He or one of the blues listed some zones and not one zone listed was above 10/12.
I intend to hold them to that
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And they’ve had 10+ years to find a better solution. There really is no excuse.
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That just points to the notion that there ISN’T a better solution. In which case, my view is still valid.
There is a comment from Ion during the Q&A at Blizzcon that talks about “when everybody is packed into Valley of Trials, when everybody is packed into Elwynn”.
But he doesn’t explicitly state that sharding will only be in the starter zones. At least, not during the Q&A.
I find it highly doubtful you were in queue for an hour in a mid pop realm.
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That’s the comment im referring to.
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Well maybe it was a half hour. I don’t remember exactly, it was a long time ago. I do know it was an awful long time to be waiting. Long enough to do an entire laundry load.
There isn’t a better solution for BfA, because BfA RELIES on sharding. Whereas even Ion says sharding is antithetical to Classic. How can you use the same solution to two fundamentally different gaming experiences? The answer is you can’t.
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This has been an entertaining and somewhat enlightening discussion to read. On one hand, I can see the merits to both sides.
“I just want to play the game. Why should we have to wait and queue and crash when we don’t have to?”
vs.
“I want to see everyone on my server, and having players disappear into thin air takes me out of the world, and saying “No” to sharding is harder if you already said “Yes” to sharding.”
I’ve played on those RP servers, and I hated sharding. I hated sharding. It made walk-up RP impossible when it was already hard to find before. And you suddenly found people from other servers with you instead of the one that’s there for your server’s community. It’s no longer these characters/stories in the same world, it’s minced and spliced and full on meta.
I gotta say I’m full on anti-sharding, and will patiently want through queues or crashes to see it not there. I think it’ll be especially damaging to RP servers for Classic assuming they’ll exist.
As for an alternate solution…
The most recent MMO I played (well, not counting Elder Scrolls Online) was Guild Wars 2. They had a similar system to sharding but the player was more informed about the transitions and could somewhat navigate them on their own terms. They often didn’t happen at random. But then even that isn’t a solution. What the “No Sharding” side wants is to always see everyone currently logged into the world. There really is no other way to handle it without putting in queue times.
I imagine “Let’s do nothing” was the first thing Blizzard’s Classic team thought of and came to the conclusion that it’s suboptimal and included sharding in the first place. Sharding was the best thing they currently had to combat it (or in their view, their best thing they currently had), but a strong pushback could make them reconsider.
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That doesn’t in any way, shape, or form promise that it will only be limited to the starter zones though.
You can try to hold them to that, but in this case you’re trying to hold them to something they didn’t say.
The only thing stated in no uncertain terms is that it would be time limited during the first few weeks.
Ion specifically mentioned Valley of Trials and Elwynn when talking about sharding, if I am not mistaken.
If you’re stuck in a qeue, you can’t have an experience. Period.
They’re used as examples of “when everybody is packed into…”, but he didn’t actually say that sharding would be limited to those areas.
And yet waiting in a queue is at least an authentic vanilla experience. Sharding is not.
Sharding retail is expected. Even the bloody lawyer didn’t mince words when talking about sharding in classic.
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Then they should have used some better examples.
That’s a pretty meaningless and boring experience then. I’d rather experience the game. Somehow I doubt the qeue is the game.
Why not? Once you login eventually, you will have a much better experience than you would have otherwise with sharding.
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While he didn’t explicitly say that sharding would be limited to those areas, I think it is fair to say that he HEAVILY implied that it would.
Do you understand why many of us are concerned that sharding will not be limited to those “starting areas” or that “brief time at launch”?
And I’ll have likely missed the event I was trying to get online for.
Unacceptable.
As is sharding in vanilla wow.
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