Enjoy waiting 3 hours to kill 1 mob in the Starting sub-zone/area/sliceofmap XO
If they shard that much of the game they start bleeding subs
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What? Was being wrong so stressful to you that your brain just broke
People will jump up and down and huff and puff. Ultimately whats best for the game will win out and most of those claiming to quit will stay longer term.
Its only until populations stabilise.
Think that if you want but when they discussed sharding at blizzcon they only listed zones up to level 12.
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I am hoping that they only need to phase 1-10 zones but It all depends on the progress of the massive blob of players. Its about creating the best possible play experience, ideally there would be no phasing but some phasing is better than the alternative.
If things are not overcrowded, they don’t need login queues, spawns are not constantly camped, worlds are not crashing/kicking people back to login screen or rubber banding/monumental lag… then of course no phasing.
There are a lot of features that have not been tested in a live environment, having options (like being able to do a quick server restart/flip a switch and turn on phasing for 10-20 zones) is much much better than a day of down time.
Ion Hazzikostas explicitly stated that they are looking at sharding in the “first few weeks” to deal with launch issues. As examples, he mentioned the Valley of Trials and Elwynn Forest as areas where it would make sense.
He also explicitly stated that sharding is antithetical to building communities in Classic WoW, saying that everyone should be competing for the same thorium veins and that, for example, there should only be one Lord Kazzak.
Search for " Ion Hazzikostas Answers About Classic Sharding" on youtube to hear it all for yourself.
Let me ask you something. What happens when hundreds of players are fighting each other at Blackrock Mountain? What about when thousands are in Silithus at the Opening of the Gates of AQ? Do you shard then?
Sharding is not a solution. It’s a band-aid, and the conditions of launch aren’t a one and done. There are going to be situations where people will feel overcrowded. Too many competing for resources, for quests. And so on. It’s not just constrained to launch or early zones. Which is why I encourage finding an actual long-term fix…if sharding is even being done for technical reasons.
Because if not, players will demand it in any instance where they feel inconvenienced. And they’ll be right to do so, since Blizz will have already validated their complaints by sharding at all. Once it’s in the game it’ll be used as an excuse to extend it, and extend it, and extend it.
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Absolutely not. The only way that sharding should ever be allowed in Classic Wow is to deal with oversaturation of the starting zones during launch. That’s it.
if they dont shard there , they should level restrict the opening as that’s where a ton of the problems with that and the Isle of Queldanas had issues with.
Yeah i swear they better not shard aq and holidays
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So people think they’ll accommodate the convenience for launch, but when it comes to other events like huge world pvp battles, or AQ, they’ll say, “Suck it up!”?
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I’m willing to let them have enough rope to hang
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This type of congestion is needed, its what pushed players to swap factions and fill other servers.
There does not need to be a long-term solution for a recreation of Classic Vanilla experience.
The only real ‘Solution’ for the sake of not having servers crash is put a queue on character creation, allow only ‘x’ amount of new creations per hour, adjusted by start zone congestion for each race. This would be something they would have to actively monitor and update: EG multiple GM’s per server per zone actively reporting back to throttle creation.
Additionally having an auto-afk time out of around 10-15m until congestion calms.
One-Time Events
For the AQ opening event, making it a restricted area for the groups that are actively doing and progressing the event. Having an evacuation order issued of sorts for all other players in the zone under the pretext of the dangers of opening gates, (forcing players out) would fit this situation. To facilitate this an invitation system of sorts would need to be created and used. In-game item or code activation on the player for the account to be allowed in.
Adding more structure to the event so its able to occur for only those that actively pushed the quest lines for them should be left to them. True this would essentially change the Classic Vanilla Experience. At the same time just having Kalimdor go down constantly for the event because players want to ‘be there when it happens’ is extremely unfair to those that were able to band together to do the quests for it.
The main issue with the AQ opening event is one that Blizzard could not accurately predict and prepare for in the past, now they have an opportunity to allow it to work as they intended originally. Sure any player could contribute materials and the like for the opening and feel entitled to being able to view, HOWEVER… That’s like expecting the same ‘reward’ for investing in a crowd funding project whether it be $1, $10, $100, $1000+, its an unrealistic expectation.
Even with crowd funding, there are usually limits on serious projects how many package levels they allow. So even if they treated it more like a Ticket system where providing ‘X’ amount of support would allow you in, there would be a limited number. Additionally for matter of the groups (likely guilds) doing the event, they would likely be granted more tickets for the need of replacements to get it done.
Making iconic one-time events work properly given a second chance chance should be the only items under consideration for any changes.
What was i doing when the gates opened? Convincing players to not go to Kalimdor and message anyone they knew over there to leave to facilitate the opening, no matter how much they wanted to see it. Also hitting up the forums over players complaints, asking the to let those that were taking an active role to do their job, then we could all benefit.
The people who make it to endgame will hopefully be made of tougher stuff and not worry about too many people being there, whereas at the start anyone interested will be there - so you have many more players than normal.
Let them fight, the amount of people that will make it to BRM on each server vs tourists to classic on launch is magnitudes different. I have been in those raids where its “just get into the zone and buff up so we can start our raid, those jerks are comping again”. Its a part of wow.
May need to shard everything north of the gong (one gong per server obviously), the stairs leading up to the gong are the transition point… its how I would see it working… depending on how the event plays, if its stable don’t shard any of it (PTR can determine it).
Yes they really are, nothing is as popular as a lunch event or more stressful for testing new systems and content.
Later content releases will have suffered through extreme attrition. Its human nature many, many, players will try vanilla and decide its not for them.
On this we can find common ground, I would love a better solution to wow being able to handle population concentration but I see server instability or lengthy login queues as being worse than sharding as an option.
And this is why i am against sharding. Because people like you are more then willing to let blizzard use it whenever they want
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You are against sharding because people like me are for it?
That is literally the definition of spiteful.
I’ve tried to explain my position as I think the issue is more nuanced than a yes/no, all or nothing or “slippery slope” proposition. I think we can talk about it and its uses intelligently. I value a stable and immersive play experience above all.
No I’m against sharding because it shouldn’t be in vanilla at all.
It’s anti mmo to begin with and anti vanilla.
I will endure its inclusion at launch provided blizzard does as they have advertised. 1 to 10 (or 12 depending on what you consider the first zones cap to be), for a few weeks and no further.
I fight against it so that it stays that way because people like you for some reason want the awful system to have its use expanded upon.
It’s intelligent use would be not to use it at all in a community driven game.
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Sharding does not go with vanilla, by Blizzard’s own admission. They simply are looking at is as a final solution to the problem of bottle necking at the very start. They haven’t said a word about using it after that - and at no point should they.
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