I’ve been pondering the significance of individual servers in World of Warcraft, especially with the introduction of mega servers like Living Flame. Back in the day, the small servers created a unique environment where you could consistently encounter the same players, fostering friendships and memorable interactions. However, the landscape has changed with mega servers and layers.
Now, mega servers, despite their practicality in managing population imbalances with layers, sometimes feel like a conglomeration of smaller servers. The randomness of layers can make it challenging to consistently run into familiar faces, potentially diminishing the sense of community that smaller servers offered. Additionally, server locking can be frustrating for those who joined later and find themselves on a less vibrant server.
It makes me question the necessity of traditional servers in the current state of the game, considering the prevalence of mega servers with multiple layers. Should Blizzard perhaps explore the possibility of implementing sharding in SoD and Wotlk, similar to Era or Retail, to manage player loads and enhance overall gameplay? I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this matter!
Layering is more or less Sharding, the former is realm-wide while the latter is zone-wide which already happens now.
The thing is often players forget with pink-shaded glasses is that in the far past, Vanilla or so, there was no such thing as sharding/layering. The realms really went down often or needed a lot of maintenance.
Zones were overload quite often and quest mobs were camped on the spot by 4 or more players at once, much akin to launch. With sharding technology this is alleviated greatly, but it has downsides. Like players who suddenly get sharded elsewhere, while they were grouped or not.
It is explained in more detail here why it happens and so on:
And it isn’t so that Living Flame was introduced as a “mega server” or biggest server cap by Blizzard, but more or less that players themselves designated it as the Number 1 server before launch and swamped it. So Blizzard decided to increase cap and also increase layers.
Think of sharding like adding temp floors to an existing building. The building capacity itself doesn’t increase.
There are plenty of entirely same, viable and populated realms that could’ve been the “Living Flame, Mega Server, Locked make a post about it” thread which happens occasionally when they get (faction) locked.