Sharding really sucks. Why can’t we get battlegroups again and merge few servers. Seeing other people on the world besides the area close to auction house isn’t bad.
6 Likes
Sharding has its own issues but it helps solving a bunch others.
So yeah, game would be better without sharding as long as the other issues don’t come back. And so far they don’t seem to have anything better to offer.
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What issues do you mean? That you had to wait 1-2 min. for quest mob in the starting zone or that they talked to you?
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Unstable servers for one.
Mostly server stability and queues for the issues. BFA launch was extremely smooth compared to WoD for example. No crashes and not too much lag beyond the capitals with the auction house.
Sharding also allows everyone to tag mobs which solved some frustration issues (can’t steal mobs anymore and so on) and iirc it’s also why you will recieve your drops mailed if you couldn’t loot the mob in time which is great for World PvP.
These last two could be overlooked but i’m pretty sure the game stability is one of the most important thing for Blizzard.
It seems They used the additional ressources saved by sharding to upgrade the combat system (more procs, CDs, effects, higher number of debuff per mob, faster treatement and so on) but went too far which leads to the current lags you can experience with sharding.
For example early vanilla bosses had up to 8 debuff at a time because allowing more would increase the data allocated per mob and the burden on the server. Now you have up to 250 debuff per character involved iirc, so up to 5k debuff for a 20m raid.
I’m pretty sure removing sharding today would leave us with a broken game because of this increased burden on the servers. Classic WoW use the same kind of cloud server than BFA but can hold 3k players on a single continent wide shard. This isn’t a matter of server at this point but how they use the available ressources.
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Agreed, hate sharding.
Balance servers by merging, close some down and ditch sharding.
Server community is dead and sharding x-realm has a lot to do with it.
6 Likes
I think CRZ is the real problem, not sharding. Although sharding sucks a LOT of d*ck as well. But CRZ should be tackled first imo.
Everyone always hates sharding, but the moment a bunch of people get invited to a shard, the world lags and everyone complains about lag. Without sharding, that lag would be a very regular occurrence.
In my opinion, sharding should be reduced, not eliminated. i.e., it should be used only if absolutely necessary. Perhaps when the server is clearly overloaded, it can be sharded temporarily, and once zones clear up, the shards can collapse. They already technically do that, but Blizzard is too aggressive about it.
In addition to that, shards should be continental. Sub-dividing an entire zone into multiple shards creates awkward gameplay, and I really think Blizzard ought to change that.
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I played 3,5 expansion without it and they were the best expansions for me. This crap is ruining whole MMO experience. I was playing on high population realm but as soon as I left the city the world is empty. What’s the point of having this in an MMO. In MoP being added by someone meant you are moved to that server. Simple, yet effective.
I want to play an MMO not a single player game. If I’d like to make my quests alone I’d buy a proper sp action rpg like The Witcher 3. I want to see the people from my server when I level up not a random guy from RP server that I’ll never see again in my life.
4 Likes
Sharding and LFG merges is whats killing WM too - the fact you can go from a 50/50 phase to a 90-10 phase in terms of faction representation is disgusting.
My server (Sylvanas) was a high population realm in MoP. Timeless Isle was unplayable for the first month of that patch, and many players ended up migrating alts to low-pop servers and having friends invited to that server to make the game playable. There were multiple forum posts of folks claiming that this is some elaborate ploy by Blizzard to get people to pay for migrations.
I really would hate to resort to such workarounds. Again, my position is that sharding is too aggressive should just be reduced. It should be a “last resort” type of thing to avoid servers working too hard, rather than something so fundamental to gameplay. 
I thought shards were based on zone? In bfa zones. You saying each subzone is a shard? Need link to info on how shards actually work.
We’re better with sharding that works in a way that players would understand.
- Fill as many shards as possible with a 50/50 ratio.
- All other shards will be 100/0, and a warning should be shown to players who have been assigned to them that no WM bonus is in effect.
- This is the inevitable outcome of faction imbalance and people will get it.
- The minority faction doesn’t feel like a minority faction anymore and might turn WM on.
Dump this rubbish of spreading the minority faction out amongst however many shards there are. All that does is make a bad experience for 100% of players, either because they always win, or because they always lose.
1 Like
I might be mistaken. Nevertheless, my point still stands that it is too aggressive and needs to be reduced.
Sharding/CRZ/etc in all its forms is bad. I have always been on high pop servers and lag has never been an issue before sharding. Now you cannot even do a 40 Vs 40 PvP raid outdoora before it lags to unplayable. Just make it so the servers can handle it, there are way less players then before so it should be fine.
They’ve removed sharding in nazj and when world pvp breaks out with 2 raid groups the lag makes for 2 sec delay on spell casting
That is because they rely on sharding instead of having a server that can handle that amount of people.
3 Likes
Yep, the game is 15 years old mind
You’re forgetting that the game is much more complex now than it was 15 years ago. There are more events for the server to listen to, more security, more data to query, more validation to do, etc.
I know to the layman it doesn’t make sense how a 15-year-old game could face these troubles, but anyone who as worked in software would understand that this is just the nature of the beast.
I know it has changed alot, I know the lag is caused by calculations for each ability used and on what the ability is used I am just saying the shard(VM) is under specced to handle that amount of players and it is probably not cost effective to spec a shard to handle the max amount of players, but if they take away sharding and the servers have a cap on players they can spec the server correctly. Maybe this is not how it works and I am wrong but have a server with a set max limit of players allowed on it makes more sense to me.