Your entire complaint is based on an assumption that they’re lying about using Sharding as a temporary solution for launch. This is despite the fact that they’ve openly acknowledged that sharding is not and should not be a part of Classic gameplay and the fact that every update we’ve received so far has reinforced their claims that they want to deliver the most authentic Vanilla-like experience possible.
The RP server issue is, as always, being mischaracterized. They never said they were going to completely disable sharding on RP servers. In 7.2.5 Blizz announced they would be disabling sharding in the old world on RP servers. This is so people could organize player-run events without worrying about sharding. However, it was always meant to remain in use intermittently in all new (Legion, at the time) content as well as game-run events in the old world (festivals, etc.). I haven’t seen any indication that this policy has changed. The complaints of sharding on RP servers that I have seen universally involve new (Legion and now BfA) content.
Excitement, gratitude and easy acceptance. The only things true Classic advocates are feeling.
The click bait prophesies of doom posts are coming from a very specific crowd. They really don’t want their private servers to close and try to use any tactics to justify their pro-private server PoV.
It is something the whiners and fear-mongers should simply accept.
Ah… another thread by someone who probably didn’t experience things like the AQ release event in Vanilla without sharding.
Back then, we’d have killed to have sharding had such technology existed.
Back in Vanilla we’d try to get online into An Qiraj without sharding. The game simply couldn’t handle so many players in the same zone.
The experience went something like this:
Constant server crashes and server resets
Long queue times to get into the game. The wait just to login could be over an hour long.
Loot and combat lag - sometimes everything would appear to just stop as the server choked. When it restarted again, your character was usually dead.
Loot and combat freezing - often you could move your character around, but if you tried to do anything else your character would be frozen in the looting or casting animation. You could still talk and chat, but could not engage in combat or loot anything. If a monster attacked you would appear to take no damage.
Multiple evenings the game was simply unplayable. There would sometimes be days where most of the players trying to play simply got fed up and logged off due to the aforementioned problems.
Even when everything actually worked, there were so many players in the same place actually tagging enemies was difficult. There was no multicharacter-tagging like there is in Retail. Only the first player or organized group that tagged a mob got credit or loot for it. If you were playing a class without a fast cast you were pretty much out of luck.
With so many players nearby, mob respawn time got shorter and shorter. Sometimes it became instantaneous. This led to the comical situation of where you down a mob only to have a fresh identical mob appear on top of its corpse the instant it dies. Kill the second one and a third one respawns instantly, and so on. And these respawns were immediately active. Not like respawns in Retail that don’t aggro for 5 seconds or so. With such fast respawn and aggro it was impossible to loot.
All that was part of “the Vanilla Experience”. But was it fun? … absolutely not! Just like all the gold seller spam, that stuff is a part of Vanilla that I think Classic should not have.
Sharding would have fixed all that. Those events would have been much more fun had sharding tech been available. Being able to actually play the game is an important part of WoW.
Except for the tiny minority of people trying to quest in the zone, sharding would have destroyed the AQ experience for a lot of people, since they wouldn’t have been able to watch the guy bang the gong anyway. Just suddenly mobs everywhere killing them, and 20 other people they could group with.
My hope is that with modern tech, they can put 2000 people in the one zone for AQ.
But how would you possibly be able to complete any quests with so many players in the same zone. Trying to tag mobs would be an exercise in frustration.
Dynamic virtual server balancing means that if more people get into zone X, then it is assigned more CPU and RAM. VMs are a super cool technology.
The question is, whats the hard limit? There will be a point where the code/memory hits a bottleneck. Only blizz knows by doing load testing, and that will probably effect their decisions.
In fact, that might be why they want to shard at launch. 2000 people in durator may just not be smooth at all.
Didn’t you have to do quests to unlock AQ? That’s my recollection anyways.
The unlocking didn’t just happen on its own. Wasn’t it timed based on the server’s progress in completing quests at the new AQ quest hub?
Also keep in mind that Vanilla didn’t have world quests like Retail does. Once AQ came out it was THE place for endgame players to go. ALL endgame players went there to quest (when they weren’t raiding or PVPing).
