To add to that, it’s not just that we want something changed going forward, like it’s feedback or something. The custom ruleset to disable sharding has been in place for RP servers almost since the inception of sharding/phasing (Mists-ish?) and was extended to the whole world in legacy content on those servers since about one or two summers afterward.
When one-off events come up that re-enable sharding temporarily - something that understandably happens, and we try to be patient about the necessity for the most part - we always end up needing to rattle around from forum to forum after the event ends trying to bring it to someone’s attention that a manual fix needs to be enabled to restore the previous functionality of no sharding (and explain, and re-explain, that we’re not asking for something new, this is a ruleset that has been in place for about a decade now). And that is usually a very frustrating, weeks-long uphill battle with people getting progressively more upset until it finally falls on the right ears, so people are weary and on-edge from years of struggle with this issue.
If we knew where “the right place” was and saw that going there caused movement on the issue, or there was a defined process, or if someone could just like…stick a post-it note to their monitor that said, “Event starts 5/25, re-disable sharding in SW/Org on RP servers on 6/15” it would save a lot of people a lot of headaches. Posts to the Bug Reports forums (although I see that Irakaius has done that also now) haven’t caused any movement on the issue in the past. Neither have in-game bug reports, or posting to General Discussion.
I’m sure it seems like a weird non-issue to a lot of people internally and externally, but having no sharding in population centers on RP servers makes our silly, nerdy hobby possible. Not just it makes it better, it makes it possible. Otherwise our communities are fragmented and can’t see and interact with each other, it makes it impossible to hold large events or have populated cities. It isn’t a matter of convenience, it’s a matter of having most of the people who play on Moon Guard and Wyrmrest accord, big swaths of people a lot of whom only subscribe to do this, through content lulls and without clamoring for new big expensive raids and generally dropping tons of real cash on transmog, mounts and pets, inclined to keep playing.
This always seems to take Blizzard’s internal team by surprise, that this happens, and it seems to always take a lot to get people to understand what’s happening and how to fix it. If there’s a better process we’re all ears, we’d love to have a more expedient way to have the issue addressed.