You can’t possibly have a “classic” experience if they leave sharding in the game. Game content was only half of what made vanilla WoW what it was, the other half was the community. You were stuck with the people on your server, you would see the same faces from time to time making players famous or infamous for their actions. The pain of fighting for mobs or the joy of finding people who wanted to share was part of the experience that makes us remember vanilla so fondly.
Server merges kill it harder.
6 Likes
-
6m read time
-
9 topics viewed
-
31 posts read
11 Likes
600 people jammed into your level 1-5 area of choice also wasn’t part of the vanilla experience. Sharding for this area for the first week or two isn’t going to prevent the community from existing.
10 Likes
Wasn’t their stated reason that they’d only do it during launch since the influx of new characters on launch day would be massive(with no shared tagging this would be a huge issue) and cause all sorts of problems and it be turned off relatively quickly?
2 Likes
This is true but blizzard has a history of if not outright lieing, at least greatly stretching the truth with sharding. Many of us have concerns that 1 to 10 and launch window only will be stretched to include
- holiday events.
- AQ launch.
- anytime blizzard deems it necessary for stability
6 Likes
Not sure you understand sharding. You will be playing with the same people. This is not the same as Cross Realm Zoning
5 Likes
My position is I can live with sharding in Northshire Abbey for a few days, but not Elwynn Forest.
The reason being Northshire Abbey is tiny compared to regular zones and will therefore suffer the issues from overpopulation ten times worse. It’s also nice that it’s walled off from the rest of the world.
Therefore I am OK with brief sharding in the tutorial zones.
7 Likes
Northshire Abby is not a zone. It’s an area within Elwynn Forest.
1 Like
I’d be fine with this under normal circumstances, however I also feel like that allowing it once would leave the genie out of the bottle, so to speak. I’d rather keep that locked up and put away. I have more faith in the classic players to be able to handle the consequences than I do in the consequences of sharding.
3 Likes
And still i am completely 100% against permanent sharding.
Permanent sharding would mean servers are generating extra resources they shouldn’t be.
3 Likes
I don’t think anyone has said anything about permanent sharding.
They only mentioned it being used at release to lessen the burden on the servers.
Yes now do me a favor, go look at blizzards track record with sharding.
They frequently say one thing and then do another.
I’ll believe blizzard on sharding when we don’t see sharding in westfall/barrens and beyond.
I’ll believe blizzard when we see unsharded world events and aq launch
4 Likes
It’s worth noting another concern is server population.
It’s expected that there will be a surge of players at launch followed by a sharp drop as the tourists hit level 10-25 and decide Classic isn’t for them and they’ve seen what they want to see.
Using Vanilla era population caps increases the liklihood you’ll end on a server with a lower population that people will leave for the popular realms creating dead servers, just like what happened in WoW’s lifespan only we wont have the rampant runaway growth to fight it off as long.
I don’t really like the idea of sharding but it does solve a few issues that nobody has come up with a better solution to that doesn’t potentially create problems down the line for us.
It’s just as Mat’s been noting: The concern is Blizzard using it again whenever they deem they need to “for stability reasons”. The AQ gate opening is a big one we know will be laggy as most of the server rushes down to Silithus to see it.
2 Likes
We don’t know that. In fact, there is a dev quote stating just the opposite.
No they don’t, they’re just careful with their words and you take that as some sort of betrayal of trust. It’s not Blizzard’s fault that you can’t discern between carefully worded posts and lies.
1 Like
Retail says otherwise.
1 Like
All of which would be an outright lie if they did this because they specifically said it is only for launch. They however, do not have a history of lying about something similar to this.
I understand that concern. But if they really want to use sharding later, I’m not sure how it would make any difference whether they choose to turn it on during the first week or not. It’s not like they’ll go like this in the office.
Ion: “Hehe, AQ event coming gusy. Time to turn on sharding in Silithus!”
J. Allen Brack: “But Ion, don’t you remember you didn’t turn it on for launch? You just think you want to turn on sharding now. But really I think you don’t.”
Ion: “You’re right! Now there is a magic force that somehow renders me unable to hit the sharding button! I literally don’t understand this tech sometimes lol”
2 Likes
So “sharding as needed” means “use sharding all the time”
And
"Classic won’t have sharding " means “we think we’re going to use it at launch and not afterwords”