To be fair, I love the ‘parallel play’ vibe for PVE content where I’m playing near but not directly interacting with other people. Or even on antisocial days, I’ll sit around in Stormwind and watch other people RP from rooftops or something. But that kind of thing also needs sharding to be off.
What’s wild is that Valdrakken is sharded. That’s just how many billion people there are there right now, that every phase is overstuffed with people.
LOL right? 
The rest of the world including Ironforge, Exodar, Suramar, etc. are all also sharded. So, people venturing out into the world to find RP in other places through…I don’t even know, faith trust and pixie dust, will probably also not encounter anyone.
sharding still up!!! classic blizz plays xD xD xD -___-
I think that’s the worst part. Valkdrakken gets 100+ people shards and you’ve got some Stormwind shards that have fewer than 20.
*Noms Thallia*
Also, I wouldn’t hold my breath for a fix in the immediate future (read: December). Blizzard’s in holiday mode with the NOC, skeleton crew IT, and those in CS who are (presumably) not on the vacation rotation this year. I woudn’t expect a fix until at least the second week of January at the earliest unless they have a premade script that can be run to undo the sharding.
They turned it off pretty quick for a Tournament of Ages a couple years ago. Probably isn’t much harder than a couple of flags.
adding more voices too this and sent a tweet out to the CS team as well.
They were fully manned at the time though. As I noted, they’ve got a skeleton crew right now. Generally speaking, for things regarding the servers, the motto for holidays is likely “if it doesn’t break, don’t touch it except for maintenance”.
Anything is possible, but highly unlikely until everyone’s back in full swing.
I sincerely wish people at my place of employ would get that message. Ops loves giving the maintenance folks “holiday presents”.
Ironically, they responded very quickly to the outcry during Dragonflight’s prepatch; people really wanted to do RP encountering dracthyr for the first time in Stormwind, and vice versa, and the week prior to Launch was very fun because of it (and it barely affected the zone’s lag).
The WoW team is supposedly larger now than it’s been in years, because of a variety of factors, but for whatever reason they’ve been deathly silent on the issue currently. It doesn’t make any sense or have any consistency, in my mind, but large companies can be eclectic like this.
In general it’s just vexing and disappointing. Maybe some people went on their holiday vacations early and the staff leftover are just very new and afraid to do something about it without permission?
But then at least get the PR team to say “Our top notch mechagnome crew are stuck in Gnomeregon. Give 'em another week to find their way out.”
They might be confused and not even think it’s a bug, is what I mean. 
god i wish they responded to issues In Character like that tho LMAO
It would be more along the lines of “don’t break anything while we’re on vacation”. In general terms the staff that mans the ship during the holiday break does only what is necessary to keep the games functioning properly. Esoteric things like adjusting shards is something they do once they’re back to work. While it’s possible you get lucky and this gets attention ASAP, it isn’t something I’d expect. I’m just trying to help you make sure you aren’t setting your expectations too high. Better to be armed with the best known facts than to think something will happen for sure when it might not.
I’d like to think it was vacations, but it’s not vacations.
They’re able to drop sharding without a patch. They’ve done it before. It shouldn’t take an entire team. Additionally, we’ve been asking for a couple of weeks now. All of their maintenance team can’t be on vacation - they just did a long maintenance on Tuesday.
Blizz just considers this low priority. If they didn’t, it would have been taken care of by now. Instead, we’re here asking for SW and Org sharding to be removed, with no removal or response.
+1