Title says it all really and havent really seen it talked about in some time beyond comments here and there.
Last I remember, the reason for removing it with War Mode was due to the sharding mechanic they were using stating, something along the lines, that they couldnt guarantee you would be on the same shard as the person attacking the place getting pinged. In all fairness, valid point and would be super frustrating to pop from Undercity to Nagrand just to find the person not there, despite the pings still going off. I remember unable to respond to pings due to phasing back when it was still active and then having to log off, grab a whole new character, and fly back out only for the person to have already left by then.
Ignoring the old world for a moment and sticking to only current content, it would be great to see Amirdrasil under attack while in Valdrakken or out in like the Azure Span or even Org, and vice versa if youâre in the Emerald Dream and like the Wingrest Embassy is under attack with people gankin fresh 60s. It helps promote WPvP and generate responses, and builds community. Reviving it would also help spread out WPvP from just the sparks zone of the week and fighting blobs all the time while combating the idea that War Mode is empty or dead (all of us here know it is suffering, but this should help address the issues of finding people who are already in it).
Now Iâm not going to pretend to understand the nuts and bolts of Blizzards coding and infrastructure, or the duct tape and paper clips some have described it as. I will say on a surface level, since the issue is guaranteeing players see each other, the problem primarily seems to be with Chromie Time and less so WM. Chromie sends you into a whole separate shard when you choose an expansion, and that shard is then of course divided into 2 more shards, WM and not WM. Ignoring additional/population sharding for a moment, you then have at least X shards at all times where X = number of expansions x 2, and those numbers only grow in time. Maths! So you, currently and with all other variables constant, have a 1/20 (5%) chance of seeing that person!
Iâd like to think, then, removing Chromie Time and instead simply implementing game wide scalable content (and probably finding some new homes for overlapping NPCs with a small bit of phasing) would not only potentially breath a little life into old zones, but be the primary barrier to bringing it back. Adding to that, unable to take Warmode away, attacking a flagged NPC, even in retaliation or trying to escape, should then activate War Mode automatically. Given it can be turned off in any Inn, I dont see a major problem with that (and should add the ability to turn it on in any capital city).
The only real barrier left then would be population sharding and that I have less of a solution to. Part of me says âoh well, Iâll dealâ if that means I could potentially be responding to a ping on a different shard and see no one given most of the world would ever be meaningfully sharded. It would be more beneficial than not in my eyes. My other thought is that (and correct me if Im wrong) they already have local defense and general figured out, its localized to your shard(?). Could that not be expanded to world defense while also removing sharding in more zones, such as capital cities and starter zones?
IDK. Thoughts? Comments? Trolls?