Call me sentimental but I agree, back in the day I could encounter friends I made months ago and help them out. These days you might be in the same area as someone else but they are on another shard, hell you are lucky to even interact with another human being. The experience of encountering people you actually know out in the world is entirely lost today. It’d be nice if the devs would analyze that factor but I doubt it will ever happen.
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… RP servers haven’t had sharding in old content for YEARS.
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Is this why WrA Stormwind felt more dead than usual?
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Sadly yes. Even MG Stormwind looks like WrA Stormwind.
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Sharding is terrible on all server types. Outside of events like a launch, I think most people on a lower end PC would be able to deal with city lag if it meant actually seeing the population of their server.
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It is inexcusable that sharding still exists. Period.
It should have been nothing more than a short-term (read: expac or two) solution until they could re-engineer the server architecture to accommodate more people on a single realm within view and interaction with each other.
WoW claims to be an MMORPG. The RPG part was tossed aside long ago but the MMO part remained. However now that is dying as well with sharding, the continual (it’s been going on for many years) pushing of people into siloed instances for running ‘content’ (mythics, raids, etc). It has no massive anymore. It’s merely conventionally multiplayer and with a world that’s always felt a little small for the lore size (I mean look how small SW and Org are compared to their in-lore population statistics, they should both be Boralus sized at least).
There are other MMO’s out there that concurrently host thousands of people in the small spaces successfully.
Now I’m not saying they should be able to sustain good framerates and stability with 500 people within 200 yards of each other all rapidly casting spells and running around in a major city (say major city pvp). That’s probably one of the few instances where sharding is genuinely acceptable as a solution to save the overall server stability and framerates of those not participating. But I am saying you should be able to have 300 people in a city who can mount up, walk around, talk, trade, chat, do business, craft, RP, and interact. I mean that’s not even a massive amount and in many cases with good city design draw-distance means most aren’t even being rendered for most people most of the time.
WoW’s original admin in a book wrote how cheap Blizzard was, claimed they bought the RAM separate and had them assemble the server boards themselves. Yet those original servers could host a few hundred people in a city together who could walk around and interact with one another without anyone being pushed off into another unseen space. The modern servers cannot and I don’t doubt part of that is cheaping out on performance. Yes the demands have increased, but processing power and architectural solutions for processing needs have become more readily available. When WoW launched they thanked 2 senior Cisco engineers in their credits for their help because what they were doing in the networking space was novel if not unprecedented. These days everything they do is either being done by others or there is hardware and architectures for related applications readily available which would serve their needs.
WoW needs fixes to its backend server architecture. Problem is those cost money and band-aids like sharding are cheap. Problem is they consider this a niche problem, they’re not interested in running an MMORPG so it’s not really important that it’s not massively multiplayer or that RPers are shafted because neither of those things matter to a team that has long thought encounter design is king, that encounter design sets them apart and prints their money. Because encounter design is cool. It’s nice to design boss fights and the raids they take place in, designing worlds is boring to too many people.
Now I’m not saying that the devs wouldn’t like to fix this properly but I doubt they push that hard for it or are willing to make any sacrifices for it to the suits who are uninterested in renovations on a dinosaur that brings in little money relative to newer projects.
It also, let’s admit it, lets them hide how much WoW’s population has declined. If everyone’s always sharded, you can’t be sure how dead your server is, maybe you’re just on a bad shard you think to yourself and continue playing rather than having to face the dispiriting revelation that your server is dead with no more than 40 people on at prime hours in the major city.
I think the only good sharding would be a kind that forces players engaging in intensive activity (think repeatedly casting tons of spells, combat type stuff) in a major city into their own shard with one another so that 1. they can’t grief people by forcing sharding for everyone and 2. so those who just want to chill, be social, trade, RP in cities and who are not contributing to behavior which causes frame-rate drops, latency on player machines and high CPU cycles and network activity on the servers are not punished by those who do.
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The second bliz stop sharding cities (snickers), these same people flood the forums with posts complaining about the insane lag.
TDL:DR please?
This, unfortunately, is true. The second there’s a millisecond of lag you get people coming out of the woodwork complaining that they’re leaving the game forever, even though it’s not like people are doing cutting edge raiding or PVP in the middle of a major legacy city. They’d rather be alone in an empty game than have one stuttered frame.
Sharding bad! Roleplayers make big money for Blizzard, bring in many #engagement.
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…I don’t want to celebrate prematurely or anything, but uh…
I’m seeing a lot of people in Stormwind right now, and no one is showing up on the map that I can’t target.
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it might actually be off right now, and im hoping so hard that it stays off tonight
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Sharding has been extremely helpful, and I hope it continues to be implemented.
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You’re MG Horde, y’all don’t even need sharding.
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not every role player stays subbed throughout - if they did there would be no expansion and pre patch rush and the need to turn on sharding. The population would be the same.
Also not everyone who plays on a RP server is a RPer and I suspect a greater number of non RPers are playing on RP servers than RPs.
Bold of you to assume this is the character I actually play on. You right about the state of things, though. MG’s Horde is dead, and the Alliance on the server went out of their way to make sure it would never recover.
I don’t know, I think a lot of people on the server do at least occasional RP, even if it’s not their main hobby. I know that a lot of other people just come for the chill vibes, that’s cool too as long as they’re not being disruptive and doing stuff like asking for sharding so that they have less lag on a server where they’re not there for its labeled purpose.
Not sure what MG Alliance had to do with it, but that’s another subject for another time and place. For now, we celebrate that sharding appears to be off!
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a lot of people on RP servers are there because no CRZ and they are mount hunters
Here’s the thing, 90% of RP servers simply aren’t used for RP anymore and they should really be labeled something different now, but they’re not the ones we’re talking about, we’re talking on the two servers that are actually used for rp (on NA I mean) Moon Guard and Wyrmrest Accord, there are hundreds of people on those servers that RP regularly and the sharding on these servers makes that almost impossible unless you are a member of a guild that does scheduled rp or an active community that does the kind of rp you are looking for.
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Sharding was necessary for the pre-release of DF because so many people were in Stormwind that it was actually routinely crashing the world server, not even just causing lag. Stormwind+Goldshire were putting a huge strain on server loads.
But as of right now, almost an entire month into the expansion, the sharding is no longer necessary.
I haven’t checked to see if sharding is off in SW today. I will go check when I am able.
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Sharding is off now
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