Using history as a basis of likely trends and outcomes is not ‘whatifing’ its called analytics, its a globally recognized method for decision making and discussion.
The only flaw in any logic is believeing a discussion contains flawed logic over what is not known, you are focusing on the unknown ‘whatifs’ and not focusing on the what we do know. If you want to continue to try and shut down any discussion on the matter with the same invalid argument of ‘flawed logic’ I will report you for trolling, since you only seek to discredit and not add.
I am unsure how how the one you replied to would answer, however IMHO its not a far fetched concept. Making Classic more accessible without bottlenecks diminishes the Classic experience. Sounds silly doesn’t it? I believe many Classic hopeful will agree that the single greatest detriment to WoW was its extensive and excessive streamlining. Part of the difficulty and charm of Vanilla was it took time and the journey to 60. It wasn’t something you rushed through to farm raids for achievements or loot for bragging rights, its something each player had to establish for themselves through the connections they made with others.
The wall of key differences from Retail to Classic will be massive, each a bigger and bigger wall to find their way over. The ‘tourists’ will likely hit the wall cry a bunch then leave, sharding delays the first wall they would have hit and and will just end up moaning and groaning over it longer. Using the Soul Series as an example, those who pushed through and made it past the first boss generally had a sense of accomplishment, those that disparaged the game for being too hard leave promptly. The issue is solved quickly and easily, whats the ‘first boss’ of WoW Classic for context comparison? Player congestion in zones.
IF Blizzard decides to use “temporary” sharding, I would certainly hope that they were open enough to set hard and fast, definitive geographical and time limits to that “temporary” sharding.
Leaving it vague and undefined doesn’t exactly do much to support them being “temporary”, IMO.
How many times has a game the size of WoW recreated it’s original release as a faithful recreation, using now cloud based technology instead of blade based technology? What percentage of the player base returned? How long did they stay?
What? There’s no history for this kind of thing to point to?
Huh, weird.
It’s almost like this is the first time something of this magnitude and engineering has been (officially) done before and it’s kind of a crapshoot.
It’s almost like all of the data that would MAYBE help clarify things are held on the Blizzard side of things.
But yes - you feel free to continue speculating (aren’t we all?) but don’t sit here and act like you KNOW something the rest of us don’t - because you don’t, you’re using half-baked, flawed logic to reach a conclusion that is personally satisfying to you.
And I have a fair wager I’ve contributed far more to this forum than you have.
Well said. Streamlining definitely helped kill the game and its community. The LFG button replaced me and my friends with anonymous, unfriendly random players who were virtually NPCs. The Garrison replaced, well, the need for pretty much everything and everyone.
Sharding has streamlined people away into ghosts.
In modern WoW, people are obstacles - sharding removes people and therefore obstacles in my way. I don’t need or want them getting in my way.
But no need for others means no community.
I don’t need you and you don’t need me.
Community dies.
Soon, Classic WoW starts to feel like convenient modern WoW.
If you like sharding, play modern WoW.
Sharding was NEVER part of Vanilla WoW.
Sharding should NEVER be used in Classic WoW.
Sharding dehumanizes players into obstacles that must be removed from the game. How antithetical that is to Vanilla WoW.
Isn’t it ironic that at least one proponent of sharding has stated explicitly that they see all those other players in an MMO as nothing but obstacles in their way.
Honestly, I leveled at launch (launch day) November 23, 2004. I was a Gnome. While there were some issues with spawns, I remember respawn rates (at least through the L1-5/6 place) being fairly high. Regardless, it’s the type of play style that we are attempting to get. Sharding didn’t exist at the time. It will divide the playerbase (even if only for a few levels for the first few weeks). It will create artificial elevations in people leveling past beginning content faster (due to less competition), leveling tradeskills faster (due to duplicated nodes from different shards), and lessen the overall impact that you have on the community and the community has on you.
The real issues back then were severe lag (especially loot related) because the servers were overwhelmed. Today’s servers shouldn’t be overwhelmed as easily as they were in 2004… I think the way they’ve changed servers will make sharding inevitable in Classic. You experience severe server lag frequently in huge world fights or even 40v40 brawls (Southshore).
If they do end up implementing sharding, how small each shard be? When do you get to a new shard? By passing into a new zone or is it based off of subzones like retail? Implementation of sharding will destroy the contiguous world we experienced in vanilla… That Priest who was running beside you just disappeared… That rare you were killing is gone now because you shifted shards… That character that ganked you while you were fighting a tiger in STV? Oh, he’s gone now. He walked over the bridge to Duskwood. Better luck next time!
Considering the launch of Vanilla was no where near the expected population to launch of Classic, tell me how do you figure “sharding” will ruin your experience, when even back then, you didn’t experience the launch of WoW it self, you literally have no idea.
I’d prefer dynamic respawns and no sharding. But taking into account the Classic team’s recent announcements, something weird has arisen called “trust.”
So if they sincerely do plan to implement sharding for only a few days after launch, and this would improve everyone’s experience and also result in an earlier release date than if they coded dynamic respawns, then okay.
I would consider it a negative but I’m not going to overreact and pretend like they’re doing a poor job on everything else.
When first starting everyone is level 1. Everyone all starts in the same zone (char dependent) and at launch they will all be in the same zone at the same time. There is no way around that. As people start to level and progress outside the starting 1 thru 10 area people start to spread out plus the zones become a tad bit bigger, hell the barrens the alone is the size of probably 3 starting zones if more. At this point the population begins to spread out a bit people begin to drop off, people begin to level at different speeds, log in at different times, play for different amounts of times.
Any game that is launching usually has their biggest numbers of concurrent people online at the same time, within a week that number starts to dip a bit as some actually use time off from work etc to be there for that initial launch of the game and classic will be no different.
Uh, they’re not going anywhere if sharding is obtrusive. You should probably read the mission statements on the big servers. Blizzard either gives us what we want or we give it to ourselves. The only team that can lose this in this game is blue.
![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
![:wink:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")