WAHH SHARDING, your say, your way, go

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
61

I’d certainly agree with you depending on the scenario. I’m sure we can both argue for either case.

The context of this discussion is on over-camped starter zones due to no sharding being implemented.

Everybody wants to play the game. Sitting in a queue is fair but that doesn’t mean people gladly sit in queues for hours. Being held up by quest mobs is another form of queue. People who have the ability to shorten that time will leverage that. Yes, I’m sure some players will group up and go slower when they don’t have to but that doesn’t speak to the general behavior of the average individual.

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62

I would argue that the lack of sharding is the authentic Classic experience. That’s just how Classic was. There was no sharding. If there were tons of people in one zone, then there were tons of people in one zone, and we just had to deal with it.

I can’t speak for what the congestion was like when Vanilla first opened its gates because I started playing Vanilla a few months after launch, so I’ll just take your word for it that it wasn’t so congested. That said, there were times when these zones very much were congested, so I don’t think it’s inauthentic to put everyone in one place.

So to answer your question: Blizzard doesn’t need to find a solution to congestion, nor do I want them to. I want genuine Classic with all of its faults. I will happily log on at 6 AM to avoid the pack or roleplay with the people around me as I wait for my turn to kill a mob.

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63

This text will be hidden[quote=“Muzein-stormreaver, post:55, topic:168224, full:true”]

Ok, So first off: You can not complete quests in a Raid.

Secondly, when a quest item drops, only 1 person in the group can loot it. Grouping only makes questing faster if it’s a kill quest or an escort (shudder).

And as I’ve pointed out in previous topics; Players who have the ability to instantly tag mobs from range will have no incentive to group up. If the quest is to collect 10 bear asses, a party of 5 will have to collect 50 before moving on. Ranged players are not going to multiply the time it takes them to complete a quest when they could instead complete it quickly and stay ahead of the curve.
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So making groups to complete quests in zones is pretty cool. complete your quests, leave your party to move on, while making room for another to get in the group. Would be better doing this with raids though, Maybe completing quests in raid group should be an option.

64

My idea would be to go back in time and prevent the person who thought combining subs was a good idea from advancing that garbage.

Server startup glut is authentic and memorable.
Offering millions of players of another game free access to classic at launch is not authentic, and has serious repercussions.

I can stomach sharding for 1-10 zones period and for a very limited time (2-3 days). I cannot stomach decisions like sharding for server community health, while the same decision makers think having no RPPVP realm at startup is a good idea. The decision making for this reboot is so chaotically all over the map.

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65

According to you, maybe - but NOT to Blizzard:

If millions of people show up and play for years, that’s awesome. And if just tens of people show up and play for years, we’re fine either way. What’s important to us is that we have this Classic experience people can enjoy, that people do have the opportunity to go back to. This is an important game in videogame history and there’s not a way to go back and experience that today. This is also about preserving something that we think is really important.

https://www.pcgamer.com/this-is-how-blizzard-plans-to-finally-bring-back-vanilla-wow-servers/

I’m not returning to WoW so I can instantly login and quickly loot my corpses in my tiny, little convenient shard. If I wanted that I would have continued playing BFA. But I don’t.

I want Vanilla WoW. I don’t want sharding in Vanilla WoW. Sharding was NEVER part of Vanilla WoW. Sharding kills community in Vanilla WoW.

As the Director of Vanilla WoW, Jeff Kaplan, said the MOST important thing in Vanilla was community (NOT “successful launches” or “queue times” or “spawn rates” or “server stability” - issues which pro-sharders are obsessed with).

What I think made old World of Warcraft great was the sense of community
— Jeff Kaplan Game Deisgner and Director of World of Warcraft during Vanilla, TBC and Wrath

https://classic.wowhead.com/news=275688/wow-classic-servers-jeff-kaplans-thoughts-and-blizzard-hiring

I could care less about login queues, crashes and empty realms. They were part of Vanilla and it was one of the most successful games ever made.

What I do care about is anything that is antithetical to what made Vanilla great: community. Sharding kills community - far more than your launch issues.

Look, Vanilla had launch issues. Did it kill community? No. The game thrived anyway.

In contrast, BFA had few launch issues and all the sharding you could ask for.

How’s the community over there in BFA these days, bud?

I don’t play WoW so I can experience a “smooth launch.” I don’t need that.

I want to play Classic because I want to experience Vanilla WoW again - and be with friends in a hometown realm community again.

Randomly sharding people kills that experience. Everything else (queues, launches, realm population) is completely secondary.

VANILLA GAMEPLAY FIRST.

