Why do people keep saying this? Mergers are 100 times worse than sharding. So disruptive. First, its just sharding on a massive scale. Second guilds and players names will have to be changed because of collisions.
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You’d have Vanilla. Lol
I think the best thing for blizzard to do at this point is launch a beta when we get closer and have it no sharding and implement a login queue just like it would be at launch. Then the following weekend launch a second beta with sharding then let the community see for themselves.
Without sharding there is still one shard. Once that one shard is full, a login queue will get implemented. The server side can only handle so many people on screen at a given time. That is how it worked in 2004. There was a login queue. On Hyjal, mine was sometimes over 3 hours.
With sharding, you would still only be playing with folks on your server. Instead of seeing what feels like 1000 people in your starting zone like the video linked in the op, you see just enough to encourage grouping. Instead of looking at a login queue, you are playing the game in a “full” shard.
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Blizzard has never released a recreation of a previous version of their MMO.
Blizzard has never faced such a concentrated backlash against features such as sharding and CRZ.
Blizzard has never listened to the player demographic that is interested in Classic; they’d better start doing so now.
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Correct.
It’s not nearly as unanimous or concentrated as you might like to believe.
Blizzard has been, hence rogue energy regeneration change, 16 debuff limit, etc… They just may not be doing everything you want. Get over it.
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I consider myself fortunate to have extensive playtime in Vanilla when sharding was not available.
The feeling of being surrounded by your fellow players and enemies, feels electric.
Sharding however is the complete opposite. It feels desolate, lonely and isolated. Sharding is a cheap and lazy solution that sacrifices social interaction for quality of life.
Accepting sharding in starter zones is giving Blizzard the green light to use this tech anywhere they feel it’s beneficial.
If you can’t survive quest competition in the starter zones, you’ll never last in vanilla. Blizzard already has the tourists in their pockets. Catering to tourists need for quality of life has 0 benefit on Classic’s long term viability.
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Going to disagree. Sharding in current bfa is skewed because of warmode trying to keep faction populations in check. As horde I am commonly thrown onto a shard with no alliance but commonly see other horde characters. While leveling in lower zones, the population is divided among warmode on/off and faction balance. That leads to a desolate feel because there aren’t many people leveling plus the amount of zones to level in now. The population is very much spread out now on retail more than ever.
You need to look at how sharding worked at the launch of BFA to understand what you will be seeing in classic launch. The zones had a ton of people in them. Shards were full. Making up numbers here for the use of an example but how it worked was when 1000 people tried to play in the same area, Shard 1 would take 50, shard 2 is created and take 50, shard 3 is created and take 50… shard 20 is created and takes the last 50. All shards are full. Instead of seeing 1000 people questing and standing around waiting for mobs to spawn, there were 50.
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I didn’t play the BFA on launch day, but I did for Legion.
I’ve never experienced such an empty feeling. The only highlight was the Broken Shore scenario, and that felt engaging because of the massive amount of players.
If you never played a non-sharding version of WoW, I’m not sure you have the appropriate frame of reference for comparative purposes.
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You cant really compare BfA to Classic in regards to sharding because it will work differently due to crz.
I’ve played since vanilla. I have seen sharding and no sharding. Ideally it would be best without sharding but looking at the alternatives… I will gladly take sharding.
Sharding will either exist in the form of a login queue or in game.
Not really. The core concept is very much the same. Look at how the shard rp realms in bfa. There is no crz sharding with rp realms.
It’s not that we want it, it’s that we have accepted it, like an adult would. Why should you have to wait? Maybe because they ARE going to be implementing it in the game for the first weeks. Why would we have to wait when we don’t care either way? That makes no sense.
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sharding isnt a bad idea for certain starter zones.
Willing to give it a shot for the first 10 levels.
If Blizzard releases Classic at the start of a new Raid Tier then sharding would have less of an impact, possibly not be needed at all.
If Blizzard releases Classic in between Raid Tiers when players are bored, then I agree there will be challenges but sharding is such an evil solution.
Also, I can’t say for certain but I believe reading there is some sharding on RP realms despite Blizzard statements. However, there is definitely no CRZ on RP realms, as far as I know.
For anyone not familiar, Sharding and CRZ are (2) different kinds of tech. Sharding creates virtual copies of a server, and CRZ connects players from different realms to appear as a single realm which could theoretically be sharded but CRZ realms are typically already low-med pop.
I don’t disagree but in practicality, there is only two other options other than sharding. Login queue and merge servers down the road.
Sharding is the lesser of 3 evils.
Option 4: Competitive launch with Retail so the player base is divided.
Just start with artificially low caps of 1k concurrent players. This will limit the amount of players in the starting zones. Then they can slowly raise the cap during the day/week as more players spread out of Northshire Abbey/Elwynn etc.
Players who don’t want to sit in queues can always wait a week or so before logging in.
Those interested in playing will stay in the queue while trolls won’t.
Eventually the concurrent player cap will reach the desired 2.5k and the populations will stabilize. If the game grows after that, add more servers. This also means if there is still queueing on the existing server, they have some wiggle room to work with. Some servers were about 3k, so you could actually go that high while remaining authentic and true to the Vanilla spirit.
Anyone who can’t live with queues can always wait a week or so before logging in.
Or option 4, release enough servers so that people can disperse as needed then you can actually build a reputation on your own server and seeing familiar faces as you level and you have the option of grouping with them and ultimately build a community. Competition isn’t bad, not everybody can get a participation trophy when they are competing with mobs its the way it goes fam.
I’m anti-sharding, but this option isn’t viable for those who don’t want to server transfer or are beholden to special names.
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You can release 200 servers, and that won’t matter if people still focus on going for servers with already established population (ie: log in, see “Medium” or “High” and go there for fear of the dead server syndrome otherwise) – if you implement low caps to force people to other servers, that also still runs the risk of ‘dead server’ when the supposed tourist crowd goes back to LFR.
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