I'm still up for a mega server with no sharding for retail

[Chilela]

If you genuinely believe that a giant mass of players doesn't cause the servers to lag up, I have a simple response for that: Ruin shards during the Nazjatar PvP event. That community would flood shards so hard, they'd become nigh-unplayable. While part of me does pine for the days where sharding wasn't a thing, there are perfectly valid technical reasons for it to exist, particularly around expansion launches, which have been smooth for the most part the past couple of xpacs.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

I don't know who to trust: Blizzard server admins whose actual job it is to know how this stuff works and where their server limitations are or some random guy on MMO-C.

...guess we'll never know for real, will we?

Always tough to know who to side with in these situations, isn't it?

[Fistfighter]

Splitting communities of players because something is overcrowded is just wrong in a MMORPG and proof of this are other MMORPGS that are alive and well without it.
Feels like stress on a zone is way overrated issue that people make it to out be, main reason for sharding is convenience and not actual in-game related issues.

There must have been a lengthy argument between a populated, live looking environment VS. comfort and convenience for the casual player at Blizzard before they introduced sharding.

They keep saying the Game A vs Game B argument, and this is one of it's aspect

a game A is a sweaty server filled with multiboxers and russian bots, all farming the same mobs in a giant pile of 200+ players in one spot, where the casual players just have to suck it up and git gut

game B is a nice casual stroll through the zone, where you can easily tag mobs, and the only player you meet is another leveling casual, who might help you finish the quest mob


there's argument for both, but I fully understand why they chose the latter


Personally I LOVED the whole server reputation thing, even as far back as MoP, where you kept meeting the same people outdoor, and it formed a sense of community, but at the same time, there were times where this made the game outdoors game unplayable. And instead of enjoying the community, you were looking for ways to circumvent the mass of players standing in your way.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

Yet another example of Gimlix inserting his foot into his mouth from the very first post.

[exsanguinate]

5000 players in northsire, man sounds so fun

[Gaidax]

This is such a bad argument, i experienced 300 man raids during WoW peakdays and it barely effected lag, AV is 40v40 too and no lag either.
50ish people is just DISGUSTINGLY low and bad for a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

People forget how much fun a massively overcrowded world is and prefer convenience over immersion and fun.

Bullshit.

Back in Vanilla I participated in a community project tasked at making a huge faction battle of around 200+ players total in open world.

We gathered the army and server literally died 10 seconds after we started the fight.

So no, don't tell me Vanilla servers could handle hundreds of players in the same area at the same time. They could not. The best they could do is having them exist, but not do much anything certainly not fight.

[enigma77]

Sharding is the worst thing that ever happened to WoW. But if you a meta-player, you might never notice the difference.

Sharding isn't for server stability. WoW servers are the most stable in the industry and have been since forever. Sharding was to create the illusion of population density. No matter where you go, you will see players. Ironically this killed social interactivity since those players are never the same twice and vanish and appear at anytime destroying immersion forever. Since sharding, players in the open world are just warm bodies.

Anecdote: When it first came out, i was leveling a human. Passerby and I worked together w/o grouping to clear murlocs/gnolls. Doing the same quests in the same zone. Might add them and see if we can level til DMs. A second later, we walk over the bridge to Westfall. That guy vanished. Never saw him again.

MMO my ass.

Yep, so sad. This is not an mmo experience.

[Calfredd]

That's why on this thread there are half a dozen "raiders" complaining about server lag even though they spend 90% of their in-game time in an instance. It's because the only remaining players are loot-addicts who just need to see mobs die as fast as possible so they can get their roulette roll and dopamine hit in. Even a second delay on that must be extremely frustrating.

Yep, full focus on convenience and not actual immersion and MMORPG experience.
Thing is we are the minoritiy on this website and what ever we say, we are seen as the outcasts.

80% of the playerbase is gone and that somehow has nothing to do with any of this.

Is it fun for you people to be spouting this nonsense daily? To be living, walking Hitchen's Razors?

[enigma77]

I still believe to this day that sharding is the worst thing they implemented into WoW, i get the idea when a server is underpopulated and it needs to be more populated that sharding is a solution, but once there are too many people and you shard people away then the whole idea around sharding becomes very stupid for a MMORPG...

You play a MMORPG because you wanna experience an alive open world, not to feel like the game is dead because your server is too populated.