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66

This is nice in theory and I’m all for it, but you still run into ‘the selfish player’.

Quest items are global to the group. It’ll be a matter of whomever loots it first gets it. So even while grouping, you’ll suffer the inverse. Rather than losing tags and loot rights to ranged characters outside of your group, now ranged characters in the group will have the least chance of looting a quest item before everyone else. If the party is just a revolving door of players in the area, then there’s little cooperation if players just bounce out when their quest is done.

If a melee joins the party and is on top of each mob when it dies, and they take the quest item every time then says “Thanks for the group, I’m done. Bye” - It feeds back to that ranged character thinking ‘what was the benefit of me grouping with these people?’. Heck, I see this when I play with friends - Most people probably have that one guy in their social group who always tries to loot every mob or chest first.

Vanilla just has a general level of incompatibility with group play. It’s why we now have things like quest items duplicated for each member of the group and global tagging rights. People play nice when it’s in their benefit: when there’s more than enough mobs and the group kills faster with less down time or for safety in a contested zone. But an over-camped starter area doesn’t provide those upsides outside of general kill quests.

67

Please troll somewhere else.

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68

Except it’ll be like a new game, people will be flooding and creating characters for probably months. People did this on new servers too. If sharding is the route Blizzard chooses to go, it will need to be there until almost all of this congestion stops. Whatever solution they choose to use, will need to be implemented until this congestion ends. Whether that’s weeks, months, whatever, it is what it is.

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69

Exactly why we must SPEAK OUT NOW AGAINST ANY USE OF SHARDING AT ALL.

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70

I don’t disagree with sharding the starting zones. It will help promote long term server health instead of Blizz just creating more servers to end up dead, which ended up being a pretty big mistake IMO that they can learn from and not do again.

But again, we don’t know what Blizzard will choose for this, but we can only hope they will opt for long term server health in alleviating this problem. Long queues and crashes are not the answer. Making too many servers is also not the answer.

71

You’re comparing retail starter zones to vanilla? You sir have no idea what you’re talking about.

Retail is easy. Sharding does not affect mob difficulty one bit. Good lord this isn’t rocket science.

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Let’s use your numbers of 2-3 million. We’ll even go with the lower end and say 2 million.

Even if 70% of that 2 million are tourists and leave before finishing the starting zone, that still leaves 600,000 players.

Let’s use your number of 30 servers.

Even assuming that those 600,000 players were evenly distributed among those 30 servers those servers would likely have to be capped at no less than 20,000 to accommodate 600,000 players without queues. Do you seriously expect a server with a cap of over 10,000 would not require sharding beyond the starting zones?

Let’s say they decide to cap servers at 3,000 total players, to stay in keeping vanilla.

That would be 200 servers just to accommodate those 600,000 players without queues, assuming an even distribution of players.

Those numbers go up if the actual number of initial players exceeds 2 million.

Please tell us all how Blizzard can keep the number of Classic servers “on the lean side” without extensive use of sharding well beyond the starting zoned and that brief time at launch or having queues.

75

I actually think the number is more like 90% tourists, but lets go with 70% for discussion.

Firstly, if we’re seeing 30% conversion past 1-10, or even 80% past 10-20, Blizzard will need to open new servers ASAP and redirect later joiners. Not “20% hitting 60” but “20% hitting 20”, should be the trigger for closing a server for random selection.

Note the second last part of this statement: expand as needed.

They won’t. If they’re hitting 600,000 players getting past 20, by that stage they should have had 80 servers spun up by that time. They’re starting lean, because they simply don’t know the numbers that will arrive. And we don’t really either. Everything is a guess, but the method is to define the scaling process and then work from there.

76

It’s not about Ion lying. It’s about him being wrong about the conditions that would allow them to stop using sharding.

First of all, let’s go over his reasoning and justification for sharding. He said he expects there will be a lot of players who will login at launch to check out the game, but that many or even most of those tourists won’t last. So without using sharding, they would have to use far more servers to accommodate that amount of players. And with the supposition that many will leave, that would lead to more servers than the population requires, and a lot of dead and empty servers. Whereas with sharding, they can use fewer servers, shard them to handle the load, and then naturally as the bulk of players stop playing we’ll be left with healthy population servers.

My problem with that is that I don’t agree with the premise. I don’t think there will be a mass exodus of players. In fact, I think the playerbase will continue to grow. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m right. But for the sake of the argument let’s just say that the playerbase isn’t drastically reduced in a relatively short time after launch. What does that mean? It means we’re left with far more players than the servers can handle…without sharding. So what does Blizzard do? Let’s look at their options.

