It ruins gathering, mob farming, questing, causes flying mounts to drop companions. It’s just been overly obnoxious and aggravating since it was added years ago. There’s no need for it, please just remove it. We have group finder if we need more people for something. Please just remove it, some of us choose low population servers for a reason.
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Quest progression. Server stability.
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There is absolutely a need for phasing. There’s no way to have different versions of areas without phasing.
Number of people has nothing to do with phasing.
Do you mean sharding?
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If that is how you feel, something tells me you’ve never tried killing a WB with 2 or 3 full raids in the same spot.
Server lag is already horrible in populated areas…removing the systems designed to reduce it would only make things worse.
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Not trying to argue semantics but I think you mean Sharding not Phasing.
It says sharding in the OP?
I changed it, because not once have I ever heard it referred to as Sharding in 11 years since it started. It was always Realm Phasing. But if Sharding is what it’s mostly known as, I’m willing to change it.
Phasing is where a Quest or Zone puts you into another ‘timeline’. For example, Jade Forest before you complete the opening bit with the ship. You will see many areas around there are Phased, as in you are not seeing the Live version. This usually occurs with Quest chains that alter the world in some significant fashion.
Another example of Phasing is asking Zidormi to place you into a zone timeline that was before a major event, such as Darkshore.
Sharding is when a global instance becomes too full of players, and is a detriment to the server. A new Shard is spun up to place players.
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Phasing isn’t related to sharding.
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I don’t know who you’ve been talking to in 11 years, but phasing is where zones change with questing storyline. Sharding is what they use when zones become too populated. Cross Realm Zoning (CRZ) is what they use when zones aren’t populated enough.
We know this. OP’s original title and thread said “phasing,” not “sharding.” It was changed after Kiyoko and I posted.
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Better yet. Just remove server selection and go all in on sharding.
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That’s not better in any way, shape or form.
Sharding/cross server zones do have downsides though. Not saying it should be reverted but when each zone is essentially its own instance rather than a seamless open world it does kill the immersion a bit and leads to awkward moments if playing with others when transitioning between zones as they disappear for a good 5-10 seconds.
Not sure how they could improve that behavior though.
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I agree. I think sharting is gross.
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There are several features at play here:
- Sharding - when a zone gets too full, a new copy (aka shard) of it is created and incoming players are redirected to the copy
- Cross Realm Zones (aka CRZ) - players from a group of realms are sent to the same shard to populate a zone as much as possible
- Phasing - variants of a zone depending on quest progression and other factors.
The first 2 probably use the same technology.
What the OP is complaining about is CRZ.
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There’s no need for it
I’m guessing you’ve never heard of Chesterton’s Gate.
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Sharding sucks. Well, rather, the implementation of sharding sucks. I’ve had too many things disrupted by being sharded mid way. Trying to do a group activity (for example, the Tuskarr soup event), fighting monsters, gathering, and more. I was recently doing a fight in the Brawlers Guild and suddenly got sharded. I was the only person there and was able to keep queueing, but suddenly, in the middle of a fight, I instantly get teleported out of the arena, and there are now 5 other players, so now I have to wait in queue. Waiting in queue is fine, but getting sharded mid fight sucks so bad. So does losing a reward because the event where you had achieved the highest reward at the end but suddenly you’re in a new shard with 0 progress.
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Chesterton’s Fence*
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You seem to be mixing up three separate things as if they are one and the same… they are not… and all three have reasons to exist… and two of them also could be done better too…
First off… Sharding has absolutely nothing to do with the objects and mobs suddenly disappearing when you are wandering around, or party members getting forcefully dismounted mid flight… that is Phasing. Phasing is necessary to create a cohesive and evolving world.
Imagine going to a ruined village, picking up a quest from an NPC who acts as if the village is perfectly fine and nothing is in ruins… claims the sky is blue and sunny when it’s infact an ominous red and everything is on fire… it’d be a major disconnect from the quest… about halfway through the quest chain suddenly an event happens to destroy the village, and now it all makes sense… That is how things would be without phasing… but with phasing, they can keep these two versions of the same location in the world at the same time.
Is phasing done flawlessly? Of course not… we’ve all experienced a lot of weirdness with it… some issues might not be possible to fix (like mobs phasing out when you enter a phased location, this might unfortunately be impossible to fix)… but others could very easily be fixed, and quite frankly SHOULD be fixed… like getting pulled out of phase of party members… there are 2 simple ways they could easily fix this issue…
- when partied, the group always uses the Party Leader’s phase.
- when partied, the group always uses the lowest progression party members phase.
Second… Sharding also has nothing to do with you seeing players from other servers either… Sharding is a technology that allows for mega servers to be seamlessly subdivided into smaller servers based on active load. Basically… if a zone can support a maximum of 300 players at once, the game will generate a new shard when the population in the zone exceeds a specific amount, it will then automatically bring new players entering the zone into the new shard to keep the population manageable for server loads. This was actually in the game long before they started linking servers together outside of just instanced content. It just was rarely ever experienced unless you were on super high population servers during peak hours. They had to make multiple adjustments to how sharding worked back in Legion due to problems with it suddenly being more prominent.
If you were playing during the Greedy Emissary Event earlier this year, you would have seen Sharding in action when the portals spawned… on nearly every server, there were multiple shards for the fight… if you ever showed up at the portal and saw there was like 3 other people there, you got put into a new shard because the previous shard was near capacity. I ran the event while grouped with a friend, and I lost track of how many times one of us would have to right click the other in the party menu and choose the option to join their phase because we ended up in an empty shard and they were in the populated one.
Your issue of “I chose to be a on a low population server expressly because it was low population” unfortunately is an issue that cannot ever have a favorable outcome for you. It is simply not beneficial for the game to have servers that are so low in population that they make the game feel empty. Servers were linked (cross-realm) because there were a lot of servers that were exactly that… before cross-realm worlds like this, Blizzard instead performed a few server mergers… but those always came with their own issues… most notably that a large number of players from the server that was being merged into another would almost always lose access to their character names.
If they did away with cross-realm worlds, then think about this for a moment:
You’re on a super low population server… your server population has dropped to the point that most zones feel completely empty at all times… Blizzard has decided to merge your server into another more active low population server… you log in tomorrow and all your characters have had their names reset because someone on the new server you got merged into already had characters with the same names as yours. You pick out new names… you get into the game… you open guild chat… and… you see a ton of unfamiliar names… more than half of your guildmates lost their character names and now you and everyone else has to spend the next week or so trying to figure out who’s who again… your guild recruits a new member and wait… that’s your character’s old name… some of your guild mates who were away for the last week or so log in and start chatting in guild chat, the new player responds, and they all think its you.. they are organizing a new raid, you were always part of the static… suddenly the new member has your spot in their static because they don’t realize that is not you… and when you say something in guild chat you just sound like a crazy person to them…
Is this better? Do you really want to go back to having this happen?
Now… if you really want a super low population server that badly… transfer over here to Kirin Tor… we’re linked with a few other servers that are all virtually dead too… outside of cities and open world events, it’s extremely rare to even see another player in the world…
That would literally close down every single mexican restaurant
1 Like