He can’t very well play both at the same time, can he?
He will have to make choice as to which game is his priority. If he chooses Classic, then we are no worse off, right? If he chooses retail, then that is one less person in that initial classic rush, though.
As I said, releasing classic and a major BFA content patch concurrently may not prevent the need for sharding, but it cannot hurt. I would rather see Blizzard make every effort to reduce or eliminate the need for sharding than see them say “Well, that won’t completely eliminate sharding so we won’t even bother trying it. We’ll just go right to sharding.”.
Doesn’t matter, Johnny will clutch the pearls and cite blizzards mantra of “inclusion, not exclusion”, the state of the game be damned.
Johnny Retailer doesn’t care about anyone but Johnny Retailer.
Oh, I perfectly grok the situation. My primary concern upon release is healthy server populations that are healthy for the longest period of time possible.
Let me ask you this then:
Why should people who have already at length given their input on a subject, once again have to do it in yet another spammed thread, simply because either the OP was intentionally spamming, or too lazy to actually scroll down the forum before creating a thread?
Doing a search by latest posts for “sharding” other then this thread. Only 1 other thread on the topic of sharding has actually had a post in it within the last 24 hours and that was 15 hours ago. And before that post the last one was 8 days ago.
Now other threads may have evolved into discussions about sharding, but that’s not what their original topics were about.
well if it helps to know, i am not entirely certain i had this much to say on earlier threads on the topic, so its been an eye opener for me. it had to roll around in ye olde noggin and steep in my limited brain juices for awhile before i came up with my solution, which if that one guy was correct about people deliberately creating shards for gold farming, not sure any sharding would work. that essentially means i’ve come full circle to agree with the op - might as well use queues.
Something to note is that it doesn’t take a great deal of time for people to begin spreading out.
After the initial rush the number of players are a lot lower. There might be some competition for quest objectives but that does also mean you can group up with people. Get some socializing in, which is part of what Vanilla is all about.
and unlike 2004 Vanilla, there shouldn’t be this massive population explosion post-launch that keeps flooding the starting zones with new players. If anything it should go in the other direction as tourists decide they’re done with checking out Classic.
Still, we’re making some huge assumptions about population sizes here. We can’t know for sure until release actually happens whether sharding will be needed or not.
True, and I’d accept sharding at launch even if I’m not a big fan of it. That does also allow for them to put more people per server which mitigates the problem of dead or dying servers later on as all the tourists leave.
Though I’d prefer it to be very time limited, and limited to only low level areas so that people don’t rush to 60 and abuse sharding hopping to farm things like Black Lotus.
It’s the best solution I can see since even if we could solve the server stability issue some other way, that still leaves the server population one.
Though I do think that they’re going to have to address server stability with large groups of players regardless of sharding at launch, even if to a lesser degree than what would be needed at launch.
Like I noted before, all it really takes is one guild to think that raiding Org or IF is a good idea.
well, theoretically or rather, technically, there are skins for leatherworking, herbs for alchemy, ore/stones for blacksmithing and engineering, cloth for tailoring and fish for cooking recipes. also the rare 4 slot bag drop. but i agree, not much there .
problem is, we dont know if the sharding would be zone specific or if it would just be limited time use (they guesstimate how long till people level up to tertiary newb zones like westfall, ashenvale, silverpine or the barrens), meaning it could still be sharding while leveling thru westfall/barrens/etc, because it’s set to no longer shard after x-days?
once you get into those zones, the stakes go up. now you’re into briarthorn and swiftthistle for making swiftness pots (of course ya need the recipe and for all intents and purposes it appears to drop almost exclusively on kalimdor), earthroots and so on for mana pots and heal pots, tin and copper ore (which equals bronze), green armor/weapon drops (which mean disenchants for enchanters), etc. you can see how the gold could start mounting.
The fact that they provided feedback proves they listen. They know we are interested and talking about it. Just because they don’t agree with us doesn’t mean they aren’t listening.