Durotar AND Mulgore both dump players right into the Barrens. Imagine two entire zones of players dumped into one zone, fighting for those zhevra hooves.
We get it. Some people, particularly some retail players (but not all retail players and not limited to retail players) are only concerned with their own convenience and see all those other players in an mMO as nothing but obstacles in their way or random A-holes. These people want the convenience of less competition for quest mobs, quest objectives and resources that sharding provides.
The problem is that the minute they hit the first area or zone that is not sharded and they see all those obstacles in their way again, they will come running back to the forums screaming for Blizzard to extend sharding so they can have their convenience again.
We have 14 years of experience to show us where Blizzard trying to cater to that mentality ultimately led.
Well, that was “the Vanilla experience,” and that’s not why they’re sharding. The Barrens is huge and can handle crowds. It’s not to keep us from fighting over nodes/mobs. It’s to keep the server from shutting down or people from having to wait in queues to log in. That’s the stated reason, anyway.
that’s just my understanding. Strictly speaking, I believe the “starting zones” is community interpretation and blizz just said first few weeks, but everyone, including myself, has a general perception it’s the first zones.
RE: mulgore and durotar going into the barrens barrens, isn’t that literally what y’all are begging for anyway?
It still won’t be the same crush of people as your boars for the first quest though. The zebra respawn rates should be able to keep up with the number of players coming in, because they will finish their starter zones and be ready to kill zebras at much different rates. I’d expect it to get moderately problematic during peak hours for about 2 weeks at worst. Also remember, at this point there is alternate content (RFC, profession grinding, other quests, hiking to the other capital to learn a weapon to name a few): when trying to get your first 10 boars that’s literally all you can do other than hoping to find a couple unclaimed scorpids for XP.
If I am not mistaken, Ion said starting areas, and specifically mentioned Valley of Trials.
They have not defined starting areas, though. Are starting areas the 1-6 areas? Are the starting areas the initial zone, which also happens to include that faction’s capitol city? Are starting areas the 1-20 areas, or those zones that would be uncontested on PVP servers?
We do not know. Blizzard has so far refused to define starting areas or what the limits of sharding would be and that is one of the concerns that those who desire a truer classic experience have when it comes to sharding.
If I am not mistaken, Ion specifically mentioned competition in those “starting areas”, not server stability.
Cloud infrastructure doesn’t waste capacity. it sizes itself for a shard and no more, then when there’s no more people it shuts the rest of the shards down to save money. A physical, old school server has its full capacity up and powered all the time.
EDIT: also, anyone telling you it could handle things didn’t participate in certain major world events, and definitely never raided Naxxramas. (Naxx was such an issue in part because of stability issues: for instance, there were 5 or 6 bosses you’d wipe on if an entirely different guild pulled Thaddeus during your fight because the server would choke on the auras)
Well, sometimes, they couldn’t. I was on Stormreaver (Alliance) and Tichondrius (Horde).
On Stormreaver, we raided Orgrimmar one time, and the server shut down for like 20 minutes because it was overloaded by a 40-man raid group (plus some who followed) in a crowded capital.
Once, during BWL on a guild first down night, the server shut down because elsewhere on the server, there was a raid on a capital or something, and we lost that entire night of raiding and had to start over.
Queuing was common. I haven’t had to queue before logging in in ages–years–but it was common back then to have 30 minutes or so of waiting in the queue to get onto your server if the population was high.
So…the answer is that the old servers couldn’t always handle it. It makes sense that they’re being careful and trying to avoid problems at launch…because those problems were real.
While I agree with you, temporary sharding will help.
It does also ruin the experience of classic, when you see so many people questing in the same area, theirs no tagging to get it, you had to whisper or ask if you wanna party up. Especially lower levels where things can get a little difficult if you pull incorrectly sometimes 2 mobs even at lower levels was a death sentence, the game was scary to walk off the beaten path.
Classic was about making bonds with people that lasted through the years even some still lasting now, that’s why sharding is bad in the sense of the “Classic” feel.
I do see where Blizzard is coming from saying at the start they’ll do it, so it’s easier, like imagine 1000’s of players at once logging in the same area. Be really laggy, so I agree in that sense, but for like a week or two.
In most cases I agree with you. Even in the demo, when there were several of us killing Defias in northwestern Westfall, we grouped up and stayed till everyone was complete.
However, looking at the launch period, especially launch day/night, there are going to be thousands (maybe tens to hundreds of thousands) of people (current subscribers and returners alike) all logging into the game and starting characters at once. It is going to be a sight that hasn’t been seen in years, if ever.
Sharding is absolutely necessary at that time period. After that initial period, things will thin out. People will quit, either because it’s too much like Vanilla, or not enough like Vanilla. People will run out of time off and start logging in when their work & home lives permit them to, leveling will start to spread out…
I agree that sharding is not the best thing in the world, and shouldn’t be used everywhere. But, I do feel it has its place, and also feel that launch time is that place, because I think that even the anti-shard posters are underestimating just how much of a draw WoW Classic is going to have for those that miss it along with those that never got to play it years ago.
You say this as if the possibility does not exist that they could shard the starting zones and in spite of that still have these same launch issues.
They are going to have sharding. They are going to have launch problems. Sharding does not fix all launch problems. The cloud based server structure they have settled on has basically forced their hand on sharding.
Fact is we’re getting the same basic server structure in Classic as we have in BfA. Go out right now and try to organize a 300-person raid in BfA. (Which just blows my mind that they could pull this off.) This would take at least 8 raid groups, maybe more. I bet they get sent to at least 4 different shards and nobody will be able to see more than 80 of the 300 in this raid.
And if they did that, they might still crash the server…
In fact, didn’t they have something like 3 raid groups of 40 each try to raid Zuldazar recently, and they all got ported to different zones, not even different shards within that zone?
Tell that to the Tarren Mill raids, naked gnome races and Crossroads PvP battles.
Player created content is a huge reason why Vanilla was such a success. Sharding turns us all into strangers on a train instead of an established community.
The amount of people in one area happened alot, especially when people raided cities. City raids were very very common back in classic and I bet they will be.