Earlier tonight, Moonguard, WyrmrestAccord, SistersOfElune, and BlackWaterRaiders were all in the same shard for Amirdrassil. Whole zone! It has been this way for several days, and it was pretty cool. Cross RP central. Great potential.
A server game rule kicks in when too many of one realm are in the zone- everyone else gets shoved out of their shard. Cross RP is basically strangled in the crib, and this makes… no sense for this zone.
My suggestion is basically “Don’t. Don’t do that.”
UPDATE AS OF TEN MINUTES AGO:
It’s back to how it SHOULD BE again but, still. It’ll break constantly.
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So if memory serves, sharding isn’t supposed to be a thing on RP realms unless it’s a current expansion zone. Admittedly I haven’t kept up too much with changes like these but I think it’s still the case.
It’ll probably keep happening until the next expansion, or prepatch for it at least. It would be nice for blizzard to just ditch the sharding entirely on RP realms fullstop, but I doubt they’ll do that at this point.
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I can put a stop to it. But not for free.
(emphasis added)
You’ve said it right there. “Too many” people in a small area is the fundamental reason for sharding. Sharding happens because it’s part of how servers keep workload manageable. For obvious reasons it’s going to be in the engine (hard-coded), not a switch that’s manually activated by some kind of 24/7 human watch. So of course there will be times when sharding has an undesirable effect on particular groups. That’s part of the price we pay for high population servers. Which a lot of the rp community seem to prefer.
Sharding is always going to be a thing. and it’s not just in new zones. Ask anyone who has tried to hold a decent sized rp event inside Jade Serpent Temple for example. The Gnome Run charity event is an even better example. In that situation such things as heavy use of toys, pets, mounts, all tax the server to the point that sharding happens.
Ways to deal with server load have to be built into the game engine. We’d be a lot less satisfied if we had to deal with frequent server crashes or disconnects of individual characters than we are with the inconvenience of sharding. So, like it or not, we have to do what we can on our end to maintain our rp quality of life, and tolerate the occasional inconveniences imposed by the necessity for the game engine to balance loads.
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I…
No.
Frankly, it’s a load of crap, Kunbo. Tournament of Ages is explicitly unsharded for hundreds of players at once during the event, and the server doesn’t immediately crap itself and die there.
MoonGuard Stormwind has over a hundred players in it average and does just fine.
Sharding was activated for both Stormwind and Orgrimmar in anticipation of Dragonflight’s launch, and continued sharding those places even though WrA Orgrimmar didn’t come close to lag-worthy numbers. Worse yet, the sharding remained while the player count in Orgrimmar waned to about thirty, which shouldn’t be the break point.
(Interestingly, it was the biggest advertisement for WrA Duskwood RP, which Thomas was sure happy about)
No, I do believe they can manually suppress and activate sharding at will, because they’ve clearly done it before. My argument is not that “Sharding is dumb remove sharding”.
It was “Sharding is dumb for Amirdrassil on the RP realms, remove sharding here.” And since it has precedent, I think they can do that without it killing RP for everyone.
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It’s probably a setting that they apply in new areas across the entire game at once - all servers - and then don’t think about the fact that the 2 active RP servers DON’T WANT IT.
So then we have to complain, open tickets, post on the forums, etc. And wait for someone to turn it off. Eventually.
It probably sucks on other servers besides the RP servers, but Blizz probably doesn’t hear from those servers because it’s not broadly affecting activity there in the way it does here.
Well if my understanding of AI ticket resolution is up to snuff… that means all we have to do is mass report Amirdrassil Sharding and that should get it chatbanned for a week.
It’ll do.
So sharding is such an important issue to be because of the way it hinderances Rp and events. Honestly, it has can be a hinderance to PvE as well. It sucks to suddenly find those around you disappear as you are yanked into another shard. One or two people might be with you but then you don’t have the numbers you needed or the mob you were waiting for isn’t coming anymore. Fyraak’s disciple in particular.
But sharding is also a much needed… Tool? Thing? Trying to the to the Dragon Isles was awful until I went into war mode to bypass the crowds and lag.
Ultimately, I think it would help tremendously if Blizz allowed us to choose our shards. In SWTOR, it is apart of the map to also be able to see what shard you are in and choose to move. It would be great if Rp servers had their own shard as well. That way you knew which shard to be in to find the rp.
We know the servers can handle events and rp hubs like that and still be fine. We also know that big pvp raids can crash them as well.
Personally I wouldn’t want an RP shard to be empty of content, per say. I liked it when people questing could happen upon your rp and say hi. Maybe join in. Having the other shards you could go to if the server is starting to lag would be great.
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