Except that they have. For years. Since just after sharding was introduced in about…what, Mists? A lack of sharding in legacy content, including major legacy cities like Stormwind and Orgrimmar, has been a feature of RP servers all this time.
Sharding gets flipped on for a few events, like the Running of the Gnomes, the Treasure Goblin event, and new expansion releases that funnel everyone through somewhere like Stormwind/Org, and then we usually need to ask them to turn it off again, so that our hobby is possible.
They have turned it off again, with players campaigning for it.
I think it was BFA (maybe) when sharding was left on for over a month. And there was massive campaigning, twitter threads, people writing tickets to GMs. It was a huge organised effort. Its happened a few times actually.
Basically, it amounted to the sharding policy would be reviewed and turned off in RP server hubs usually, but would still be needed during certain ecents. Server sharding is still the policy, and requires permissons to turn off because of the strain on their servers and hardware.
We’ve always had to remind them occasionally because until the policy is changed, the process requires middle management dorks remembering we exist.
They literally have entire servers dedicated to this concept specifically called RP servers to choose from for that very reason. If dedicating entire servers to RP is done for a “very small number of players” isn’t considered a resource for RP community, idk what is.
Right, now imagine if they forced everyone to do the event in Warmode on the Warmode shard, PVPers would have had the game dead in under a week. Blizzard just needs to let the RPers play their intended way in an MMO RP G.
Except that they’re not stopping you from roleplaying, sharding is implimented across all servers in the same way, and roleplay servers have always been treated like PvE servers with (rarely - if at all- policed) social policies.
I get that you’re frustrated because you can’t roleplay how you want to. An organised effort to remind them to turn off sharding has always traditionally worked.
It’s not defeatist, its just an understanding of how these things work behind the scenes. It’s part of the TOS that Blizzard doesn’t have to make special allowances for individual servers, so its a positive thing that they do.
I’m also all for roleplayers making an organised effort for permanent changes to how RP servers are run. It’s long overdue, I’d love to see Blizz making long-term changes for RP servers instead of treating like glorified PvE server.
I wonder, and this is just spitballing, that perhaps they are waiting for the next maintenance period so the servers will be offline anyway so if the sharding on/off thing requires hardware or virtual machines to full shutdown or restart, it won’t incur additional downtime, however short it may be.
I would think that, but nah. I’ve seen sharding get turned on or off in the middle of the day on a random weekday. It definitely doesn’t need a server restart.
I really wish Activision Blizzard would get things right when they make changes to WoW.
I came from an RP-PvP realm. I left WoW and when I came back, my old realm was just labeled RP and dead which pushed me down the path of finding a new home.
I enjoy PvP especially when there is a thought out RP spin attached to the event. Anyway. I’m totally in the RP camp on this one and I would like to see Activision Blizzard permanently shard the RP only realm’s together.
It would definitely help the less populated RP realms like ER and ED get some traction so that those players can enjoy being with other RPers.
Well the good news is they know about it, the bad news is the people who know about it have no control and could only pass the word along, AND ALSO that there is no place to properly report this kind of thing normally.
After having my post moved from Customer Support to Technical Support by the CS SFAs, Technical Support is saying that the Bug Report forum is the right place to mention it.
Honestly I wouldn’t trust it, There’s been a guild UI permissions thread floating around the forums, almost 6 years old now, Actively being posted in/non necro’d, acknowledged by Ion and Blizz and the Blizz rep who used to post there before being fired, and permissions left completely broken in game still while also having other features like the guild roster command recently get removed too.
They either need a better place to post these things to get seen by the right people and fixed sooner, or they need to start communicating better with the player base on these things.
However the 1 thing that remains the common denominator is that it’s all something Blizz NEEDS to do better on.
I mean, if it was something that was irrevocably broken by a change/update to the game, I can see a fix for something like that being back-burnered forever as long as people didn’t rabble hard enough for it because they probably don’t have any idea how to fix it.
This has a fix. Somewhere, out there, in the cosmos, is someone who knows how to do it. But we’re throwing rocks at the window from the ground floor and everyone inside keeps saying they don’t know who that person is or how to get in touch with them and none of them will take on the responsibility for finding the heck out and it makes me want to gnash up puppies with my teeth.
