guard anyhow.

Back then, RP servers were rather low pop.

For me to “just move to another server” would cost way too much money. That’s why I’m not on a regular PvE server.

If I could move ALL of my characters in a single batch along with my personal guild, for something reasonable like $25 or something like that, I probably would, just to get off Moon Guard, now that a family member doesn’t play WoW anymore and quite likely never will again due to rapidly declining health issues.

Sure, players “could” “enjoy” WoW without sharding, if you don’t mind 2 second pauses anytime you try to talk to an NPC or pick an item up or what-not.

In theory it works, yes. But this is 2022 and anything above 50ms ping is unacceptable to most people.

Back in 2008, 200ms was perfectly fine.

Today, 200ms is considered “unplayable” for many.

EDIT: Also, back then, pretty sure RP was far less popular; I never saw that many people in SWC back in the days of TBC or Wrath, or heck even MoP. You started seeing the ludicrous lag about the time they started limiting portals in other cities after MoP.

Personally, I always used Darnassus for the longest time to escape the lag, but they were hellbent in making Darnassus one of the most inconvenient cities ever, which is sad because it had the best setup of the AH and Bank being right near each other with a mailbox beside both. And also, the cooking and fishing dailies in Darnassus were way better than either of the other two towns.

142

Okay. Let me see if I can put this…diplomatically.

The core issue is that you don’t like being in the major hubs on a high-pop server without sharding during the brief times when there’s a crunch.

You are…one person. Compared to all of the people whose hobby is only enabled because sharding is off, who like to hang out in the city and talk to each other and interact.

I don’t know if engineering an entirely new ruleset is the solution to a problem that is only a problem for a handful of people, compared to the people who came to the server to specifically have the experience that the server was earmarked for.

The Moon Guard server wasn’t created until August 2009, a year into WOTLK, and Stormwind has been full of people ever since. I’ve personally been on it since late Cataclysm, and there were always tons of people in the city. There hasn’t been a time when RP was ‘less popular’ and people didn’t do walk-up RP in the major cities on the RP server for people to RP on, in large numbers.

How often does that happen to you? I’ve only had problems with lag briefly during either when the servers were going to go down or during a huge event, like a city invasion when off-servers purposely try and crash the server, or the end of the TOA in Icecrown where people purposely set off toys and all pile on the stairs together and try and run through the stutter-lag to fall off the cliff.

You’ve mentioned that you don’t like to go to the major hubs anyway. So…remind me again why they’d need to go to the effort of changing the way that the server works based around your experience?

Normally it would be no skin off my nose what you personally like or don’t like, but if you’re going to come into the thread where people are trying to get Blizzard to notice and turn off sharding and be contrarian and say that you want it to stay on like you represent any significant part of the community, I have bones to pick with that. It’s like the people who used to complain about PVP happening on a PVP server. Like…one group is there on purpose, because it’s what they want. They should get priority say on how things are set up.

Your experience is not common, and the roleplayers on the roleplay server almost entirely want sharding off so that our primary hobby is accessible. If people want servers with less other people around and no risk of lag (although I’m not sure what 2-second lag you’re referring to and it’s not like you’re doing high-end Mythic raiding or PVP in the middle of Stormwind that absolutely needs minimal server response time) there are options for that already.

143

The proposal I put forth would take very little to implement as all the requisite systems are already in place, all you need is a button and a little bit of code to specify where the player should go and it would make literally everybody happy.

Are you sure about that? I created who is now my Warrior Blacksmith (who I have since race-changed) to play with my then-girlfriend who invited me back into the game after I had taken a hiatus during vanilla.

This was right before the release of TBC, near the end of Vanilla. This warrior blacksmith (who was a male night elf, who is now a female draenei) would then join a raiding guild (my one and only) and we did Karazhan with my then-GF.

I brought my paladin that I had played during my first days of WoW from Argent Dawn to Moon Guard, and build the rest of my characters around those two.

Moon Guard couldn’t have possibly started during Wrath, because I was on it during TBC and IIRC, server moves didn’t exist back then, and the only person I ever server moved was my paladin (who is now my Alliance Main).

Pretty sure there are some odd shenanigans going here.

All I know is that sometime near the end of MoP, the lag in SWC started becoming real. I would always do the cooking and fishing dailies there for quite awhile to level alt characters, and rarely had a problem with lag until about the time of WoD. I quit during WoD .0 and came back right before Argus, and remember noting that SWC was almost unplayable except for early morning hours.

On a daily basis. Every single time I logged on and attempted to go to SWC during Shadowlands when they had sharding turned off, I would see that 2 second lag, and FPS numbers would go from a steady 55-59 down to the 30s, sometimes even occasionally seeing mid 20s.

There was a brief time during Shadowlands where it was sharded and suddenly the lag went away, and then they reversed that change and the horrendous lag was back.

You willing to fork over $300+ to move all of my characters, then?

144

You’re telling me you had 2 second lag in Stormwind with sharding turned off all the time? Even in Shadowlands? Shadowlands era unsharded Stormwind was giving you 2 second input delay lag?

I’m sorry but you probably should look at your ISP, because Shadowlands Stormwind sure as hell isn’t anywhere near peak levels of numbers for the server. The expansion saw a drop in population, including RPers, if you were suffering lag to that extent constantly then earlier expansions would have made your computer explode immediately.

I can get an FPS drop, sure, but even my potato of a laptop that I played WoW on from 2014 until 2021 never got to the point of 2 second lag in Stormwind constantly, only during very, very crowded events.

