There is absolutely nothing false about it. I fully remember early vanilla (and every other expansion launch) and the frustration of not being able to even log in without sitting in a queue for sometimes hours at a time.
The major difference is 14 years ago I was a child with nothing else to do. Now I’m an adult who doesn’t have that kind of time to waste.
The only launches I’ve seen go smoothly were Legion and BFA. WoD was an absolute nightmare, and MoP launched fine but sheer amount of people being packed into Jadewhatver forest made it impossible to get anything done.
Wrath and TBC were literally unplayable for me and many others day 1.
Trust me as much as sharding sucks, it sucks more when you make time to play and then get blocked behind a queue wall.
most people are accepting of sharding at launch. what we want to do is contain that to as few zones as possible and as short a time as possible.
and then make it go away for good. never to be seen again.
not during holiday events.
not during AQ launch.
not during peak farming hours.
I must be minority then, because I’m not addicted to dynamic spawns nor am a private server person. Sadly sharding by a few weeks would over extent launch and would just cause the same type of thing to occur in the next zone.
Should be short, like a week if it really will cause issues and not expand into durator outside starting area. Spreading professions by limiting nods.
Yeah, “no sharding after launch” makes me giggle when people realize GoAQ is TOTALLY going to be sharded. Anyone else there for the launch of WoD on these fancy new servers of theirs? I hope i’m wrong honestly.
It’s little things we all tend to overlook or forget about. Once I thought about the AQ opening event I went “Yeah, they’re going to shard that, they’d be stupid not to.”
I plan to wait a day at launch to get sharding reports, and if it has been included I’m going to wash my hands of Classic. If they add it at launch, it’s here to stay.
It didn’t…at least on servers where players actually showed up. Framerates dropped into the single digits. Players were rubberbanded all over Kalimdor. Some people couldn’t even get off the boat in Kalimdor. Servers crashed.
And the raiders simply skipped the opening event to run directly into the raid itself leaving the scrubs to deal with the army of elites wandering around Silithis. It was a disaster. That’s the reason we haven’t had massive server wide events since then up until sharding was introduced.
It was fine on my high pop server. It took a few tries to actually get to Kalimdor from for the boat, but once there none of my guild had any issues besides lower than average frame rate.
The only thing about sharding that I am worried is the possibility that the tourists don’t leave because they find out they like the game.
Then the servers will be permanently overpopulated and have to be kept sharded permanently or the servers need to go through mass transfers to get them to acceptable population for turning sharding off.
This scenario is not likely to happen but it’s still a possibility.
No I didn’t think about that until you mentioned it. I didn’t suspect that a bunch of Blizz devs one day decided to lock themselves in Blizz’s basement and make their dreams come true.
I thought it’s a multi-billion company’s business as usual. Realizing there is a demand and now looking to get back that “core” subs they lost while chasing everyone. Their first though was “ok clone retail with 60 level cap, easy peasy money squeezy”, but people laughed at them. So their second thought was “fine, if we invest how much we will make back”, looks like they got the $ math figured.
Sure there are some Blizz guys whose passion is exploited but their job is to swing the hammer until the thing is done, they are not decisionmakers.
P.S. It’s not fear but age that makes you cynical (and a tiny bit more realistic).
Sharding is a cost-cutting measure. I can understand it, but as a player I will never respect it. If there’s sharding in the launch zones I will be disappointed, but I will swallow my bitterness.
If there is sharding anywhere else, it will be a deal breaker. They will lose my sub, and at least some of the people I’m bringing with me from my pserver guild.