1. Add more servers.
This doesn’t really accomplish much. Players aren’t going to abandon their characters and start over on a new server. Sure, brand new players can start off there, but servers that are already overpopulated will stay that way.

2. Allow free transfers to the aforementioned new servers.
Again, how many people are going to want to abandon their friends and leave for another server? Guilds will have to unanimously decide to migrate or get broken up. Still, this solution might help somewhat. But I think most players would be relucant to pick up and leave.

3. Just keep sharding.

So that’s my concern. I believe they’ll choose option 3. There will be some post where they say something like, ‘Well, more people stuck around than we thought would, so we need to extend sharding.’ And then it’ll get extended again…and again…and again. And for ever how long the population demands. That’s the problem with sharding. All it does is delay an issue that isn’t going anywhere unless enough people leave to allow the devs to stop using sharding. Blizzard is hinging everything on the hope that players will quit the game. That’s…weird, to say the least. And unrealistic in my opinion.

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77

Shouldn’t that target level for greater than X% of players progressing beyond before opening new servers not be 10 rather than 20?

Or, are you now advocating for sharding to be used beyond the 1-10 starting areas?

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You’re imagining them being added far too late. If they’re added when 20% of the first 3000 on a server get past L20, then new players won’t be directed to that server and will be sent to the new server, thus spreading the incoming load before too many people are on the server.

Many people are going to be taking these if the server is constantly queued, and they’ll take their friend groups with them. Its unlikely that early on they’ll see interconnected webs of people, so taking an entire friend group is possible.

They know this would destroy the world and everyone would walk (myself included). The only people who would remain are those tourists who don’t realise any better. They’re not going to do it, because they’re trying to recreate what Vanilla was.

Both points should be triggers. The 1-10 trigger at 30% or the 10-20 at 20% balanced against their end goal of 5000 engaged accounts on the server (peak aim is “40% of engaged accounts = 2000”, as peak historically only included about 40% of a realm’s MAU). This is what Blizzard’s server team does though. Predict what changes need to be made before they’re needed. I mean these guys watch streamer’s streams as one of their “alert points”. They’re going to be watching the Classic server key points (of which we’re probably missing some of their own triggers), intently.

And no, originally I thought the Barrens would need sharding because of the numbers, but people convinced me that there’s enough room that people could just do the quests inefficiently (i.e. out of grouping order) and be able to spread out around the zone.

79

I find it so odd that this is considered a problem that has to be solved by external means.

If there are “literally” thousands of players fighting over one mob, then the problem would be a realm given an excessive level cap. Original realms had a cap around 2500, if I remember right. There are three starting areas, and people don’t all play at exactly the same time or in the same way.

Hundreds? Maybe, but that would be an authentic experience. What do you really think Day 1 of vanilla WOW was like, the moment they made the servers accessible? (Blizzard has even said that they don’t want the authentic LAUNCH experience because of that chaos.)

Absolutely not to dynamic respawns.

Personally, I’d let players deal with it in player ways. Some will run from the starting area to the first town or the first city without doing quests. Some will be logging in only to reserve names. Some will start grinding on mobs that are further out or not typically quest specific. Some will start cooperating with each other. Some will start talking, using the shared experience as a starting point.

Of course, as I’ve said many times in many threads, I plan to wait a month or so before I make a character. I’ll reduce the population on release day by 1, I’ll have an experience more authentic to my original one (I didn’t start until Jun 2006), and I won’t deal with the initial sharding.

I’m not all that concerned with sharding IF it truly is only ever used in the first few zones. I’m concerned that certain individuals who see it as the best available option for certain scenarios won’t hold to that, and Blizzard will keep using it at other points in the game. My worries have to do with city raids, massive-scale wPvP, Silithus for the AQ event - and thus my solutions, or desire for other ones, are not about a bunch of people who want to no-life day 1.

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80

Blizzard will launch the game and shard Elwynn and Westfall because they are both beginner zones… yes westfall is a beginner zone… thats why you dont get flagged there on a pvp server.

Sharding at launch is a beautiful idea in order to avoid the over congestion that NEVER EXISTED IN VANILLA TO THE EXTENT THAT IT DOES ON PRIVATE SERVERS.

Why would blizzard squander the launch of Vanilla in order to appease a small population of 10k edgy private server players?

btw I’m one of them… I’m just not inept.

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81

Couldn’t have put it better, myself.

82

we all agree that vanilla wow will crash and burn if they sharded the entire world… we all agree that would run counter to a true vanilla experience considering the importance of player interaction and server community… competition for nodes… world pvp etc…

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