As far as apparently Legion content, Forced sharding has been out of control. People have reported being phased WHILE engaged to monsters, rares and various activities and now I have joined them in witnessing this first hand.
It was my understanding that sharding was supposed to work vastly different than how it does now. According to it’s initial release: “When too many players are in an area, the game automatically creates a new “shard,” a copy of that area. Players entering the area will be placed on the new shard.”
So why are players being pushed to new shards despite being in the zone consistently over the span of say an hour? Shards are supposed to be created for new players, not players who are already in a zone.
There is also the case of Sharding on RP realms where it’s supposed to be disabled apparently: https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs/status/1022566187266232320
Now for my experience:
I was in a group in Tyrhold during the Elemental Invasion, killing a rare with a friend and two other people outside our group when we were all phased as the rare we were killing was about to die.
How do you let this happen? Originally if you were in a group and/or engaged in fighting, being pushed to another shard would not touch you. I thought you’d only be sharded if you remained inactive on a shard for a certain period of time, but here I was engaged in a fight and it happened.
If a developer can look into this: We were pushed into a new shard at approximately 7:39 PM CST 2/9/2024 in Tyr Hold Reservoir on my Alt Tibias - Wyrmrest Accord. We were engaged to the Overloading Defense Matrix.
I have an addon that tells me which shard we were in/moved to. We were in Shard 8624 and were pushed into shard 29920 while engaged with an enemy.
I meant to make a post sooner but IRL obligations popped up and prevented me from following through with it. Edit: Apparently these sharding issues have been happening for years!
Posted Link here for Non CC members to give their 2 cents about what they’ve experienced: