To some extent you can blame the bots. They overflow a zone when a bunch of them spin up and it causes sharding for the legitimate players. Bots are a little out of control at the moment.
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Unfortunately, that doesn’t solve anything for dead servers like mine. Way back when CRZ was first implemented, I was very vocal about my dissatisfaction. Now, years later as my server slowly shriveled into a husk of its former self, I’ve grown to appreciate it. The solution isn’t its removal. It is refining the system in place to not phase people in and out at random, especially if they are in combat already.
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One thing (of the many things) I like about GW2 is that they will notify you if a “shard” (I forget what they call them there) that you are on is empty/full and give you a small buff to preemptively switch to a new one. It will warn you that after a certain amount of time (an hour, I think?) it will push you out.
It may be somewhat of an adjustment and/or annoying at times, but it seems much better than just auto-swapping someone, especially in the middle of something.
Yeah this really needs to be addressed. Being moved over to a new shard mid-combat is the game itself griefing you. The most recent alt I was leveling, I got sharded while I was fighting a rare mob three separate times. At least it was only while leveling. But I’ve also had it happen while fighting a world boss, in a raid group. Their tech doesn’t even care whether you’re solo or in a group; you’ll get moved anyway on a whim with no warning at all, no matter what you’re doing. It absolutely sucks.
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I think they should leave only maybe 3 of those “dead servers” of each type and close the rest, giving players options for a free transfer to another server of their choice. Some people prefer those dead servers for whatever reason, so we’ll leave those 3 for those players.
What needs to happen is more server merges. A lot of them.
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My favorite was doing a Superbloom and having the silly tree teleport away - I and a few others got sent to a different shard where he was walking the other path.
It was annoying.
Yup, got sharded twice in less than an hour doing the cavern events. SO frustrating. Soloing something at 90 percent , poof disappears. Some manager some where may think that they are padding their getting more played time numbers out of this . But in actuality I’m playing alot less because of the sharding.
I sometimes wonder how mats multiply but I never see anyone farming them.
Agree completely. Can’t count the number of times I’ve been working to get Fyrakk to appear only to be rudely yanked out and end up in an area where not only have I lost the high percentage that I’ve worked to get to, but now I’m in an area where the summons hasn’t even started. Absolutely terrible.
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I’ve been working on the Best in Slot achievement to upgrade the Tuskarr fishing gear. Usually a couple times an hour while I’m fishing in the ice fishing holes I’ll suddenly switch shards, and the ice fishing hole suddenly disappears. It’s kind of annoying, but not that big a deal I guess.
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Many months later and it is still happening, and it has nothing to do with the server size, I see stories of people mid combat being sharded on low/dead servers.
I think they put a time limit in place to stop people camping and making it harder to get things done, going to be a royal pain in TWW when mount rares are out and about and we can’t camp them.
But on the flip side, if we keep getting thrown around maybe it will give a chance for more players to fly by and find things up.
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It shouldn’t be a problem at the start of TWW because this really bad sharding issue only started when the server populations dropped and they started using the CRZ groups more. Up to that time I was always only in my connected server cluster and never experienced the problem I encounter now almost constantly if I play early AM.
I notice it more in the areas that has those group events - it is like they are trying to make sure there is enough people in a shard to do those so are constantly yanking people out of other shards to fill.
Yet many people I know experience it in lower population areas, like sitting in Zaralek Cavern with 3 other people on the /who list while waiting for Karokta to spawn.
They have definitely changed something, because up until all these reports of sharding issues the one big thing since BFA was that no one gets sharded while in combat, but that changed, many people are reporting that in mid combat they are being taken out of combat and thrown into a new shard.
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It makes doing any world content tough.
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I just hope it is only a DF issue and not something they purposely changed, for myself I am thankful I was done with world content long before these issues started being reported. But if it continues into TWW it’s going to be an awful mess and practically change how the game is played by many players.
Obviously there are good reasons for this to happen:
- No one can camp world content like the feast and time rifts since you might be moved to a shard that has no progress.
- Cannot camp rares since you are always moved around, cannot realistically know of their spawn timers.
- Better for casual players doing flybys to find what they want up.
- More incentive to join groups and have the community thing going on.
But on the flip:
- Players who like to camp for things like rares or waiting for events to start, say when cooking or watching a movie are severely punished since they are always moved around.
- Players who don’t like to join groups for any reason are now shifted around and potentially lose any help they would have otherwise had.
- And being moved to a dead shard during an event could place you on a shard that has no progress even if you are contributing, all seemingly for nothing.
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Unfortunately whatever they did in DF they are going to have to adjust because it is flat out bad trying to do any world content in DF.
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When you think about it, it may have been on purpose. Too many complaints about people going AFK at world events and just camping things, like Karokta and Breezebiter, so less chance for those who cannot camp to get things done.
They did change the Big Dig to make it so if you went AFK you got nothing, but people were just moving an inch every few minutes to negate that. So now we have this, get sharted sharded every so often to force you to participate and join groups to get things done faster.
But yeh I think they went too far, if you are in combat or if you are active you should never shard out, it should only boot those who are just not doing anything, move them to dead shards or shards where the progress is low, it’s not fair to players who are actively playing the game.
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that may be close enough to the researchers under fire event to draw from that area.
Idk. Sort of unrelated to the current “sharded during an activity” issues, but ever since they added sharding I noticed I barely see other players at the start of an expansion because the game is sharding so aggressively to prevent any crowding.
So on launch night when player numbers are huge, I’m in a high pop server, I see maybe 2 or 3 people around me as I’m questing. It kind of disheartening. I miss when the game felt super alive on new content launches.
I blame the people who freak out about any bit of lag like it’s the worst thing to ever happen in the game lol
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