Update on Sharding please?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

I believe it is about time to update us about sharding and the way they will or will not want to use it. Its one if the, if not the most important issue thats left to get updated on - beside the release date.

Any Information we have about that topic is many month of feedback old and outdated in my opinion.

  • Will sharding be used?

  • If it will be used, how and how long will it be used?

  • For what zones would they use it? Starter zones (like durotar) or more(like barrens)? Or even more than that?

  • Will they, if they use it, use it to make starter zones playable only, or will they use it to counter ques and create mega servers?

Phrasing the question differently: will servers have a static player cap and if so, how big will that number be?

  • Will sharding be used for any large scale event that threatens to crash servers like the AQ event?

  • How big, if sharding is used, will one shard be for each individual zone its used in?

Feel free to add more questions in case I missed some.

Thank you for reading.

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2

If sharding is used for holidays and aq ill be supremely dissapointed

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I think at this point its guaranteed that sharding will be in Classic, I think Blizzard is just waiting to the last minute to say something because they know that a significant amount of players wont be happy with their decision. Ion did say at Blizzcon that they wanted to use it the first 2 weeks at the launch of Classic and he said that they wont use it after that.
I dont recall if he said it would only be in the starting zones but I hope sharding would be limited just to the starting zones because I feel its really damaging to the player experience and I am concerned that having sharding everywhere in Classic for the first 2 weeks would result in there being a increase in the amount of higher end resources available.

I personally find it hard to believe that Blizzard wont use sharding after launch if they use it as launch.

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4

Assuming a playercap of around 4000 on each server, I’d only use sharding in 1-10 zones just to filter out the inevitable flood of tourists. In my experiences on…servers, the “initial rush” tends to die down after a week or two, and that was with a player cap of 12,000. Sharding in 1-10 zones for the first week or so should be fine.

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5

I’ll be extremely gone.

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Ion has already been quoted(Blizzcon 2018 IIRC) stating that while they don’t want to use sharding as it is antithetical to Classic, it is something they may have to use, for a small, time limited, portion during launch. Paraphrasing of course.

Ion mentioned at most using them for the starting zones, for the initial launch.

What clarifies as a “starting zone”?
Could be Elwynn forest, could be Northshire Abbey.

What clarifies as the “Initial Launch”?
Could be 2 weeks, a month? All depends on the success of the launch and how underestimated their initial server list is. With Ion going on record multiple times mentioning no RP-PVP servers both in Q&A and Twitter, I will err on the side that it will be a small portion of servers, and adding more as needed. Which is what Vanilla did.

I don’t see them using sharding to counter server queues, more so to counter overpopulation of a given area.

Here I would say more than likely it will depend on what the sever sizes are looking like at that time. I can’t imagine they’d automatically just use Sharding as they are already stating they’re aware it’s not how Classic would have handled it. That being said, I could see them looking into seeing what the community is looking for at that time, maybe even going so far as, “if we don’t add sharding, we advise people to avoid Silithus during the event”. So not sharding the experience, but letting people know it could crash the server. Happy medium maybe?

Anywho, that’s my thoughts for now. Sure it’s not Blizzard official, but in my experience this is what I’d expect.

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Agreed that along with the release date, it is the last bit of information we really need.

It makes sense so I’m hoping it rolls out like this

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if they use it after launch i’ll be saying adios.

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Jeez you guys. They’re not going to use sharding after launch. They’ve already said they know how detrimental it will be. I don’t know why everyone feels the need to come along and say that they’ll quit playing if they keep sharding in. It’s like going around saying the sky is blue.

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and yet the original plan was no sharding at all.

to make sure blizzard stays true to their word.

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I can’t speak for others here, but as far as why I am personally concerned is because of this fact.

Sometime ago Blizzard assured the player base that CRZ **would not**be used in current content, only older zones that were becoming barren. Now, I fully understand that CRZ and sharding aren’t the same thing, but let me finish my point. When Legion launched, all the zones had CRZ enabled. People were upset, pointed it out in numerous posts in the forums and Blizzard would remove it saying it was a bug due to the patch.

This happened many times. Each time there was maintenance or a patch, CRZ would be enabled. Every time there would be an uproar in the forums and we were told it was a bug and it would get removed. Until one day, what happened? Ah that’s right, now we got told it was intended and wasn’t going to be removed. To this day CRZ, sharding and phasing is in every aspect of the game.

So you could say, but hey, this isn’t sharding and this isn’t live. The things is, as much as I want to believe Blizzard, past scenarios with very similar circumstances that they can, and have, went back on what was promised when it suits their needs better.

Sharding is community and game breaking for Classic. At this point I pretty much intend to wait until it’s completely removed before even playing. And I have been hoping for these servers for many years. My worry is it won’t be removed completely.

Here’s how I think it will personally playout. It will be in in the beginning. It will later get removed. Then one day when some big server wide event is happening, guess what? People will phase out. I don’t expect it to be temporary. I fully expect them to try to sneak it in and just hope people don’t notice, like happened in the demo.

Edited to add: I expect the update regarding sharding to be put off as long as possible because I think they know that that is one of the huge deal breakers for a number of people. Vanilla was a lot about community, sharding ruins that.

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13

Go back and actually listen to what Ion actually said in that Q&A.

He never said anything like what you claim he said.

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I think any decision on that front is premature and will be waiting until public Beta and possibly even an open-beta public stress test event.

Until they have actual “Real world data” rather than simulated data, they don’t know what they don’t know, and it’s going to be hard to say never and follow through on the promise. So best to keep their mouth shut and wait until they have more data, data which they cannot get until Beta.

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I was under the impression they had already said what they are doing with sharding?

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They have only sad they were considering using it. They may choose not to use it at all.

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I really feel that based on their history the chances of any beta being open is pretty small, they would get better usable data by having a closed beta. Having it open would skew the data too much to be really useful.

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No. They have NOT said what they will be doing with sharding. They have made vague statements that sort of imply that there might be limits.

There are many people that are insisting that those vague statements are definitive promised while also declaring that Brack’s previous statement regarding no sharding was not a promise.

Blizzard has thus far refused to set any definitive geographical or time limits for sharding.

My fear is that they advertising to set any limits because they have no plans to actually limit sharding.

If the number of servers is going to be on the “lean side”, how do they expect to handle the population on those servers even after the “tourists” leave without resorting to sharding?

It is often easier to gain forgiveness than permission.

There are already many people not only willing to forgive sharding the “starting areas”, but sharding well beyond those “starting areas”. Will people be more likely to accept extended sharding once they have a little time invested in their characters?

Is it really that farfetched, given Blizzards history of saying one thing and doing the exact opposite, that Blizzard may not actually limit sharding to the “starting areas” or that “brief time at launch”?

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Yup , people hear and interpret what they want to hear.

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20

I won’t even renew my subscription to start if Sharding is in launch. Having an unsharded launch is a much easier way to weed out the tourists and get accurate server populations than coddling them with retail mechanics.

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21

This is my fear also.

If introduced to Classic, when will sharding be eliminated?

I hope sharding is NEVER used. It was never used in Vanilla and has no place near Vanilla WoW.

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