Good evening,
This is both a request for a fix to an issue, and a pre-emptive request to ensure the damage caused by upcoming content is minimised to Roleplaying servers. Once again, with the 11.1.7 patch, there’s going to be an event taking place in Stormwind and Orgrimmar.
We know from the Hearthstone event it will lag the server and inevitably, cause sharding to be turned back on. Wherever sharding turns on, it does massive damage to roleplaying in the region outside of small scale events with guilds. Roleplaying servers have been promised for years Sharding wouldn’t be turned back on for zones that don’t need it (I.e. current content zones). https://x.com/WarcraftDevs/status/1022566187266232320
But even major events like the Tournament of Ages aren’t immune to this problem. Because they shared a continent with the War Within prepatch, the entire event had to deal with Sharding. We too had to deal with it on Argent Dawn for Prepatch adjacent campaigns around Dalaran designed to be open to any member of the public walking into the area, as we assumed the sharding would only be enabled for Dragonblight, but was for the entire continent.
Now, we still have to deal with it on content zones that aren’t active. It was enabled for Pandaria remix. Pandaria is still sharding enabled. Every week, public events with attendees in the hundreds deal with having to try an drag people across shards, because the work that should’ve been done almost a year ago to turn it back off, hasn’t.
AD might be the largest RP server in europe and one of the largest unconnected realms, but we’re not alone in our troubles. We’ve sent in reports, we’ve filed it as bugs with various different customer supports, but none of it is entertained with a response that actions it, except for this thread here relating to the Hearthstone event last year, and there were several reports of that before it was actioned.
We ask collectively that when the realms need to be restarted for 11.1.7 it is turned off Everywhere that doesn’t need it. That means Everywhere except for War Within content zones. It still happens, on top of this issue with level brackets in the Dragon Isles, Pandaria, and a few other isolated remenants from that prepatch and in Legion Dalaran, despite there being little to no need now given the expansion has been out for nine months.
We can accept the need for sharding during the upcoming Greedy Emissary event due to the strain it places on the server. But isolating that damaging sharding usage to the zones being used only will do a lot of good for the roleplaying community.
Roleplaying communities exist for Stromgarde and other zones related to the story being released and deserve the chance to thrive and welcome people in during this exciting time. Players congregating in Pandaria shouldn’t need to join in-game communities to try and find a public event when it isn’t current content.
Night elf roleplayers shouldn’t have to not use their race’s new capital for major events because people can’t find one another. All of these places will be critical in keeping roleplaying alive and healthy during the upcoming month or so of the Greedy Emissary effectively disabling Stormwind and Orgrimmar.
Make sure they have the best legs to stand on, and our wait once it ends to get the capitals back to usable is as short as possible and we aren’t forced to chase it after a month. We just want to tell stories in the world and find other people in it to naturally interact with. This is a bug afterall, not a feature we can’t find our freinds.
