We recognise that launching WoW Classic poses a couple of meaty challenges.
Unlike launching a traditional game that’s brand new, where you can assume that everyone that’s jumping in there on launch day has the intent to at least explore playing it long term, we expect that early on with Classic, there are going to be some people who are there die hard, dedicated, they’re racing to defeat Ragnaros and Onyxia.
There are going to be others who just want to check it out casually and they just want to see what all the fuss is about, they want to see what they missed.
And, our concern is, I think it’s exactly as you suggest, what’s that going to look like? What’s that going to do to realm communities, as some server populations may dwindle over time?
That is where we are looking at using sharding in a very limited way.
We understand, and I understand completely, that sharding is antithetical to a cohesive Classic community.
We are competing over limited resources. When Lord Kazzak is up, and guilds are racing to defeat him, there needs to be only one Lord Kazzak. You’re trying to get, you know, if you’re trying to lock down the thorium vein spawn in limited sections of the world, you should be competing over limited resources.
That said, when everybody is packed into Valley of Trials, when everybody is packed into Elwynn, we think we can use sharding there in a limited, time limited way, to solve the initial launch day load problems, while making sure in the long run, that as server communities solidify, there’s a healthy population as single worlds for everyone to live in.
Source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-GobXQTf6w
So tell me, what is Ion’s main point here? What does he spend the entire time talking about? Server population. Server community. What does he spend one piece of a sentence mentioning? “Launch day load problems”.
Why does everyone focus on this single fraction of a sentence like it’s the entire reason for sharding being mentioned as a solution?
The entire reason for sharding as a solution is what we all want to protect: Server community!
A dead server = dwindling, almost non-existant community.
We need to maintain server populations. We can’t have temporary tourists artificially inflating numbers and potentially ruining server communities before they take off.
Sharding is a reasonable solution. We’ve been given far more than we thought we would thus far. To dig in our heels like children and say NO I DON’T WANNA is petty.
Trust the Classic devs. They’re obviously trying their hardest for us. This is a project of love. I have no doubts that they will do all they can to remove sharding as soon as possible and never implement it again.
Please guys, just let them have their smooth launch that also protects our servers in the long run.