As someone who helped unlock my server’s AQ, I’ll address these:
Yes there were quests. They took weeks to complete, with different raid lockouts, costly materials, and lots of help. They were not completed in AQ because the raid was inaccessible prior to the Opening event.
There was also a massive server wide materials gain process, which you couldn’t unlock AQ without completing every category, so the entire server had to help.
There was no timer on AQ until well after the hubub died down, and only on low pop servers that were opened late in Vanilla. The latest servers opened with AQ already open and never had the event.
AQ is a raid dungeon, instances for each raid. Silithus, the zone you’re thinking of, was one of a number of different 55-60 zones and was not something that you couldn’t avoid. You didn’t have to even step foot in Silithus quests to enter AQ, you just had to ride through the zone and into the Raid instance. Unlike Retail, the level 60 zones were:
Eastern Plaguelands (and Western to some degree)
Winterspring
Burning Steppes
as well as Silithus.
Also, during the AQ event, you were being mobbed by L63 elites with more mobs than players. You were NOT questing in any way shape or form. You were either repeatedly dying, an L60 raid group taking them down, or running from the zone because of the AQ event, not because of the number of players questing in the zone.
What you’re forgetting though is they added the Silithus quest hub at the same time AQ was added to the game (and before AQ was unlocked). As soon as they did that, Silithus became the end game zone for all max level characters.
You could get gear and summon rare and elite bosses who dropped gear with the Silithus quests. All of the rewards were much superior, from a player power standpoint, to the previous endgame zones before the Silithus quest hub was added.
That quest hub is what caused servers to overload. It pretty much meant almost the entire server was trying to quest in just one zone (Silithus), and the software/hardware couldn’t handle it.
I was there too. And it wasn’t just an issue during the gong event.
The Silithus quests were repeatable each day. And you needed to repeat them if you wanted to summon the world minibosses or the big world boss that had a chance at giving you loot.
Since everyone was farming those daily quests in Silithus the zone was constantly overloaded. At least during prime evening time which is when I played.
That situation of being overloaded lasted for weeks. It wasn’t fun.
If you don’t trust the company, why are you here? Your comment makes zero sense. You don’t trust Blizzard’s word. If you don’t trust their word how can you trust them to take your comments seriously. If you don’t trust them to take your comments seriously, then why are you commenting?
Some part of you must trust Blizzard since you’re here and posting and want your voice to be heard.
Ok but that wasn’t the part the 2000 player cap would kick in.
I was referring to the AQ event specifically. Normal caps would be in place for everything else. If there’s heavy competition for quests in any given zone, that’s the vanilla experience.
Sharding in Silithus to handle quest goers is anathema to pretty much everyone who cares about Classic. The only time that zone needs special treatment is during the AQ Gate Opening event. Outside of that, it should be business as usual. If you’re on an overloaded server in high level zones, it might be time to accept one of those free transfers, or reroll elsewhere.
I wish there was no sharding at all. Sure, leveling for the first few days with two hundred people in Valley of Trials at midnight, but I personally feel it adds to the experience.
Let’s say it’s 2022, Classic has been out for two years now, and you reminiscence about the release. What scenario do you think you’d have fonder memories of, one where Classic was released with sharding and you just quested normally, or one where you made a character and were greeting by hundreds of people all around you, where you had to join groups just to tag mobs, where you saw all the numerous people interacting with one another, one where you decided to level up to five with your squad by exploring early zones so you can leave Valley of Trials and take on level 5 boars?
Think of all the “epic” historical moments in WoW history. Opening of the gates of Ahn’Qiraj, the Scourge invasion event, etc. What did they have in common? It was epic seeing so many numberless people milling around. Imagine if Silithus was sharded during the opening. Yeah, you would find it far more convenient to kill stuff, and there would have been a lot less lag and crashing, but can you honestly say it would have been as epic? No one who’s interested in Classic is interested in it because the game is more “convenient”, if people really wanted convenience they would just play BfA. I feel like Blizzard is making a mistake here with sharding, even if sharding is literally just for level 1-6 areas and not even the whole of level 1-12 zones, let alone the whole of the game.
![:joy:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")