Edit: We did it, boys! This looks to be fixed now! Leaving the discussion up for three weeks after the next content patch when I have to copy-paste it again, though!
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Hi-diddley-ho, neighborinos! Blizzard, you may not have noticed, but you seem to have left sharding on on your servers marked with (RP). This is bad!
Now, in case you weren’t aware because it doesn’t have anything to do with raiding, M+ or timegated open world content, servers marked with (RP) are set aside for Roleplay, or, as I like to call it, Nerdy Barbies. What we do on RP servers is that we hang out, often in the major cities so that we can see and interact with other people doing the same thing with their characters, and act out our characters in-game in a weird blend of acting and writing. We have addons that allow us to write out whole profiles for our characters, to set custom names for ourselves with last names and icons and different colors, to speak in-game languages, to split emotes into multiple posts automatically so that we can keep writing, to ping us when our character’s name is mentioned and let us follow conversations in crowded areas, all KINDS of things.
Roleplayers, as a subscriber group, are what you in the industry call “evergreen” subscribers when you’re being kind, “addicts” when you’re not. There is no specific season or raid tier or content patch that we show up for, we’re always around, because we make our own content. We hold events like the Tournament of Ages in the summer where thousands of people show up and we raise tens of thousands of dollars for charity holding competitions, games, ceremonies, live-DJed music, a Ball, and player-hosted booths with food and items. Those events also get mentioned in major press outlets, drumming up publicity for the game.
SO MUCH of our creative energy gets poured into this game. We’ll buy toys and mounts and transmog with cash. We’ll buy gold with tokens to get in-game items. We post our character stories and art on our social media accounts. We are deeply engaged in your brand, bumping your metrics.
And what do we want from World of Warcraft as a game? Largely, vastly less than raiders or M+ runners or PVPers. We don’t need expensive new raid tiers, we don’t need perpetual new higher-iLvl armor and weapons, it doesn’t even particularly affect what we do too much if the game’s story makes sense, we only use the basic framework and have the world’s events go on in the background of our stories when we can. Except when stuff like a three-year timeskip that barely got a mention in the story gets imposed on the world’s story, that’s…irritating.
All a lot of us need are spaces where we can walk up to each other and say “hi” to each other in-character to kick off interactions, stories, character development, and the forming of the kinds of parasocial bonds that obligate people to keep logging in that you guys love lately. Year after year, season after season, no matter how finely-tuned the raids are or how the stats on the current tier work out or if their class is the current meta. And Dragonflight as an expansion has so much that seemed to be designed with roleplayers in mind - a whole new playable race, a big pretty lived-in city with spaces for meetings and hanging out that can serve as stand-ins for dwellings and guild halls, toys with fun effects, neat cosmetic items…MTV’S DAN CORTESE.
But a long time ago, someone had the idea to implement new sharding technology to the game to reduce server loads on populated servers. Since seeing and interacting with other people is such a critical part of what we do, most of us settled on two servers and turned them high population - Moon Guard (generally the server where Alliance players congregate) and Wyrmrest Accord (generally the server where Horde players congregate). When sharding was rolled out, the pushback from our community was hard. If you can’t see the people around you to interact with them, it doesn’t matter how little lag we have. Your RP options are going to be limited, at least in terms of spontaneous ones with people that you don’t already know. It was rolled back in the main cities on RP servers shortly after, and after the Tournament of Ages was a big hit in its second year it was turned off worldwide in non-current content for RP servers also. It was a move that allowed us to keep participating in the most accessible and interactive part of our hobby, yay!
We could, and sometimes do, get set up on various fragmented Discords across the community where people can try and prearrange RP, and that works out pretty well for large projects where people have all different schedules and ability to contribute. But why would we keep paying for the visuals and transmogs and toys and access to the live game if we’re going to end up doing all of that in pure-text format outside the game instead? If we’re not going to be able to walk around and have unplanned, spontaneous interactions with each other, why would we keep coming back and paying $14.99 a month for empty cities with a handful of other people - usually not the ones that you were looking for - rattling around in it?
We haven’t even traditionally complained (much) about the necessity of CRZ and sharding in current content. We stick to our cities and hubs instead, understanding that for those that play the current PVE game and do current world content actively things like loot lag and server response times are important. And we understand that sharding needs to go on sometimes too for the sake of stability, like when a new expansion launches and every character in the whole dang game needs to get through Stormwind to get to the new content.
But I’m genuinely trying to explain what this is about to you guys, and what the financial bottom line benefit to you is, because all I can assume is that whoever you had on staff who did RP at all or knew anything about has left the company, because sharding is still turned on in legacy content and the main legacy cities. And we’d be much more patient and much less irritated about this, if:
- It still seemed justified. The amount of people on Stormwind Moon Guard during primetime in the evening is a fraction of what it normally would be, because people are avoiding coming and hanging out due to the frustrations with finding other roleplayers that are right there but the game won’t let you see them. There’s not even anything like the numbers two weeks after the prepatch came out.
- If we didn’t have to do this. EVERY. TIME. Sharding gets turned back on. It never just gets automatically disabled again, it’s always a manual fix and no one ever remembers to do it until we practically riot
- If it hadn’t now been three weeks since the launch, which was now at least a week longer than the delay after Shadowlands.
We’re excited to play the game. We want to get in and meet all these new Dracthyr characters, we want to get back to our ongoing storylines and established characters who are now fast-forwarded three years ahead into the future for…reasons. Perhaps we now have mustaches and an eyepatch, to show the passage of time. We want to dress up our digital paper dolls in cute outfits and shake them at other digital paper dolls while we go, “Hello, how are you today?” in a weird and semi-muffled voice. We’ve given you a lot of money in the past, and will continue to do so in the future, if you continue to enable us using your online spaces to do this.
So much money, seriously. So much #engagement with your brand. So much promotion of your IP across social media platforms.
But only if you do, in fact, let us see and find each other to do that stuff.
In conclusion, turn off the gottdam sharding, already. Tell us if there’ a plan, and why. Tell us if there’s an ETA, or what’s holding you back. Otherwise…just flip the dang switch already, or the community is going to wander off and find greener pastures to fling our money at. It doesn’t matter a whole lot at the end of the day if we’re playing Kaldorei or Elezen, we don’t stay for the world of Azeroth specifically. We stay for the community, and if our community is going to be broken off into chunks that can’t see or hear each other we might as well play our Nerdy Barbies elsewhere.
out of WoW’s ability to generate organic player-to-player interactions which are fundamental to a healthy community, but what about $20 