I believe the fear of sharding is greater than the wholesale potential effect people claim it will have.
Sharding in the first Zones, for the first few(defined as up to a unit of 3 in most cases) weeks is not going to “do more harm than good”. If you believe it is I think you need to remember the amount of people playing in a limit number of realms.
Think about it. That many people are going to be in the same zone as you, hundreds of people waiting for a single mob to spawn(god help you if you are melee).
Sharding is not the worst thing to happen. I’ll take a little sharding in the first weeks of classic if it means not having to fight over mobs for the easiest portion of the Vanilla leveling experience.
I would rather have large cap sharding at the start (meaning larger than normal population as compared to 8.0) than to have to overly fight for mobs in the starter zone.
Now I KNOW that part of this is the experience. And I get that. But when there are so many people in a zone that you simply can’t get your quests done it will create an issue where people will log off and never come back. And that is not what we want.
There is a balancing act. The new systems can help. The devs had said over and over they know how important community is and they even where a part of this very community back when it was happening. So try to have some faith.
And PLEASE stop comparing everything to Pservers. This is the legit REAL deal guys!! It’s going to be wonderful!
Are you saying that after 14 years since Wow (vanilla) was reased and with about 6 months or less until classic’s release, Blizzard does not yet know what they consider starting areas and cannot define “brief time at launch”?
After they think they have us invested enough to tell us that sharding will be used throughout the game in perpetuity?
Do you remember when CRZ’s were introduced and Blizzard told us that they would only be used in past expansion content and not in current content?
Do you remember when they were caught and called out for using CRZ’s in current content?
Do you remember them telling us it was a bug and they would “fix it” and they did “fix it” temporarily. Then they were caught and called out for using CRZ’s in current content again. Again, they said it was a bug and they would “fix it” and again, it was “fixed” temporarily.
They were caught and called out for using CRZ’s a few more times and temporarily “fixed” the bug until they finally changed their tune and told us they would be using CRZ’s everywhere.
But, they wouldn’t possibly lie to us about sharding, would they?
I believe you didn’t read my whole post, as I clearly said I wasn’t completely against sharding at launch, just need a few things definitively defined.
That said, the whole sale belief that sharding is the miracle cure for populations that people think it’s going to be is pretty amusing. Everyone who is completely onboard with no reservations against sharding don’t take into account that it could possibly, however unlikely be completely detrimental to Classic. They also fail to consider that that Blizzard is only assuming people will leave in droves after the initial experience and not taking into account that a lot of the “tourists” as they’re called could very well decide to stay and cause several severs to have dramatically more population then it can conceivably hold without permanent sharding or dynamic spawns.
If one server is found to have sharding for any reason after Blizzard says they turned it off, it will have a ripple effect on all the other servers and cause lots of people to leave just on principle.
All I am saying is software development is a processes and we are lucky to be getting this. Give it time and remind the community, respectfully, of your opinions occasionally so it does not disappear.
This isn’t just another game being developed. This is a world being crafted from the memories of those who witnessed it, and honed by the memories of those here on the forum for what was the “Authentic Vanilla Experience”.
Sharding is obviously not something that was around in Vanilla, Ion stated as much that it’s not something they want to employ, just that it is necessary for a smoother transition of a community. COMMUNITY.
The developers of Classic are not going to be yanking our collective chain with sharding. Look at how they have handled Loot sharing. It was the best possible solution. AV? Sure it’s not what some people define as “THE AUTHENTIC AV” But it still has a lot of things that retail AV does not. Not to mention the experience will be much different compared to the “optimized” pvp experience retail offers.
I understand fear is a very potent toxin. It seeps into everything you think about. But don’t let the fear you feel force you into positions that are not realistic.
Probably because they haven’t gotten the number down yet. All we can do is squawk about it until they do. I for one trust in the Classic Dev Team to use Sharding as little as possible if at all.
First, define “starting areas” and “few weeks” and tell us all how you define those terms.
Second, if they even once use sharding outside of those areas, will you be here making a public apology to those that have raised concerns that Blizzard will not be able to resistbusing sharding beyond those “starting areas for a brief time at launch”?
I started playing the day WoW was released on Stormreaver. The only expansion I did not purchase was BFA and I never had any major problems on an expansion release day or after.
No, they haven’t, and they can’t because they don’t know if we’re coming with 10,000 players total, or 10 million.
As soon as Classic is released, and the players start arriving at their servers, Blizzard will be able to decide what they need to do to provide a good playing experience.
I, for one, am supportive of Blizzard’s stance on sharding. I’d rather see sharding then sit in the queue for 4 hours waiting my turn to play.
If they intend to have large mega servers. Black Lotus flowers are going to be extremely rare(As they should be), I hope they do not come to the same conclusion private servers have making the nodes spawn dynamic or extremely faster.
It was not an intended feature for everyone in a raid to have flasks… it was simply not feasible in actual vanilla.
And as far as why I think we may have mega servers… I think they may want to save money on the amount of servers… they may just think it’s objectively a good thing to have as many players as you can on a server… I just really hope they keep the same spawn rates and don’t cater to the population size. Sharding also messes with the spawn times.
Interesting. I didn’t play Private far enough in to see that. I imagine that if they go the mega route that sharding will be around for more than just a “few weeks”, depending on the hype. I’m not against sharding if it means I get to actually get through the content to the non sharding zones. The Dev teams seems dead set on giving the best experience possible within reason.
As for the spawn rates, I completely understand that would be an issue. I wonder how it’s going to effect raids. Sure the fights are the same, but if so many people are used to private, raid wide flasks, it could potentially delay the progress of a portion of the community. Which I would enjoy.
I think too many people see Private servers as, THE, vanilla experience. So I can only imagine the headache the Dev Team has to sift between Vanilla and Private Vanilla.