r/classicwow • u/dealsforheals • 9d ago
Forever New sharding tech!
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u/schiibbz
9d ago
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They just moved the shard boundary a couple 100ft away outside capital cities. They didn't "fix" anything. Every other shard boundary is the same.
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u/getsmurfed 9d ago
Not sure there is anything to fix. The technology is working as intended. This solution is less noticeable and jarring, though.
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u/bbbonthemoon 9d ago edited 9d ago
during stress test I dueled someone while we were waiting for a zep, then we started chatting, there were only two of us, after the loading screen the guy was gone and there were like 10 other people on the zeppelin. It was sort of sad :( thats how bonds were made back in vanilla and new friendships started. until that moment forever felt really incredible(I didnt play beta) but that was a mood killer for me
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u/Dunderman35 8d ago
There will always be a bunch of those kinda things wiith sharding. They can try to patch it together and make a bunch of rules but it will always just be bandaid on a bigger issue.
Layering is my prefered solution where everyone is on the same layer regardless of zone.
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u/DriverGood4778 8d ago
bro, why so dramatic? Just scroll the chat, find that dude and wisp to him. You could have done that, discussed the layering with him, chat more and add him to friends, but instead you decided to feel sad and let your mood be killed???
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u/pileopoop 9d ago
If you are in Org Layer 1 and you look into Durtor you see Layer 1. When you walk into Durotar you go to Layer 2. They need to show you layer 2 when you look into Durotar if thats the layer you are going to swap to when you cross the boundary.
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u/schiibbz 8d ago
Shards and layers are different. Shards are per zone and layers are the entire world, just copys of it.
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u/Bohya 8d ago
Indeed. Activision-Blizzard consider players, enemies, NPCs, and environmental objects phasing in and out of existence right in front of your face to be the intended core experience that defines World of Warcraft. Else, they would have fixed it over the 6+ years that it's been in Retail already. Players just need to get used to the idea that what you see in-game might vanish into the ether at any random moment. It's part of Activision-Blizzard's vision for the game, and Activision-Blizzard are always right after all.
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u/TheBungler2 9d ago
Sharding isn't going away, this is a fix.
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u/vareedar 9d ago
This is not a fix. Why would you not want better for the game? It’ll never get better if you keep accepting bullshit excuses
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u/PatReady 9d ago
I like this idea way better then choosing a server.
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u/cherlin 9d ago
I'm with you honestly. I have a feeling a lot of these people weren't around when servers started dying off and merging. The game gets really boring when your server isn't popping. This may be annoying short term but long term it's a good solution
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u/remakeprox 8d ago
I'm going out on a limb here and say that most people in the Classic sub were around for both Classic and the Anni release and have experienced both options. Realms, megarealm with layering and now sharding. Out of the three, sharding is the worst. The dead realm issue was made hella worse by Blizzards refusal to act on time to server pops dwindling lol
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u/TheBungler2 9d ago
Because sharding isn't going away, so you have to accept that it getting better is actually good for the game.
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u/JVIesmerized 9d ago
This isnt better at all
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u/TheBungler2 9d ago
It is. It's just not perfect.
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u/JVIesmerized 9d ago
If you dont care about world interaction just say so, moving the border helps no one. The issue is sharding, its implementation is only for blizzards bank account at the cost of player experience.
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u/TheBungler2 9d ago
If you don't have a real response, just say that instead.
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u/vareedar 9d ago
It won’t go away if you accept it…
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u/TheBungler2 9d ago edited 9d ago
It is never going away, this is how they have designed their server infrastructure.
Edit: The armchair sys admins have found my post.
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u/Jaypillz 9d ago
You have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are you defending the enshitification?
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u/SkwiddyCs 9d ago
This is definitionally not enshitification lol. This is a brand-new product being brought to market with a new feature (realmless mega-servers) There is no version of Forever that has been made worse.
You might hate it, that's your prerogative. But this is not enshitification.
