Is sharding ALWAYS bad?
Why did blizzard adopt sharding in the first place?
If sharding is not ALWAYS bad, is there better or worse ways to use sharding?
So, first, is sharding bad? Most of the time, yes it is. The reason sharding is bad most of the time is because it facilitates cross realm and cross shard hijinks. Specifically, joining/leaving groups allows people to shard hop. This shard hopping allows clever users to shard hop for mining/herbing nodes and to shard hop to escape from pvp.
Blizzard adopted sharding to lessen the load on their realms. When a bunch of players are in one area, the entire game freezes up, they strip mine the world, and world of warcraft becomes world of lagcraft.
Right now, sharding is for the most part seemingly random. Players have no control over which shard they want to go to, except that they can go to a different shard via the group finder. This is a fundamentally abuse prone method of sharding. There are different ways to get to sharding, but they involve different shard selection schemes.
Group count based sharding
Instead of determining shard selection randomly by group leader, the shard is determined by how many players are in a certain group. The advantage here is that the pvp groups of equal sizes are ALWAYS matched against each other. The disadvantage is that herbing/mining shard raids could be formed and used to manipulate the shard by jumping based on group count.
Group leader randomized Sharding
This is what we have today. Everyone is assigned to a random shard, and whoever is the leader of the group determines which shard the raid jumps to. This is manipulated by leaving/joining raids with different leaders to jump shards.
Bucket Sharding
This is weird strategy where people can be members of the same raid, however being in the same raid does not guarantee they will be in the same shard. Instances of this have cropped up here and there. Notably in the world horde/alliance assaults. This has interplays with phasing. It gets weird.
Player determined sharding
This is a strategy where players are given the choice of what shard they wish to join. Either through a game mechanic, or through an option setting. Wow has never given the players this, mostly because sharding is supposed to be a light touch on the world, not an actual magical effect, despite being a stronger magical effect than almost any player ability…
So, how would you mix/match the sharding strategies? Would you change the way sharding works? Why or why not? Could blizzard use sharding to ensure that all wpvp is fair in terms of number of players engaging on each side? Would you even want such a sharding format?
A thought to consider… shard exploitation for the purpose of herbing/mining/killing rares could be prevented by having a lockout list of recently killed units/mined/herbed node IDs. If a node or unit is on the lockout list, you cannot loot the node until the node lockout expires. Node lockout durations would be the same durations as the respawn times of the node or looted unit. Thoughts?