Any idea when this sharding might go away? I’m looking at the TRP search thing on map and Stormwind is full, but I can never see more than five people in stormwind at a time. I understand why they are doing it, but there has to be a better way, right? Hopefully it’s fixed soon.
3 Likes
This usually lasts 2-3 weeks until the surge in new players from the expansion release settles down a bit. They will disable it when server load is at an acceptable point where unsharding it won’t crash the server.
2 Likes
Thanks for the reply 
That definitely makes sense - I just wasn’t sure of the time frame. I’ve been playing off and on since BC but I don’t think i’ve ever actually been around for a prepatch event as an RPer hanging out in cities so I haven’t quite had the experience yet.
The icing on the cake of this experience is using TRP to scan for profiles and seeing all the people you’re sharded away from.
Funnily enough I don’t seem to shard where the prepatch stuff is. Would rather shard there since there’s a tag limit as opposed to SW where I literally go to/want to see people.
3 Likes
Its going to be like this until a week or two after the xpac launches. Went through the same stuff when SL launched as well.
Yeah it sucks, luckily it won’t last too long.
It’s worth a note that they’ve pretty much never just remembered to turn it off until roleplayers raised a big fuss about it.
1 Like
I know, it’s ridiculous. Especially being an RP server, it looks like no one is online.
This was a huge thing for me. I was at one of the events and the world boss kept respawning because the servers would crash right before its death because of the sheer traffic. No sharding still. Lol.
Yeah, it kind of waters down the ‘server traffic; lots of people playing’ excuse. No sharding where everyone is at to the point of people not being able to tag; but shards where a minority of the players are just chilling. Has made this limbo where I already have the prepatch stuff, have the SL stuff I can reasonably get with the time left, have an empty city, and no other hobbies.
Though… the last one is def my fault.
Kinda disappointed. I was hoping to watch Dragons roleplay this weekend but I’ve been with like 5 people the entire time in SW lol.
Last time I was in Stormwind I had some bad ribs at the Pig and Whistle. There was much sharding that night I can tell you.
5 Likes
It’s sad seeing the Mage’s District and Cathedral District so dead. 
I like to watch RP from the sidelines sometimes after a long day of foolin’ around questing or whatever, but it’s difficult to find any at the moment since sharding splits the RP playerbase up so badly.
Given that we (justifiably) do so within seconds of noticing it, I’m pretty sure the only way they could do it before we raise a big stink would be not to turn it on in the first place…
It isn’t “broken” to be fixed. If there weren’t sharding, you all would be complaining about the lag. It will only be worse come the 28th with the number of people descending on the area, and we may even see queues again. This is a much better and more stable solution for the overall game and server, which is only a minor inconvenience.
1 Like
Could literally complain about the lag already lol Two days ago the Oribos instance went down. The current end game city’s instance failed. Are we just… not going to act like that isn’t absolutely ridiculous especially considering it’s sharded as $%!&? There’s minecraft servers with better stability than this game. Games that can fix their issues instead of having every tech page be ‘repair the game.’ I’ll pass on the bandwagon you’re on, but I’d love whatever you’re smoking.
1 Like
Naw. The thing is, this has happened before a few times and people have pushed to get it taken off. And when it was, most people were pretty satisfied they did what was asked.
3 Likes
The funny thing is that unlike the last three or so expansions, the pre-patch stuff doesn’t really need much sharding in Stormwind, there’s nothing going on barring the initial quests. Then literally everything to do in the city (other than RP) is just buying items. Everything else is out in the world.
2 Likes
Yeah so when people say ‘you’d just complain about server lag’ I can’t help but freaking laugh. First off, of sharding or lag are the two options, that’s on Blizz, we don’t have to accept either quietly. Second, it’s sharding where it doesn’t matter and those places are still screwed. You can look at the chat channels to see there’s 3 times as many people in non sharded prepatch zones than in the cities. It’s an indefensible state of the game.
Points to missing Oribos, which is hilariously being written off by sharding suppoters
Again… the current content city… missing. DF ain’t out yet homies.
5 Likes
This happens before every expansion. It’ll be gone in a few weeks probably.