Alternate Option To Sharding

[Kathranis]

This is literally a worse implementation of sharding. Instead of dynamically sorting players into 2-3 shards in high traffic zones it would be forcing them to manually select one of ten shards that are always active with separated communities.

How does a person continue to be taken seriously after making such a dumb suggestion? Seriously.

[Holtzmann]

You won't have the same name, why are you not reading what I'm replying to you?

If you bothered to read I suggested they could simply have only one player with that name for all the realms associated with that one merge

So... you want the realms to be connected enough so only one person can use any given name across the entire cluster. And then you'll merge the servers later.

Tell me, how is this better than sharding? With the solution presented in this thread you can't,
- play with the majority of people in the "mega server" until everything is merged,
- you can't chat with them,
- you can't make use of a healthier auction house,
- you can't join their guilds unless they were made on your server,
- and then, when the servers get merged what little sense of community each individual server managed to build gets destroyed by a massive influx of new people.

With sharding at least you get to chat, party, join guilds, run dungeons and raid with people. All that happens is that you don't get to get crowded by 200 people in a zone that was designed to only fit 100 comfortably. How terrible.

Sorry, this idea is just flat-out stupid. It doesn't bring anything to the table that sharding doesn't do better, except maybe the warm fuzzy feeling of "sticking it to the man" by being against something implemented after Vanilla.

[HuxNeva]

No it hasn't, you're thinking of clock speed, single threaded performance has been steadily growing for decades although the growth has slowed in recent years due to Intel's pre-Ryzen monopoly. To put it in perspective, Intel currently sell a 2.9GHz dual core CPU called the Celeron G3930, each of those cores has TEN TIMES the performance of an equally clocked Pentium 4, a tenfold increase of single threaded performance is hardly a plateau.

The performance issues of the early Vanilla servers are simply not an issue anymore and were nullified long before Blizzard introduced sharding as a cost cutting measure. I.E in the early days of WoW it was possible for large concentrated groups to bring down a server (I.E the hundreds of gnome warriors in Ironforge that brought down Argent Dawn in protest over warrior nerfs), but that was addressed by hardware improvements and improved coding, hence why there were thousands of players coexisting in Hellfire Peninsula and Borean Tundra without incident (and those are single zones, not the dozen separate starting zones of Classic)

You are wrong, and your sublinear performance improvements are not going to have much impact on an exponential problem

[huth]

I know how sharding works, it just isn't necessary.

This isn't 2004, the servers aren't running on Pentium 4 grade Xeons with SD-RAM and SCSI drives.

And the server load is higher than it was in 2004, too. It's not just the hardware that has changed.

You're not really in a position to determine if it is necessary.

[caervek]

You are wrong, and your sublinear performance improvements are not going to have much impact on an exponential problem

You see the way the dots are moving upwards and to the right instead of just moving to the right? That's called improving over time (as opposed to plateauing). Thank you for proving my argument for me.

[huth]

hence why there were thousands of players coexisting in Hellfire Peninsula and Borean Tundra without incident (and those are single zones, not the dozen separate starting zones of Classic)

Without incident? I think you need to jog your memory a bit. BC launch was why they put two starting zones in WotLK. Anybody who could immediately skipped ahead to Zangarmarsh just to avoid the crapfest in Hellfire.

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You see the way the dots are moving upwards and to the right instead of just moving to the right? That's called improving over time (as opposed to plateauing). Thank you for proving my argument for me.

See how they move up slower the further they get to the right? That's called plateauing.

[caervek]

And the server load is higher than it was in 2004, too.

True, but it hasn't increased by anything near ad much as the servers ability to deal with that load, hence why the launch issues of Vanilla were fixed by TBC/WotLK and are completely irrelevant for Classic.

Like I said there are only two possible reasons why Classic would have sharding for launch, either the devs are testing the water to see how much **** they can get away with, or they are incompetent enough to genuinely think it's needed, neither is a particularly good reason

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See how they move up slower the further they get to the right? That's called plateauing.

No it isn't, it's called improving over time (albeit at a slower rate), plateauing/stagnating would be almost no upwards movement.

If you want to see an example of plateauing look up a chart of mechanical consumer HDD transfer speeds in recent years.