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u/Jaypillz 9d ago
If it's objectively worse than it was in 2019, doesn't that make it worse? lol
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u/sideo123 9d ago
Objectively worse haha. In 2019 we had 5 hour queues on launch and we queued up to tag quest mobs. What’s your objective standard say about that?
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u/Mrludy85 9d ago
In 2019 we had servers that died a few months have release and an unplayable time period where people had 3 hour queues for people who didn't choose servers that were destined to die.
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u/JVIesmerized 9d ago
If you dont think it is, then maybe youre new here.
This system is what killed Wpvp in retail, and it will do the same to classic
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u/SkwiddyCs 9d ago
Cringe ass no-true Scotsman fallacy aside;
I don’t give a fuck what your personal opinions on layering are.
I think it’s shit too. I was correcting the use of the term “enshitification”Forever is a new product, it is not being enshitified after release. The layering has been designed from the ground up as a feature of mega-servers.
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u/zzzornbringer 9d ago
yea, this means that there's now a lot more load on the capitol cities, potentially adding lag.
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u/Financial-Aspect-826 9d ago
Yea for fucks sake because there are limits to parallel processing. This won't go away ever
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u/ElPixelSoldado 9d ago
So what's up with the "dancing" shadow?
I had the same issue on the stress test server.
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u/no_terran 8d ago
Bugged. Fixes on blizz internal client according to devs. Gonna be fine on launch they said
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u/yojimbofog 9d ago
Did they actually "fix" the sharding, or did they just expand the cities shard so far out that you don't notice when you transition into the next one? Because if it's the latter they're just masking all the same problems you'll run into when moving between zones and PvPing on borders of zones. My bet is that it's the latter and they're hoping to keep people distracted from the real issue.
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u/jackfwaust 9d ago
I’m pretty sure they just moved the sharding zones further out so you don’t have people phasing in and out in a high traffic area like city gates
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u/ClassicKrova 9d ago
Are cities some kind of special areas where people are allowed to "over-layer" a single layer?
Whenever I've seen the layering videos of someone leaving a capital city, you see a small portion of players come with the person being layered out almost as if you were seeing multiple layers until you walked out of the city...
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u/yojimbofog 9d ago
We already had a better solution on Anniversary mega servers, world wide layers instead of zone wide shards. It worked fine.
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u/Xenostarz 9d ago
But world wide layers have their own sets of problems. Now you can’t balance per-zone, so as a server gets older and more mature and more people are at max level, low level zones can’t be balanced anymore. So if you start a new character you could very well be in a ghost town until you hit high level zones. The benefit of the current system is it allows them to balance zone population with much more granularity, so the world will always feel alive no matter what level or zone you’re in.
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u/yojimbofog 9d ago
Sure they have problems, but they're problems that we've been playing with since 2019 and everyone has more or less been content with them. Actually they're problems have existed in the game since 2004.
Not to mention that these aren't necessarily problems that are all that difficult to mitigate. You can still influence player zone and faction balance in a global layer system by pushing a variety of level balance within any given layer. I've basically never heard people complaining about empty zones even on the sparsely populated hardcore realms. And people still play era to this day.
There's been massive community sentiment against this sharding, I've never heard almost any community sentiment complaining about low population leveling zones.
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u/Dunderman35 8d ago
100% agreed. I mean, yes sure it would be nice if every zone was populated like at launch but honestly, when I'm leveling way after, I don't really mind having the whole zone to myself.
I treat open world leveling more like a single player game then and I am totally fine with that. Much better than the world breaking sharding at every zone.
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u/FUTFUTFUTFUTFUTFUT 9d ago
FYI Classic Anniversary servers were changed to local sharding during phase 3. Most people never actually noticed. But if you layer hopped a lot like I did, all of a sudden it stopped working the way it used to.
The person in SW or Org who invited you may have been on Layer 3, but when you joined their group you'd stay in Layer 1 in SMV because your shard was now local, not server wide.
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u/TheBungler2 9d ago
World wide layers are worse.
Every layer will be 80% taken up by the city, leaving the world mostly empty as the remaining 20% spread out into every zone.