I feel like Blizzard should make a realm that is twice as big if not triple as big in server capability and have 0 sharding in place.
Look how alive Classic WoW looks like, how many people are everywhere and no shard in sight. The real MMORPG experience that retail lost.

For anyone who wants to go to this realm there should be a free realm change.

You are 100% correct but the simple truth is neither the wow developers nor most players give a damn about the game having become an anti-social game devoid of the most important aspects of the mmorpg genre. What made the game good was the big social dynamics, that have been wiped out in the name of convenience.

[Gimlix]

Yep, so sad. This is not an mmo experience.

Yet people praise sharding on this website and claim there is nothing better they can do, yet the game felt more immersive, alive back in the days.
Sharding is one of the main reason why WoW is declining and people defending it shows the game will most likely never return to that golden state we remember called MMORPG.

- - - Updated - - -

You are 100% correct but the simple truth is neither the wow developers nor most players give a damn about the game having become an anti-social game devoid of the most important aspects of the mmorpg genre. What made the game good was the big social dynamics, that have been wiped out in the name of convenience.

Alot of people care but most of the people who still care are long gone from the game, does not mean they cant still try to fix it and return the former glory it once was. It's sad to see that the game chooses convenience over immersion. WoW still has a massive audience, but alot of them lost hope due BFA, SL and alot of bad decisions, sharding being one of them.

WoW is the main reason why there is massive screams for a new MMORPG on the market that can dominate the whole market, because WoW no longer wants to have this. They prefer to live the singleplayer life.

[Spikeychris]

You are 100% correct but the simple truth is neither the wow developers nor most players give a damn about the game having become an anti-social game devoid of the most important aspects of the mmorpg genre. What made the game good was the big social dynamics, that have been wiped out in the name of convenience.

1) What was wiped out as several people have pointed out the "300 people in the same place and it was fine" shit is HEAVY rose tinted specs.
2) Sharding means that larger servers aren't enormous lagfests and that low pop server players actually see other players in the world. For low pop servers it is increasing the opportunity to play with others not decreasing and for higher pop servers it doesn't really matter.
3) The OP obviously doesn't play on a higher pop server because if he did he would know how much of a lagfesty shitshow the servers become in zones with world bosses. Draenor in Shadowlands was almost unplayable in whatever zone the world boss was in because of the amount of people jumping into a shard.
4) I guarantee if they didn't shard the same people would be making threads about how the world is laggy as shit and blizzard need to fix it.

- - - Updated - - -

Yet people praise sharding on this website and claim there is nothing better they can do, yet the game felt more immersive, alive back in the days.
Sharding is one of the main reason why WoW is declining and people defending it shows the game will most likely never return to that golden state we remember called MMORPG.

Sharding means that you can play with anyone in your region instead of being stuck with only being able to play with people that are solely on your server. For low pop servers it was a godsend and for higher pop servers it decreases the lag. It's a win win for both extremes so what exactly is the problem? Beyond this incredibly rose tinted "back in my day" pish?

[Calfredd]

That's why on this thread there are half a dozen "raiders" complaining about server lag even though they spend 90% of their in-game time in an instance. It's because the only remaining players are loot-addicts who just need to see mobs die as fast as possible so they can get their roulette roll and dopamine hit in. Even a second delay on that must be extremely frustrating.

You are 100% correct but the simple truth is neither the wow developers nor most players give a damn about the game having become an anti-social game devoid of the most important aspects of the mmorpg genre. What made the game good was the big social dynamics, that have been wiped out in the name of convenience.

Bit weird how you and Kokolums blame Blizzard for a player-created problem.

[Spikeychris]

Bit weird how you and Kokolums blame Blizzard for a player-created problem.

Also wonder how many social events they try and organise in game...

[kranur]

WoW could handle way bussier events then the feast and it sure as hell can today.

How the fuck can you make that argument when it literally couldn't. And that was super recent too. Like the entire fucking zone was messed up. Same thing when world bosses get killed.

[khazmodan]

I still believe to this day that sharding is the worst thing they implemented into WoW, i get the idea when a server is underpopulated and it needs to be more populated that sharding is a solution, but once there are too many people and you shard people away then the whole idea around sharding becomes very stupid for a MMORPG...

You play a MMORPG because you wanna experience an alive open world, not to feel like the game is dead because your server is too populated.