[Dazu]

No it hasn't, you're thinking of clock speed, single threaded performance has been steadily growing for decades although the growth has slowed in recent years due to Intel's pre-Ryzen monopoly. To put it in perspective, Intel currently sell a 2.9GHz dual core CPU called the Celeron G3930, each of those cores has TEN TIMES the performance of an equally clocked Pentium 4, a tenfold increase of single threaded performance is hardly a plateau.

The performance issues of the early Vanilla servers are simply not an issue anymore and were nullified long before Blizzard introduced sharding as a cost cutting measure. I.E in the early days of WoW it was possible for large concentrated groups to bring down a server (I.E the hundreds of gnome warriors in Ironforge that brought down Argent Dawn in protest over warrior nerfs), but that was addressed by hardware improvements and improved coding, hence why there were thousands of players coexisting in Hellfire Peninsula and Borean Tundra without incident (and those are single zones, not the dozen separate starting zones of Classic)

Hellfire crashed repeatedly over the first weeks. So did both starting areas of wrath. Cata also had issues in SW and Hyjal. And lets not pretend WoD release was good.

Also, its not just the server infrastructure, how many people can sit in a 40man world boss raid with no lag in retail? Also consider the people who dont live right near the servers, because you know people play this game from all around the world right? You know how much worse the lag gets when areas are crowded to hell when you are already running 200+ MS as a minimum? It jumps to 500 or more.

Also end of the day, who really cares? Starting zone congestion isnt anything anyone should want. It will hurt server populations from the get go, and has nothing to do with vanilla experience.

Or we could go with my vanilla experience which was complete weeks where the server was only up for a few random hours here and there, 3 day maintenances, 3 hour log in queues (great when your raiding 1 hour after you get home from work), not able to loot chests in the world because people had hacks to teleport around the world and through it, lagging out in SW and IF because susanxpress bots would hack themselves into the air and die to spell out advertisements etc, because you know, no changes and thats what some servers were like.

[Sanguinerd]

The only alternate option really is to just get over it. If sharding makes my experience at start better I don't really care if its not authentic to vanilla..

The entire thing won't be authentic anyway so what does it really freakin matter.

[anon5123]

What you described is literally just sharding but with 10 servers instead of 1 server.

[huth]

No it isn't, it's called improving over time (albeit at a slower rate), plateauing/stagnating would be almost no upwards movement.

If you want to see an example of plateauing look up a chart of mechanical consumer HDD transfer speeds in recent years.

You mean just like there is next to no upwards movement on that graph? And how it keeps getting slower?
It also stays completely unchanged for years at a time, and we had more improvement in a year in the nineties than we had in the last 5.

There is next to no improvement anymore. You're just deluding yourself into believing your preconceived narrative.

[turboether]

Shard the starting zones so more people can log on and play right away. Don't shard anything else so they can have the true vanilla tagging experience.

[Chaelexi]

Alexensual suggested a great way to have a Classic launch without Sharding

Let's say the server is Archimonde, there will be 10 Archimonde servers named Archimonde 1 through to 10

All of these servers will be merged into one Archimonde server after the initial launch when the playerbase has stabilised and the number of players is consistent after let's say 1-2 weeks

So initially there will only be one tenth of the population of the total realm at launch not to have too much traffic in leveling zones and still keeping the community alive and seeing the same players around without them phasing out

It doesn't necessarily have to be 10 versions of a server it could be any number really just to keep the numbers stable on a server for the levelling experience

This has been the best solution I have heard so far while not having to use Sharding on launch which no doubt blizzard will have to manage the launch in some way or another to reduce player numbers in zones

So how do you deal with names then? What if 10 people have the name of Legolas.......who keeps it. It does not work. Sharding is the best option.

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No it hasn't, you're thinking of clock speed, single threaded performance has been steadily growing for decades although the growth has slowed in recent years due to Intel's pre-Ryzen monopoly. To put it in perspective, Intel currently sell a 2.9GHz dual core CPU called the Celeron G3930, each of those cores has TEN TIMES the performance of an equally clocked Pentium 4, a tenfold increase of single threaded performance is hardly a plateau.

