OMG, I don’t get it. I don’t get the constant and never-ending fretting over this. Starting zone only, for the first week or two…so that you CAN play AT ALL in the first week or two.
Pristine servers literally shut down, and then it could take hours for them to come back on only to shut down again…when too many people clog a tiny space.
You want the Vanilla experience with no sharding in the 1-6 zone? Okay. Prepare to wait in a buffer queue for more than an hour to log in. When you finally get logged in, the server lag will be so incredibly bad that you can’t move, and then you’ll get D/C’d. This will happen several times in a row. The server might shut down altogether under the load, and then you don’t get to play at all. I was there. This happened.
This is what they’re preventing. Oh. My. Gracious. Video Game. gods. STOP with this.
If Blizzard uses sharding beyond the first couple of weeks outside of the starting zones, (Elwynn, Dun Morogh; etc) I will post an apology thread. If Blizzard changes their stance between now and Classic launch and claims they’ll need to shard beyond what they originally thought, I will hold them to their initial words at Blizzcon.
I bolded starting zones because some people seem to differentiate starting areas (Northshire, Valley of Trials; etc) to the point where they consider them different zones.
I’m going to have to agree. Every thing blizzard has done in the name of making things better has had a negative consequence that at the time of the change was unforseeable.
Why even tamper with the community? literally all you have to say to your fan base is, “There may be server crashes and a bit of lag at times, but we want to keep things as original as possible”.
I feel like I would rather hear that than tamper with something that potentially made this game magical.
That makes the British look positively effusive in its understatement.
It’s not a “bit of lag” they’re preventing with this. It’s “you probably won’t be able to play at all for the first four days.” That’s what we’re looking at without the starting area shards.
Once you leave the 1-6 zones, it won’t be sharded anymore, and everyone can go about their day in peace.
If they DON’T shard the starting areas, what they’ll do is set up too many servers for the population Classic will actually generate (because huge chunks in that first two weeks will be people who have no intention of playing over time…just “checking it out”), and I want nice full servers with lovely, rich, active communities on them over time. I don’t want these low-pop nightmares we deal with today…which is one of the reasons I’m so excited about Classic and how well they’re planning it and how careful they’ve been to express their understanding of what people are asking for.
And seriously, can you even imagine the tears and lamentation on this forum if the starting week weren’t sharded and half the people who have waited literally for 10 years for their shot at playing Classic again couldn’t log in? Had 3-hour queues to get on server? Had a server shutdown and maintenance for 24 hours?
I can see it now.
“We knew we couldn’t trust them.”
“We knew they wouldn’t devote enough resources.”
“We knew they didn’t get it.”
“We knew they’d screw it up.”
Seriously. If they shard Classic beyond two weeks or beyond the literal starting zone, I’ll be here screaming at them with you. Until then…y’all are being slap ridiculous.
Please stop with this idea. It’s literally sharding but more intrusive and forces people to experience dead and dying servers multiple times before crudely jamming two fully separate economies and communities together in the hopes that the living one will revitalize the dead one.
I know that ion used the term starting areas and that he specifically mentioned Valley of Trials.
But, let’s be generous and say starting zones , (Elwynn, Dun Morogh, Teldrassil, Durotar, Mulgore and Tirisfall Glades.
Even a single use of sharding, on any server, outside of those zones and beyond the first two weeks would warrant an apology thread and an admission that we were right all along and Blizzard cannot be trusted to honor their word.
You may as well get started screaming then because if Blizzard gets that toe in the door with sharding, the probability that sharding will be limited to the 1-6 zones is next to nil.
Based on what? Because everything they’ve talked about indicates otherwise. They know what they’re being asked to make, and they’ve given people literally everything they’ve asked for with Classic.
I don’t understand why everyone is so exercised over this all the time…based on nothing more than having nothing else to fret about. I mean, you know, you could look forward to the game you claim to look forward to. Or…we could just sit here and assume it’s all going to be garbage and be miserable and worked up and angry about eventualities that haven’t come to pass.
Because I don’t trust Blizzard and their situation to not shard permanently.
Sharding saves money, just like the Retail infrastructure does, just like not maintaining 2 MMOs does.
Blizzard/Act is having money issues and are focusing on cost cutting.
Now, given this, explain to the business why cost increased by X percent, while profits only increased by Y percent. You have to remember, that in a cloud environment, given my educated guess on how they run their ecosystem, simulating a non sharded environment could be many times more costly than your typical Retail “realm”.
It doesn’t add up.
Now, if someone can predict the future and say Blizz will definitely shut it off after a short time, than will I have an issue? Absolutely not.
Now THIS is a substantive response. Thank you. I’m still not worked up over it until it actually happens, but this makes sense, and it’s a decent reason.
Based upon Blizzard’s past history with saying one thing and doing the exact opposite.
Numerous examples of Blizzard saying one thing and doing the exact opposite or going back on their word have been linked and posted numerous times in various threads.
Advocate for the convenience of sharding all you want. I will be here waiting to see you “screaming” because sharding was not limited to the 1-6 zones, even though you were warned that it would not be.
I really don’t think it’ll happen. The way I understand it, sharding is going to be used until the population stabilizes, at which point they’ll pick the high water mark for the stable population and get enough equipment going to keep that server stable. Each zone will basically be a single shard with everyone in the zone in that same shard.
They’ll shard the whole zone though, not the 1-6 areas. The reason is simple: once people finish the tutorial zones, There’s still not really anywhere to go. so the same problems they’re sharding to avoid will pop up anyway. But while anyone can reliably get through the valley of trials in, say, 35 minutes +/- 10, durotar has HOURS of differing clear times, plus multiple directions to take one’s play. Some will run dungeons more. Some will stick around and grind professions. Some will go exploring. Some will log off for the day. Some will start their next character. What’s more, none of these are exclusive. With the exceptions of logging off and starting the next toon, none of these options are available coming out of a 1-6 zone: you just get dumped right into the darkspear quests.