I feel like Blizzard should make a realm that is twice as big if not triple as big in server capability and have 0 sharding in place.
Look how alive Classic WoW looks like, how many people are everywhere and no shard in sight. The real MMORPG experience that retail lost.

For anyone who wants to go to this realm there should be a free realm change.

You are right, but it all started with LFR and LFD, retail players and developers still love all these community destroying additions and they are getting what they deserve; the death of retail. I think retail will continue downhill in player counts and that will lead to smaller development teams which will lead to less content and less players. Eventually Microsoft/Blizzard will realize that it's cheaper to keep Classic alive and let retail die or at least clean out the development team by letting it die for a couple of years then bring it back with a fresh team hired by Microsoft.

[kenn9530]

I still believe to this day that sharding is the worst thing they implemented into WoW, i get the idea when a server is underpopulated and it needs to be more populated that sharding is a solution, but once there are too many people and you shard people away then the whole idea around sharding becomes very stupid for a MMORPG...

You play a MMORPG because you wanna experience an alive open world, not to feel like the game is dead because your server is too populated.

I feel like Blizzard should make a realm that is twice as big if not triple as big in server capability and have 0 sharding in place.
Look how alive Classic WoW looks like, how many people are everywhere and no shard in sight. The real MMORPG experience that retail lost.

For anyone who wants to go to this realm there should be a free realm change.

You know what the most important part of a game is right, its gameplay and smooth gameplay trumps seeing a few more players running around, size of a server is irrelevant, seeing too many players running around degrades server performance, thats not even taking in doing quests and stuff.

- - - Updated - - -

You are right, but it all started with LFR and LFD, retail players and developers still love all these community destroying additions and they are getting what they deserve; the death of retail. I think retail will continue downhill in player counts and that will lead to smaller development teams which will lead to less content and less players. Eventually Microsoft/Blizzard will realize that it's cheaper to keep Classic alive and let retail die or at least clean out the development team by letting it die for a couple of years then bring it back with a fresh team hired by Microsoft.

WoWs loss in players has nothing to do with anything other than the game is old, its pretty much the same game and that eventually gets boring, new players dont want to jump into such an old game and old players leave, the only reason ppl still play WoW is attachment to thier char and most other MMO are still more of the same.

[Mamut]

WoW was stable way before sharding too, stop giving sharding as reason why the game is stable. Stupid argument.
Back then WoW had massive world events on a daily basis by the hundreds.

Why do you make all this shiit up? Like cmon, I started to play like 3 months before TBC release and did some capital city raids and we were lagging as hell with like 40 people in raid and once we arrived in Stormwind it was just a total freez and lag fest.

Flawless 300 people battles, yeah right, wake up and stop dreaming.

[Viikkis]

Back in the day each WoW server had dedicated server blades that had capacity for X players and this number was constant. No matter if it were the peak gaming time or early morning every server always had the same capacity. Now if you think businesswise all the hours when the server is not used to it's full capacity is energy and essentially money wasted. Hence the industry moved on to virtualization where the server capacity can dynamically change depending on the need.

So if it is early morning and there aren't that many players online some of the "virtual" servers (shards) can be turned off and when needed they can be opened up. So the server can scale up and down and not waste resources. To simplify: before there was one massive server and now there are dozens of tiny servers. Their performance is up to argue.

Personally I remember the old capital raids with multiple 40m groups attacking cities and the server could handle it fine. But any big events like Gates of AQ / Hellfire Peninsula during TBC launch were major clusterfucks on the biggest servers. These days it seems if you try to organize multiple 40m groups for a capital raid the server will start forcing you into different shards but that is just my observation.

[Kokolums]

it has been reported that private servers have no lag issues with tons of players massing online and there is no clear reason why because blizz wont comment.

we do know that blizz moved away from physical server blades (which were auctioned off or given away as tokens) in favor of virtual servers running on a cloud to save costs, which may actually result in worse performance.

but again, we just dont know how much better or worse the new system is, but id bet a lot worse.

[Gimlix]

WoWs loss in players has nothing to do with anything other than the game is old, its pretty much the same game and that eventually gets boring, new players dont want to jump into such an old game and old players leave, the only reason ppl still play WoW is attachment to thier char and most other MMO are still more of the same.

Delusional if you think the game aging is the only reason for it's decline, it's sure not. there are alot of factors into play which sharding is one reason of.