Sharding puts Vanilla gameplay second (anti-sharding anthology)

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
520

Beedoobeedoobeedoo Covenience Police on the scene. Everyone push rocks up hills!

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521

Exactly.

Blizzard should listen to the people that are intelligent enough to realize that while sharding on the whole is antithetical to the Vanilla-like (note: Not 100% Vanilla) experience, it will be useful (perhaps even necessary) to provide a playable (read: non-private server garbage) starting zone experience for more than just a select few.

522

Or, you know, not have 50 dead servers a few months after launch.

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523

They’re not listening to the convenience driven players (of which you’re a part of), they’re listening to themselves.

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524

Thanks for the clarification.

525

Or, you know, a majority of players don’t quit like Blizz are counting on, and they’re left with the inability to ever stop sharding, and it was all for nothing.

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526

They could offer free transfers to new servers as well as login queues. It seems like you’d rather have dead servers than sharding. Going by your past posts, you mostly seem interested in solo content so this doesn’t surprise me.

527

The chances of that happening are virtually nil. Even when WoW was new and a growing phenomenon, most people who tried it never made it past level 10.

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528

That statement makes no sense. If what you said was true then the playerbase would not have grown.

But your prior statement was based on the hypothetical that many/most players will leave shortly after launch. That might happen. Ion thinks it will, and that’s why the’re considering sharding. I’m simply saying let’s imagine that that doesn’t happen. That (God Forbid) the population actually grows after launch. What then? I laid this out in another thread. I see three options.

  1. Open up new servers. Which will be somewhat effective in dealing with new players, but players aren’t going to abandon their characters. So overpopulated servers remain overpopulated.
  2. Free transfers to those new servers. This might help somewhat, but I doubt most players will want to pick up and leave and desert friends, guildmates, etc. And getting everyone to agree to leave…good luck.
  3. Keep sharding.

I think Blizz will choose option 3. Classic’s success will just be an excuse for them to extend sharding for…however long they need, for how ever many situations it’s ‘warranted’.

I’ve said this time and time again, but sharding is not a solution. It’s a band-aid, and it’s only effective if there’s a mass departure of players. Otherwise, the conditions that enable Blizzard to turn it off will never come about.

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529

"Blizzard has revealed that only 30 per cent of new World of Warcraft players make it past level 10.

That’s the tipping point at which people either stay or go, which make’s the game’s 11.5 million subscriber base all the more impressive."

-eurogamer(dot)net/articles/blizzard-70-percent-of-new-wow-players-dont-get-past-level-10_1

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530

Oh nice find. I hadn’t been able to locate that data point as a source.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/blizzard-70-percent-of-new-wow-players-dont-get-past-level-10_1

For easy linking.

531

Again, what does that have to do with anything? As long as more people are joining than quitting, guess what: the population goes up. Amazing how that works.

As far as Classic goes, I expect the population to go up. Hence…the reasons for sharding never go away. That’s the problem.

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532

It means that if a million people pick up Classic to try, 700,000 of them never get past level 10.

Sharding allows those 700,000 people to play without requiring 5x as many servers, meaning that after they all leave, servers aren’t deserted.

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533

This logic you two are employing is baffling me. Vanilla launched with what…a couple hundred thousand players? Ended at 8 million. So if 7 out of 10 never got past level 10, that’s completely irrelevant. The population still skyrocketed!! And who’s to say that won’t happen with Classic?

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534

We’re only talking about launch, not further down the road…

Down the road they can add servers like normal, as the growth will far slower than “instant”

You’re right, Vanilla didn’t start with millions. Classic will.

535

I understand what you’re saying, but that still doesn’t address what I’m talking about. Obviously Classic’s launch will be bigger. It’s why I’ve reluctantly accepted they might have to shard the 1-10 areas for a week or two (though I still hold out hope they find another solution). But let’s say that Classic launches with 2 million players and a month later has 3 million players. Blizz’s anticipation of a mass drop in player population doesn’t happen, and suddenly they can’t just stop sharding. So they extend it.

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536

If that’s happening, then more of them are getting past the 1-10 or 10-20 mark. Proper management of servers kicks in at that point, shutting off servers they predict to be full and opening new servers for the later intake.

People keep thinking sharding is the only tool in the box. It’s specifically targeted at a specific scenario. If that scenario breaks down and breaches the expected limits, they simply apply the same Vanilla tools. Add servers and close random selection to full-servers-to-be, provide transfers from super populated servers, etc.

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537

Probably because Blizz hasn’t mentioned any other interventions. They have mentioned keeping server numbers to a minimum, I think. Could be mistaken.

:cocktail:

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538

Sure they have. They said they’d add servers if the population got large. And they said they’re looking at transfers.

539

Nothing definitive at this point, just a lot of looking into it. Makes me wonder how many people they are anticipating for launch.

:cocktail:

1 Like