Came here to look into exactly this issue.
Bumped the general forum thread as well. Thank you for cross-posting it.
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After running a few TRP scans and running around, it seems Sharding is turned off again. 
My assumption is that it was turned on for Shadowlands’ launch and is automatically removed whenever our servers restart (every Tuesday); it was a similar situation after the Gnomergan Run holiday a few months ago. If it’s turned back on in the future, I recommend trying to get in contact with @BlizzardCS on Twitter; that avenue has been historically more successful than on the forums, which is unfortunately best used for players to rally together over this issue first.
Hopefully we won’t have to worry about that for a long while, though.
I’m looking forward to seeing people in the city again. 
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Hopefully sharding is off. We had to have a raid group to have our service at the Cathedral this past Saturday.
Forums tend to go ignored so if sharding persists it might be best to tweet at the devs, I think this same thing happened during Legion and they only responded when enough people made a twitter fuss about it
I suspect we just had to wait for patch Tuesday
Nevermind it’s back on. 
It was off for me all afternoon and then after logging off for a bit I came back to find out a friend couldn’t find me to show me their transmog. They invited me to a group and then I phased to an empty city. Hugely disappointed.
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Can someone please do this please? I would but I don’t use social media except for the wow forums
Went ahead and tweeted at them. Hopefully they see / become aware of the issue!
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I’ll put in my support reply here just to show how much we hate phasing in Stormwind. Or really phasing in general.
I think we need to raise a fuss on the general discussion forums… i just tried to submit something in the customer support and it didn’t seem to work 
I KNOW IT SUCKS
But sharding is one of only a few things Bliz can do on their end to make the game run smoother more consistently on people’s crappy computer systems. I mean, 75% of the people in this game use a laptop only to write customer service complaints about why framerate drops in Storm Wind to 20fps. The alternative? Players should simply get better computers and stop playing a network-intensive game on wireless tech.
I would love to see a button in-game (maybe near the minimap) which allows players to switch between the layers.
Anyone ever hear back from customer support on twitter?
It shouldn’t be necessary anymore. Most of the Shadowlands launch player traffic has moved out of the city and into the Shadowlands content. You only really needed to be there for the first quest. In fact, Stormwind might be -less- populated than during normal times due to the amount of people in the new zones.
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Reading elsewhere and it looks like sharding ended on RP servers about a month after past expansions. So possibly won’t be till mid December till it’s off? So this or next patch Tuesday if I had to guess?
I got told on customer support that @blizzardCS isn’t the right area to go and you have to go to @WarcraftDevs :l
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Right? I feel you. They are majorly instancing this city. I know theres way more people there than its showing.
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Can the sharding just turn off now since it’s not really needed anymore it’s actually depressing seeing no one in Stormwind
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tweet tweetHi. Throwing my hat in for this too. It’s beyond time to turn sharding off.
I was actually looking around the forums to see if there is any news on this. The sharding is super inconvenient. Last night I was in SW and I saw a total of two roleplayers. Two! One was afk and if it was not for the other actually being present and IC, there would have been no casual roleplay to find at all in SW in that moment. The sharding has to go.