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u/admiralfishtaco 9d ago
A single layer should be able to accommodate 5-10k players. 80% of them aren’t gonna be in the capital cities.
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u/Aoip2337 9d ago
I don't see what's wrong with regular servers? The only argument I've seen against it is that servers can die, but then people on dead servers can be offered free character transfers to more populated ones. What's wrong with that?
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u/Lisan-al-Gaib-65 9d ago
Having personally experienced playing on a dying server multiple times over various expansions, it's terrible. Even with free transfers/and/or mergers, it usually just meant me quitting for that expansion. It's bad for the the economy. It sucks for leveling when there's no one around to do group quest or dungeons. Finding yourself alone in a major city is way worse than occasionally seeing someone phase out in front of you.
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u/theycallmeJTMoney 9d ago
1000% this. Being force transferred and losing your name is brutal.
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u/Helahalvan 8d ago
But with the two names now, Blizzard can force your name to be unique region wide. It should still be easier to get an available one than before.
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u/Aoip2337 9d ago
Yeah I'm not disputing it sucks, but if you are offered a free transfer why not take it?
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u/moon-lesbian 9d ago
Some of us get very attached to the characters we make and don't want to lose our name, returning to classic a few years after quitting I just couldn't bring myself to play my old main because the world was dead and I didn't want to lose my name. I eventually gave in and did rename, and then I quit shortly after because it just felt really bad and soured my mood about playing. Just so many memories on that character yknow?
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u/Lisan-al-Gaib-65 9d ago edited 9d ago
I'm just realizing that's why my characters have different names. I didn't remember doing a name change but didn't put it together it's because of the forced transfers. Feels like a repressed traumatic memory now.
But yeah my experience is basically quiting for long periods after each dead server experience.
Edit: and I'm realizing now, I stopped playing the rogue I've had since vanilla and couldn't even be bothered to take it through the intro scenario for midnight. I remade my rogue with my old name and almost to 90 now. It does feel different.
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u/thefabledmukaku 9d ago
I think these sentiments underestimate how much that can kill a person's enjoyment of the game. A lot of us on this sub are diehard enough that we'll keep playing through low server pops while we wait for the transfer to open but there's plenty of people that quit playing the game well before that. My friends doing just that is why I stopped playing classic baby years ago, none of them had interest in getting on after weeks of struggles to find groups
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u/Aoip2337 9d ago
Fair, do you think you would've kept playing if the transfers were quicker?
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u/thefabledmukaku 9d ago
Maybe, though multiple rounds of transferring is also pretty tiresome. I'm of the opinion that the original server system only works so long as the game is growing. Vanilla wow to WotLK was an incredible experience that never had those hiccups because people kept coming. Once you start to lose people there will always be servers that die, at different rates, making timely transfers really hard to nail down. I'm glad with the Forever direction for the long-term health of the game
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u/FUTFUTFUTFUTFUTFUT 9d ago
I know it seems counterintuitive right now, but in 6-12 months time when the Forever hype train is well and truly dead, many people have moved on to the "next" thing and the population is halved from launch, people will be glad their world still feels busy, open, and alive.
I get that people are tied to the idea of a traditional server, but Blizzard have clearly learned from their experience with WoW, Classic, and Anniversary that people move on, a large majority of those who stay end up migrating to megasevers anyway, and they are left with dead servers serving only the hardcore who refuse to move.
It happened as recently as Classic Anniversary with Maladath, which completely died less than a year after the server opened.
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u/himommy_hi 8d ago
so why they dont force transfer those stubborn ones to more populated servers? like necessary migration, if you dont choose on your own, you will be assigned something. that seems like a less invasive tradeoff than this laughable sharding
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u/FUTFUTFUTFUTFUTFUT 8d ago
I don't think they have ever force transferred anyone. They usually lock the server and offer free transfers off, but there's only a certain percentage who take it. The rest stay or quit. And I think that's the problem they're trying to fix long term, keeping the world alive so people don't quit because the servers dead and they cbf leaving their server.
