Thanks for the link to the Legion patch notes on disabling sharding in RP realms!
It proves my point (in my thread, Sharding puts Vanilla gameplay second (anti-sharding anthology)) that sharding puts Vanilla community-based gameplay second - behind server performance which they are “very happy with” - while many people are unhappy because they can’t even see their friends!
What a HUGE disconnect between Blizzard’s view and players’ experience of sharding.
You would have thought that when Blizzard started looking at using sharding, someone, somehwere at Blizzard would have asked:
“Hey, isn’t it a bad thing for gameplay in a MMO to NOT be able to see your own friends in the world?”
Blizzard
Over the last couple of years, we’ve begun using some new technology we’ve occasionally referred to as “sharding” in non-instanced zones, which separates players in high-traffic areas out into separate “shards” of a particular zone. The benefit to our server performance has been massive - it was a huge part of why Legion’s launch went so smoothly - and so, as a whole, we’ve been very happy with the system.
Player comment:
Bananamanson 2017/08/08 (Patch 7.2.5)ReportQuoteReply
I do not like sharding from a game point of view. I have friends on the same realm, same guild and can never see them in game. We can run right past each other, not seeing each other as we are in different shards. Too bad they do not seem to be able to put friends in the same shard, unless they group?Not sure why it still needs to be used after Legion’s launch?
And, this…is what I am afraid is going to happen in Classic WoW - one of the most community-oriented games ever made will be divided up into tiny shards just like modern WoW.
Modern WoW is an asocial game with virtually no need for guilds or community anymore.
Now they are headed down the same path with Classic WoW by the use of sharding - it’s very depressing.