(bolding by me)
Is this the post you’re referencing? Some people are trying to say there is nothing definitive but it is pretty clear from this post and other posts we will experience sharding at launch.
The biggest question is “how long?” will ActiBlizz use it. It is not about it being an accepted idea, but an accepted stipulation. Evidently, many hardcore Vanilla fans do not want sharding at all but accept that if we want to play Vanilla WoW in Blizzards way, we have to take whatever they give us.
The answer to the question is known only by Blizzard. However, the consequences of the answer is the players. Everyone already talks about how all the tourists will be gone before they hit level 20. However, how many people are going to resub with a token for a month, find out Blizzard dropped the ball in providing an authentic Vanilla experience and bail? How many of these forum posters hyperbole of “if this one minute change is in the game, I’m quitting and never playing another Blizzard game in my life, so help me God!” actually do quit and never come back? How many people just go back to private servers? How many people just don’t find Classic to be to their tastes and move on to the next game?
From Blizzard’s perspective, they just want a smooth launch with people being able to log in on game day and play the game. I guarantee on Classic launch, Asmongold plays WoW:Classic will be on Twitch and they don’t want his server crashing because his entire stream attempts to create level 1s on his server to spam memes.
Personally, I predict a dark future. ActiBlizz doesn’t want to support two MMOs. They want to create Classic to just be modern WoW with Classic database and just work on modern WoW. However, they will forget that their modern systems works on the premise of sharding where you connect users into small groups to minimize the amount of data sharing that needs to happen. When many users are in one location and they have to update to each other in real time, there is multiplicative work the server has to do to get all that information to all players. So the mystery is if Blizzard will want to invest effort into redesigning the systems to allow it to happen.
We can speculate so much about it. Some say that if they see even a glimpse of sharding or phasing after the first week, they are gone. Well, if that is the case, where is the incentive to actually work to remove it? Why not just keep it in and just hold onto the people who will stay subbed a few months. Then the question will be how much money is Classic really making them vs how many people are still playing. If your server dropped all the tourists, purists, or followers–would you still play? Maybe enough people leave that you don’t even notice there is sharding in the game.
I honestly don’t see ActiBlizz investing capital and man hours into redesigning their engine. They just want to change the dashboard from molded plastic and digital instruments back to a walnut burl dash with analog gauges, change the seats, throw some new paint on it and hope you think driving it felt like how you remember.
In my opinion, the best case scenario is somehow people stay content enough with sharding for the increased subs and metrics of people exclusively logging into Classic over a period of months that it gives ActiBlizz enough time to actually come up with a solution such as having exclusive Classic systems that allow for hundreds of players in a location, even if it does mean sacrificing performace and providing what the developer considers a “bad experience”. It is counter-intuitive that players would actually prefer having lag with rubber-banding, disconnects, server crashes.
The worst-case scenario is it doesn’t even survive the first year as there is a mass exodus of players returning to retail, hardcore fans going back to pservers in disgust, casual players back to other games, and the few that do stick it out find out they picked a dead server and either reroll or quit too.