The performance issues of the early Vanilla servers are simply not an issue anymore and were nullified long before Blizzard introduced sharding as a cost cutting measure. I.E in the early days of WoW it was possible for large concentrated groups to bring down a server (I.E the hundreds of gnome warriors in Ironforge that brought down Argent Dawn in protest over warrior nerfs), but that was addressed by hardware improvements and improved coding, hence why there were thousands of players coexisting in Hellfire Peninsula and Borean Tundra without incident (and those are single zones, not the dozen separate starting zones of Classic)

The biggest difference is that they have moved from server on box design in the early 2000's to virtual container style programming, guess what this container style programming is the tech that lead to sharding. It allows you to automatically spin up a container to host a phase of a zone with it using a minimal hardware footprint in virtual space. Once this container is no longer needed it will be automatically closed and the resources returned to the pool. This in general is why sharding is the best option from a resourcing point of view.......

As for Hellfire any person with BWL gear skipped it and either went to the swamp or the other zone as mobs 3 levels above you gave more xp and were killed as easily.

[Kirbstermcgee]

This was actually Preach Gaming's idea, but sure, not surprised Alex presented it as his own.

I personally think its a better solution to sharding but will have its own complex consequences.

[voidillusion]

This was actually Preach Gaming's idea, but sure, not surprised Alex presented it as his own.

I personally think its a better solution to sharding but will have its own complex consequences.

How can you think it's a better solution when it's just sharding done in the wrong way with later consequences to both the end user and blizzard....

[Kirbstermcgee]

How can you think it's a better solution when it's just sharding done in the wrong way with later consequences to both the end user and blizzard....

Because I dont trust blizzard to only add sharding for the initial start, isolated to specific zones. Once the cats out of the bag I personally would expect them to add it for specific scenarios or events. The AQ event for example or world pvp.

[Holtzmann]

Because I dont trust blizzard to only add sharding for the initial start, isolated to specific zones. Once the cats out of the bag I personally would expect them to add it for specific scenarios or events. The AQ event for example or world pvp.

You're assuming the Classic server population is going to be a lot higher than it's likely to be by the time enough people reach level 60 and get on with AQ and big world PvP blobs. By that point, a few months into release, you're going to have a very small playerbase composed mostly of dedicated players, with a tiny trickle of new people coming in. Classic's population curve is going to be one massive peak at the start, dropping off into a much lower sustainable population plateau within just a few weeks.

[Kirbstermcgee]

You're assuming the Classic server population is going to be a lot higher than it's likely to be by the time enough people reach level 60 and get on with AQ and big world PvP blobs. By that point, a few months into release, you're going to have a very small playerbase composed mostly of dedicated players, with a tiny trickle of new people coming in. Classic's population curve is going to be one massive peak at the start, dropping off into a much lower sustainable population plateau within just a few weeks.

The AQ event got cluttered and fubared during live era not because every level 60 was in the zone. It was because all of the level 1's who flooded the server to check it out. By having sharding with the assumption that classic wont have a decent player base later on is just as dangerous as the inverse.

[Deleted]

Yeah and then you pile up 2000 players in a system and suffer TiDi (whole game goes literally slowmotion).

There's a Time Dilation mechanic available to help with high lag and big PvP battles. The biggest problem is getting used to seeing a space ship as your toon instead of a humanoid. But it's not that bad as there's some cool ships in EVE Online. And single sharding.

[vsb]

Alexensual suggested a great way to have a Classic launch without Sharding

Let's say the server is Archimonde, there will be 10 Archimonde servers named Archimonde 1 through to 10

All of these servers will be merged into one Archimonde server after the initial launch when the playerbase has stabilised and the number of players is consistent after let's say 1-2 weeks

So initially there will only be one tenth of the population of the total realm at launch not to have too much traffic in leveling zones and still keeping the community alive and seeing the same players around without them phasing out

It doesn't necessarily have to be 10 versions of a server it could be any number really just to keep the numbers stable on a server for the levelling experience

This has been the best solution I have heard so far while not having to use Sharding on launch which no doubt blizzard will have to manage the launch in some way or another to reduce player numbers in zones

It is the sharding, just manual. I don't think that it's a good option. They should turn on queues instead of sharding. It's the only viable solution.