You’ve declared that “The thing they’re going to enable for sharding, moved to a different timeframe”.
Of course if the thing they need sharding for moves to a different timeframe they need to move sharding. You’re literally strawmanning the argument to “prove” a non-point.
I am not American so i don’t know It and i don’t care.
This is subjective, for me can be fine a world that have a lot of people.
200 people in a starter is a lot of people. Vanilla realms almost never had that many outside of launch.
400 people in a starter for many people is unplayable. Vanilla realms never had that many.
800 people in a starter is literally unplayable, not subjective. Because there are too many people.
3 months is too long period. The longer sharding is in game the more potential it has to creep.
Not 400 per map, more like 400 per each Deathknell, so that you don’t have 1000 undead rogue’s trying to turn in bat pelts or swarm the rogue trainer at the same time.
As for 3 days… let’s assume that classic WoW comes out on a Tuesday morning alongside a server maintenance. I don’t think having the proposed sharding plan end before the weekend rush would be a good idea.
Maybe it is. Maybe starting zone sharding winds up being entirely unneeded by the 2nd day of launch. if that’s the case OP says that the second it’s no longer needed, it’s gone.
The issue isn’t simply having too many people per realm, it’s having too many people jammed into a very small starting zone area where all of them need to kill the exact same mobs, turn in the exact same quests and and chat with the exact same leveling trainers.
It creates a choke, where people don’t move on and leave because they can’t finish their quests, and since they don’t leave, the number of players in the area keeps growing. Eventually, this can cause the entire continent’s server to crash because the game can’t handle the stress of that much activity in one spot.
Specific values open to tweaking. 3 days is far too short though.
Thats why im fine with a few weeks.
This in the first 2 hours? People will spread in zones, 2 weeks will have a lot people level 30+, 3 mounths will have the firsts 60.
Assuming after a few weeks, its not needed, or the server are stable enough that the queues aren’t 24hrs+, sure. We’re just negotiating levels of optimism about the popularity at this point. 
The first few hours have the potential to be much worse than that. Consider the worst case scenario where you’re in the same starting zone as a major content streamer, and as a result your server has it much worse than others.
You have the standard initial rush that everyone else is dealing with, and also the people who just want to bug streamers on top of that.
A few hundred per starting zone is maybe a solid average over the course of a couple days. I think the first few hours, assuming no sharding, should be projected to be much higher than that.
Really, yeah this. I think OP’s ideas hit the big points though. Absolutely no sharding beyond the starting zones and the barrens, as well as a guaranteed cutoff for sharding as soon as possible, not to exceed a given time frame of <insert number of days smaller than 120>. (Preferably closer to 30)
Strawmanning?
Pointing out that using sharding beyond those “starting areas” or that “brief time at launch” for any reason would go against what Blizzard has stated their intentions for sharding are is a straw man, now?
Are we pre-forgiving Blizzard for going against their word?
I agree that sharding that late into the game should be off limits. To be honest, I think I’d rather them just honor their word at that point and deal with the resulting crashes and lage spikes as they come.
(I say this fully aware that I might be yelling at my computer in the middle of a raid some number of months from now over the very same issue.)
I understand these issues but i think that you don’t understand the sharding issues.
First at all, sharding and classic in same sentence don’t are autentic in any aspect.
Secound, classic players are ok with these issues that you are saying, you are worry only about new players geting your quests and rewards without any dificult or competition or queues. But the company have a target audience that they need to satisfy. I think that this target audience are the classic players because they will play your game until the end, not the tourists.
Third and least, pservers had this issues and players created guides showing how up level in launch scenarios.
So, i don’t think that sharding is needed after some days.
People still wait in queues for FFXIV. WoW needs to go back to the golden age
If I gave off this impression, I didn’t mean to. I’d like getting to play the game rather than have “World server is down” every five minutes, but dealing with competition is something I have no problems with.
I entirely agree.
Which is more or less what’s been said throughout this whole post. There’s some room for debate over how many days “some days” is, though.
The correct answer is as few as possible and then remove the cancer entirely.
Well i think that 800 players per sharding don’t crash a server. Some PServers have much more players numbers in a unic zone.
I don’t think that need more than 3 days. People will have spread in other zones, doing Dugeons, ganking other faction and doing anyother Stuff.
People will play in different time, will do different things and some weeks more, these issues will end.
As a Day One, never unsubbed player (got the statue) , I take offense that I’m not a Classic Player. By definition, “all” Classic players don’t agree with you.
The difference is that I’m willing to accept reality and temporary changes, to ensure that the game retains playability for 2 years, instead of falling prey to shareholder fear from bad publicity for the launch.
You demand simulacrum at the cost of survival. I want long term viability at the cost of temporary variation.
You’ve got a few critical assumptions I think are way off:
9:1 tourist to non-tourist is quite high. I really don’t think it will be that high, and this ratio is skewing every other quantification you’re trying to make.
Targeting 150-399 range for a shard is not really going to be all that helpful. If you’re going to do sharding, these numbers need to be much lower, like maybe 50-150. A shard of 399 is not better than a shard of 6,000. Both will be equally unplayable and unstable given the server stability you see in BfA right now.
I’ll call these “tourist-10” and “tourist-20” and abbreviate these three groups as T10, T20, and NT. You are making some big assumptions that the three groups of people will distribute themselves fairly uniformly across all ~200 servers and that every server will have pretty close to 13,500 T10’s, 9,000 T20’s, and 2,500 NT’s.
I don’t think this is correct. There will be a handful of servers that will become popular to NT’s for whatever reason, and there will be servers where the T10’s and T20’s make the NT’s leave (e.g. popular live streamers might draw a crowd that will be a thing to avoid). These two kinds of servers will not collapse from whatever high population they start out at down to a comfortable 2000-4000 people, the former may never fall below 10k (which would be too crowded) and the latter could fall below 1k (which would be dead).
Also, in all servers whatever the post-collapse active population is, there will be toons from 25,000 active accounts on that server that are sitting there taking up space, and names, and when retail gets boring and they turn into temporary tourists again (e.g. the T10’s become T20’s, or the T20’s become T35’s or a few might become NT’s) what happens? Do you delete these toons if they haven’t logged in for X days in a row? I think that would be kinda stupid, tbh.
Besides, there will be a regular schedule of retailers taking a break during content droughts, and coming back to these servers that have a strange full capacity (8x or 9x of unique names are taken compared to a normally-sized server, for example) and after the collapse you’ll want to find ways to draw even more players to that dying/dead server so what do you do with all the T10’s and T20’s sitting on the books?
I really don’t think sharding is going to fix any of the population problems the way people think when they try to math out their assumptions, because what works on average works, except where it doesn’t work. I think sharding will introduce known immersion and anti-community-building issues, and yet I am not convinced the efficacy of sharding as a tool for population surge/collapse control is a good tradeoff for those issues.