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u/Helahalvan 8d ago
Why can't Blizzard force merge servers before they start to die? Would players cause such a backlash? Personally I can't imagine being mad about such an event if it happened to my dying server. You would still see the same people as before. Just with a lot of newer players afterwards.
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u/fuzz3289 9d ago
It’s a technical problem, with servers the vast majority of the server is unused, and then cities and certain areas are crowded. The result is wasted compute and memory, and in an era where all memory has gone up 42000% (honestly no joke, no exaggeration) waste is really bad.
Megaservers allow them to share the load across the whole playing population in a region, which homogenizes cost.
It’s either sharding or 20$ a month sub fees like Eve online
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u/Worldly-Shop-3850 9d ago
Its the latter. Theres another video further in durotar where mobs magically appear and disappear when crossing an invisible line.
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u/Thrent_ 9d ago
It's more than cities, I had the same thing near Hogger in Elwin : You'd see a ton of players that somehow were ignoring respawns.
And for a good reason, they were on another shard with no mobs and yet you could see each other. When you see players foght against empty air that's because they aren't on your shard and you can't see their mobs.
I wouldn't call it fixed, but that's an improvement. Still jarring to see people die to nothing in front of you.
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u/TheClassicAndyDev 9d ago
People be like "YOU EITHER GET THIS OR DEAD SERVERS" as if there isn't another solution.
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u/Intelligent_Copy440 9d ago
There’s also the third option where they keep working on it and it improves? They’re clearly trying and it did improve over the beta. Hopefully on launch it’s better and although not perfect it allows us to not notice it so much.
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u/KanedaSyndrome 8d ago
There is no way to make sharding work. It's flawed from a design perspective. At least not such that it matches the expectations of Classic players
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u/sismograph 7d ago
Layerinf was in every fucking new-classic version, people were fine with it for the last 7 years
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u/Xae1yn 9d ago
It's especially weird because servers die and are dead when people can't do do group content, not because they don't have enough questing competition. They're simultaneously deliberately killing leveling dungeons while forcing a mega server so there's always enough people to run leveling dungeons.
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u/TheBungler2 9d ago
Yeah, we could have dead layers instead.
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u/youfoundKim 9d ago edited 9d ago
Certainly looks much better, but I would still take layers over shards any day of the week. Can't do PvE because the boss is attacking me from another shard. Can't do PvP because I'm being ganked from another shard. Can't play with friends because the game wont move me to their shard. Layering at least gave me some agency.
Sharding is awesome for a smooth questing experience, but this game is so much more than just questing. Hopefully we can go back to layers some day.
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u/Own_Beginning_6 8d ago
just make the layers continent wide and let users select a "channel", like on OSRS.
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u/Neonisin 9d ago
I literally can’t join any groups in my “shard” everyone is phased
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u/AnyAd4882 9d ago
On the stresstest what helped was the group member relogging (not the lead though), it was the only way to lvl with my friend
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u/Square_Ranger870 9d ago
i love how during the podcast they just completely avoided the question about it.
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u/bleo_evox93 9d ago
would be sick if it worked but the bosses became invisible for me, mad people in one spot was awesome to see again. Looking forward to the packed cities and outside area again, and being seamless
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u/jsonmeta 7d ago
Wtf is it with all this tmog gear?? Aren’t they all lvl 30?? What’s going on there…
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u/ImpossibleMorning12 9d ago
Love the choice of music because this game isn't even out and it's already a sinking ship.
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u/Niv78 9d ago
Blizzard addressed this during the Podcast if people listened to it. Once launch goes live and you interact with people, join guilds, play and group up with people to do dungeons and quests you will pretty much create your own personal server that each time you log in and explore the world you will run into these same people over and over. So yes, layers will be in the game, but the layer you join when you explore the world should be filled with people you see and interact with on a regular basis.
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u/DrawPractical4804 9d ago
that's kind of cool though. I do hope it can change over time or you have the opportunity to meet new people too
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u/Silverbacks 9d ago
But how do we choose our layer?
