Sharding made sense when the expac first dropped but right now all it is doing is killing roleplay. RP is one of the things keeping this game alive, it’s clear from how much roleplay content there is in the expac that they are paying attention to that. Keeping that sharding going is making it impossible to connect with friends or make connections and tell stories.
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Feels like being on a PvE server.
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I’m shocked Stormwind is still sharded. Found out today that Ironforge is sharded too. Why??
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Oribos is more crowded than Stormwind.
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It’s true. I have spent most of my time in Epic Battlegrounds since launch but I like a IC chat before bed. It’s been ghost town every time I’ve been to SW. Hope it gets fixed soon, Ralir is getting bored of talking to himself. 
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First dropped? It has been two weeks as of this evening. It is still brand new!
RP isn’t being killed. Not even remotely close. Your preferred RP style is mildly inconvenienced for a short time. The rest of us are having a great time. I have had some of the best world RP I have had since BFA the last week. I am even starting to see a lot of RP in Valdrakken.
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Social distancing 
Probably because there are too many people in SW for the servers to handle.
Is it sharded or is everyone just too busy doing content and hanging out in Valdrakken to afk on street corners in SW?
It is. During what’s supposed to be “prime time,” you can do a TRP map-scan to see how many other people with the addon installed are in Stormwind; it will show 50+ dots on the screen but if you fly around you’ll be lucky if you find 15 across the map.
Sharding is 
ing awful and it should have been turned off two days after Dragonflight launched. There’s no good reason for the system to work like this; RP will be fine after it’s gone but the wait for sharding to be removed is frustrating and disappointing for those of us who enjoy the dense public hub that the city is supposed to be.
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Saw a few foks RPing in Valdrakken. Might be worth a visit? (But yes, Stormwind should be done sharding. Total agree. Meantime, probably can’t hurt to establish a new RP hub?)
It’ll be disabled in the next week or two, probably now that launch has passed.
Valdrakken is also heavily sharded. The sheer volume of people there make it look more populated, but it’s still Phase Roulette to see if you get into one with other people looking for RP in it (as opposed to just infecting each other with Contagious Fear or whatever that debuff is).
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Well, so much for that idea. I tried, lol. Maybe convince RPers to relocate RP to Darkshire or Redridge?
Blizzard has turned on sharding for stability before and then forgotten about it or forgotten it’s impact on RP in the past. If there’s real concern that’s the case though, we’d really have to post it somewhere reps actually read through. I believe that was necessary back in Legion–there was that massive thread of both WRA and MG players trying to draw attention to the impact on RP and that was what ultimately had them fixing it.
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Blizzard community peeps don’t actually look at the server forums often, so; spam the main community forums with this, it’s all we’ve got.
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Tweeting at them would probably help as well, since they’re more active on Twitter even now. It’s likely they just forgot, given all the other technical stuff this week. Though I do find it kind of suspicious that each Xpac they seem to try and push the line further and further in terms of how long they keep sharding in.
This has been excessive sharding even for an expansion launch as well, unless people deliberately group up I don’t think I’ve seen more than a handful of people per shard.
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Go post on this thread:
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They’ll probs turn it off later this month or in January, like they did with Shadowlands, Blizz is just waiting for the traffic to slow down a little bit first 
So—We’re actually PAST the time that it took for them to remove sharding in Shadowlands; that time it went away 2 weeks following launch, though we also had a lot of momentum on the forums from week 1, on the forums and twitter both.
I know it only makes sense that Blizzard SHOULD have a clear plan for when phasing / sharding is supposed to be “turned off,” but after so many years of it never being communicated and the issues that the system brings being entirely glossed over in conventional conversations (the only time they seemed self-aware was when they discussed its effects on communities while discussing their WoW Classic philosophies), I honest-to-god do not believe there is one.
I genuinely believe Blizzard just puts the automated system up, then focuses on other problems until people start talking about it. If we didn’t care, I think they would leave it on forever (which is why it was such a big deal when the system was introduced in Legion).
So—Please, for real—I cannot encourage people enough to send messages either on the General Discussion forums, where Blues actually read threads, or by reaching out to the various official twitter accounts (WarcraftDevs, BlizzardCS, Warcraft) and asking something like “Hey, when is this going away???”
It’s historically been the only way to get this garbage to go away. 
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Blizzard has the means to fix the problem with minimal maintenance for them, I feel. Look at the Warmode system. You click a button, you’re in a different phase and you’re flagged. If you put in a button for RP where people can opt in or out, they can opt to phase in to others looking to RP, or opt out for performance if they’re just doing content and running around to get things done. I don’t know much about coding though so I don’t know if that’s somehow a logistical nightmare for them to implement? Just seems like they’re overlooking some easy routes to resolve problems long term for RP servers when it comes to phasing/sharding problems.
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