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145

Turn :dracthyr_love_animated: it :dracthyr_love_animated: off! :dracthyr_love_animated:

:dracthyr_cry:

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146

OP, not only RP servers but all servers. I hate that it is so empty when I play.

147

Getting really tired of it myself. Felt like a week, week and a half, or maybe two weeks would be enough. But nope. Just flew through Stormwind on Moon Guard, saw four people in the park and around the Lamb.

Turn it off so we rpers can go back to rping. Please.

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148

Please end it.

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149

No, sorry, you’re right. I know that I remembered that it wasn’t a launch server, I had been playing on Thorium Brotherhood for a couple of years by the time it was created because I remember the hubub of people wanting to go to the “new” RP server. It was made days before the launch of TBC, January 8th 2007, and TBC came out on January 16th.

Sharding has been off on Moon Guard aside from a week or two at the start of the launch of a new expansion almost since sharding was a thing (was that in about MOP?). We pushed back hard on it from the first rollout, and it got turned off in the main cities soon after, and then the next summer during the Tournament of Ages it got turned off worldwide. Permanently, except when a new expansion launches. And then we always have to rabble for them to turn it off again.

I’ve never had lag like that outside of a couple of times when the server or all servers were having a problem, and I tend to run two game clients at a time. But the fact that it is accompanied by FPS drops for you indicates that it may be a network or computer issue. Server lag doesn’t usually slow down your FPS, aside from the environment jumping around, chat lag or movement stuttering. Are you running off of a SSD with a good amount of RAM? Those things will help enormously with WoW, which is very, very hard-drive intensive.

:dracthyr_no1: :dracthyr_no2:

But, neither do I think that the entire functionality of the server needs to be changed around to accomodate what might be a computer issue on your end when we can hardly get them to just flip a switch and give us back the ruleset that the server is supposed to have. I mean, it’s not a great spot for you to be in, but every day is another day that you choose to be on a server that you don’t want to be on. Rerolling is free and leveling is fast, if it’s that much of a problem.

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150

See, I’m not the only one who complains about it, though.

I’ve mentioned the lag quite a number of times in General and sometimes even Trade, and I get “yeah, that’s just what happens” or “ya, that’s what happens when you shard 500 people into the same zone that just sit around and do nothing” responses usually.

And again. Non-RPers, I would think are actively hindering RPers as I’d think it’d be hard to really focus on what you’re doing when a bunch of people are tromping back and forth everywhere in their clown suits (compared to the carefully mogged stuff RPers wear), and the people who just wanna do stuff in SWC that they need to do probably don’t want the lag.

Why not make both camps happy overall?

Are you afraid that the number of RPers simply isn’t as high as you think it is?

Maybe you say you don’t perceive lag, but there actually IS lag and you just don’t notice it because you’re used to sitting at a table for hours doing nothing but sending chat messages?

I don’t know. But I do know that it is nice to be able to go to SWC and actually do stuff without lag, and I’m not the only one who feels this way. As for whether or not it is a computer issue, well. No matter how you roll the dice, sharding 500 people into the same zone is going to create problems when it comes to latency. Triple that if some idiots on the Horde side decide it’s a great time to come and try to kill Anduin or whoever the frick is there now.

I don’t even really understand why, in a GUI-based game, you’d wanna RP anyhow, but that’s just me I guess.

I’ve done RP for years, but it was always over pure text environments, and only using software that flashed the taskbar when a new message was received, and not in an environment where random crap spams the chat log. That’s just my 2 copper, though. It’s just something I’ll never understand.

151

I haven’t flown over SW lately, too busy going through the main quests. Usually, it’s full of people.

I’ve been in an empty shard since I left the Zeppelin. MG Valdrakken is super empty. All quest hubs are empty.

:dragon: :ocean::dragon: :ocean:

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152

I was in SW last night and I seen like 5 people.
Almost 3 weeks now sucks.

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153

I play on RP shards to RP and see a community that doesn’t exist on regular servers. I’m going to continue to push for the unshardening until it is resolved.

Remove :dracthyr_a1: it. :dracthyr_love_animated:

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154

Sharding is killing all the cities on RP servers, not just Stormwind.

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155

I gotta say, every pre-patch, when a thread to get sharding turned off again is made, there’s always one guy who is vehemently against it for very strange, often contrived reasons.

But “Why do you even want to RP in WoW on the RP server anyway?” and “Yes there is lag all the time for me you just don’t notice it on your end.” is right up there with the weirdest ones.

If you were getting consistent lag to that extent in Stormwind during Shadowlands, when the city was a relative ghost town much of the time, and entire districts often empty of RPers, then that’s something on your end, not Blizzard’s. If it was restricted to just Stormwind and not other places like Oribos? Also on your end, because Oribos is such a small city and densely packed with people that sharding would not have helped you at all, if Stormwind was giving you trouble.

I’m taking everything you’ve said at face value here, and flat out, if the lag only goes away for you in Stormwind when sharding is up, creating phases of maybe two dozen people in the entire city, I cannot imagine you being able to escape lag at all in current content zones.

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156

Here is a better idea: No sharding for any servers.

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157

i wish they’d at least address this because it makes their cities look like total ghost towns right now. with the dragonflight trial until january 3rd you’d think they’d want the game to look lively?

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158

^^^^^^^^^^

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159

the year is 2023

schizophrenia has claimed the minds of the roleplayers as they now look inwards to quench their thirst for rp

anarchy rules the streets; the only law is lawlessness

it all began with the sharding crisis of the dragonflight release…

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160

i’m not feeling enough latency to feel at home in this version of stormwind! i will settle for nothing less than 500+ latency with my eyes popping with characters to befriend!