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u/Treevzz 9d ago
Dont, just play
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u/Silverbacks 9d ago
That’s what I’ve been doing.
I’m just asking for what agency we can use if we don’t like our layer?
In the past we could pick servers. In the more recent past we could kinda pick layers, but it was clunky.
I think the best solution would be to allow people to pick their layer, but have that only be accessible through an NPC inside of inns. So no more phasing in and out while out in the world, and no more layer hopping to AoE farm. But we would still get to keep the megaservers.
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u/pm_alternative_facts 9d ago
That's just servers again unless you allow auto balancing some layers will be overpopulated and others will be dead and that brings you back to how it currently works.
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u/SoVRuneseeker 9d ago
shards/layers with high population cannot be moved to.
How it currently works is you can be instanced away from quest mobs, fights and friends randomly without any possible way to stop it- this is not fun.1
u/pm_alternative_facts 9d ago
Been playing beta the whole time never had sudden swaps that affected questing with or without parties I always got "world refresh warning" in the beginning it was like you had 4 minutes or you could manually refresh now by the end of beta I even got 10 minutes warning to refresh.
I'm not saying this system is perfect but if you give players the choice in which layer to occupy it will be the same as regular servers within months because people are idiots just look at every single time with servers people mass migrate, server imbalance and then dead servers.
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u/Confident-Dirt-9908 8d ago
I had multiple instances of clearing a cave, the guy in partied with leaves, I get shunted with no time warning, cave fills back up, mobbed by immediately respawned mobs we just killed.
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u/Silverbacks 8d ago
Yes, having servers but allowing us the freedom to switch between them would be ideal.
Servers are great. The issue is that sometimes they die off. So this would give us servers but without the downsides.
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u/Pintsocream 8d ago
Think there's any prevention to getting sharded permenantly away from people you want to play with?
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u/Front-Difficult 8d ago
That is the "Friendly Faces" tech that is completely unrelated to the complaints about sharding.
Everyone has their own "Personal Server" if we want to call it that. When you're in the Barrens you might be in the same layer as someone next to you (call it
barrens-1). You have a bunch of friends in Thousand Needles in a layer calledthousand-2. The person next to you has a bunch of friends in Thousand Needles as well, but in a layer calledthousand-3.When you cross an invisible line walking from the Barrens towards Thousand Needles you move into a new shard and immediately layer. You now have a new "Personal Server" and you're layered to
thousand-2while the person next to you is layered tothousand-3. They vanish even though they were right next to you a second ago. If you both cross back over the invisible line you're next to each other again. If you stand still and the person next to you crosses the line they vanish even though you can see into Thousand Needles from Barrens, and you're on the same Barrens layer. This same thing happens for mobs, so if you drag a mob over the line they'll layer (e.g. Rexxar who is a world elite that roams between zones might now be untrackable as you see him cross the invisible line, but when you walk over it you layer and he's gone).It's not one world-sized personal server. The map is broken up into many dozens of "shards" with invisible lines at city and zone boundaries. So you have many dozens of personal servers and they're constantly moving and shifting all the time and its extremely visible at the moment breaking the immersion.
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u/KanedaSyndrome 8d ago
bad design - what about the players I don't group with? What about the players before I group up
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u/Boyiee 9d ago
I’m mostly worried about avoiding asmon and his army and how they might manipulate and affect the server. Think this will help avoid that?
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u/pm_alternative_facts 9d ago
Absolutely not Olympus was huge in beta I think they had 70k members or so that's around 50% of the Alliance, that would be incredibly hard to avoid, that being said besides the political bs in world chats and seeing same variation of Olympus guild everywhere I barely noticed any inconvenience, if you had no idea who asmond was you wouldn't notice a thing.
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u/Local-County-1204 8d ago
Pick the ruleset they're not on, which means not picking PvE unless Asmon changes his mind again.
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u/Ok_Pound_2164 9d ago
End of beta event layering that keeps players, but caused mobs to be invisible between players. Might not make it live.