Sharding technology, while beneficial to the stability of the servers and the game itself, is harming players ability to become a part of the world they devote so much time to.
Here are 2 examples of sharding instances that have made me very angry IN THE PAST 2 DAYS.
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I posted a thread about this in the War Mode forums, but long story short: Questing on my leveling mage, ganked by max level paladin. Log to my warrior to try to fight him off. Cannot find Pally in exact area I was questing in. Log back into mage where I the paladin is still camping. You cannot avenge your own death.
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Doing Dragon of Nightmare. Running away from bad things on the ground. Get shifted to new shard where the boss is not spawned and I lose the progress I made on killing him.
This is absolutely game-breaking. It is impossible to form meaningful relationships. Difficult to help your friends unless you join a group (which may not be possible to the group being full, and converting to raid prevents quest progress) and overall makes the game feel more like Battlefield, or a random FPS with selectable servers (which is actually better than sharding) and less like a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
20 Likes
You wouldnāt be changing shards mid-combat, so for the dragon, you very likely ran out of range of it and dropped combat. I noticed that I dropped combat on Ysondre yesterday on my mage, itās weird that you even CAN with these world bosses, but thatās not a sharding issue, thatās a āthese bosses are old and probably adhere to old combat rulesā issue.
As for avenging your leveling alt, idk. Some would argue that itās just a consequence of leveling in warmode, but you should still be capable of logging over to your main and getting some form of vengeance. Maybe in the future they can make sharding an account-based thing if only temporarily, so that all your characters will appear in the same shard if you log over in quick succession?
I do agree with the issue of trying to kill someone who camps an alt. Ran into this on my hunter being camped by a rogue while leveling. Tried to log onto DH to kill him but alas sharding had me in a complete different zone. It would be nice if the sharding didnāt make your characters at all these different shards.
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This has been my primary problem with Warmode as a whole. You can end up in a shard with a good mix of players, alone against an army or completely alone. Itās all completely random.
I know theyāre working on fixing this but so far I havenāt seen many results.
(puts out a little tray of cookies in support of balance shards!)
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Totally agree with you OP. Iād rather see some a lot more connected realms/server merges than this whole cross realm sharding.
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Yea. I would rather see players from the merged servers then randoms you will never see again. Bliz should make it an option to get sharded or not or even add in an option to stay on a less/more crowded area.
Happened to me a couple days ago in Arathi w/ my mage. Husband and I in a group of 2. We jumped in on a fight against one of the rare elites (Molok). There were 3 other people that I saw on the mob as well. After building up icicles for glacial spike, I start to fire it offā¦but it never lands. Husband and I get phased to a different shard from the mob and the others fighting him. Suddenly weāre standing 5 feet from a very alive & full health Molok with no one else around us.
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I canāt count how many times I have been phased into a different shard while killing a mob when leveling my alts. It does happen! It has gotten me killed a few times as well.
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My mistake then! Iāve never experienced it myself, though I recently swapped alliance and turned war mode off and Iāve been experiencing a LOT more phasing issues with mining and herbing nodes, so honestly part of me wants to say war mode has something to do with phasing bugs. Who knows thouhg, honestly ![:man_shrugging:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/man_shrugging.png?v=6" ":man_shrugging:")
And Iāve forgotten how many times Iāve tried to mine a node and it disappears right before Iām done, wasting my time and just making me angry.
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Yeah, the other day, I was farming Sethrak on my mage and sort of leveling at the same time. A 120 decided to show how good they are at PVP and, after almost dying to the mobs I kited him through, managed to get the better of me (a lvl 112). I logged onto my priest but, of course he was nowhere to be found. Hereās where it gets interesting. I logged back on my mage and rezzed. Next thing I know thereās a huge group of peope pulling mobs and mowing em down. I took advantage of all this and jumped in with my Arcane Explosions. To make a long story short, the leader of the group started whispering for me to leave and that I was messing up their farming group by making a lot of mobs turn gray. I replied that I was farming too and I wasnāt going anywhere. I was like, āwhy donāt you invite?ā and he was like, āweāre fullā. Well Iām definitely not one to be bullied so I continued to go about farming Sethrak. Then I start getting more spam messages about what kind of person I am (to put it nicely) and I was being reported for griefing. Whether they phased to my shard or I phased to theirs, I had just as much right to be there as they did. I would love to go back to the good olā days where realms were separate, if not in their own server group. Phasing sucks.
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Iāve only once had a sharding issue. Since then, Iāve been more careful about where I eat lunch.
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Geez I thought I had bad luck when the node I was mining would just disappear.
Yup, sharding is out of control. I want to see peeps I recognize.
Sharding is done more responsibly in other MMOs. In other MMOs you can choose to go to a shard and are only kicked off if you have been on the shard for many hours and it is full.
In WoW sharding is forced constantly even on low pop realms and it feels bad and you have no choice to go to a shard to play with friends or families or do transmog events.
1 Like
Yeahā¦ merged servers are A LOT better than this shardingā¦ thereās 0 sense of community now. I have these problems with characters on the same realm being in separate shards lol. There was an alliance group raiding Orgrimmar at some point while I was on an alt (havenāt joined groups since logging in, nothing) so I switched to my main and everything was but a ghost townā¦ Very nice.
What? This happens all the time. Just a few hours ago I was fighting Mechagon Enforcer and Nullifier on the platform you summon Nullifier on and when they were low I got put into a different shard. There was no running out of range there itās just the small little Nullifier platform, nor is this mob old.
Yup, it does happen all the time.