Phasing like this is really immersion breaking

[u/zhellqq]

I understand why they do it, but it feels like there has to be a more elegant way of handling it, or perhaps a better "overlap" period where someone only moves off your layer when they are no longer visible.

[u/SkY4594]

The sharding per zone system needs to go before release. Make the standard layering of the whole world like they did in Classic and call it a freaking day, this shit looks so ridiculous.

[u/newebay2 → u/SkY4594]

Classic didn't have mega servers. Layering the whole world is expensive process since zones would have vastly different distributions.

If they do it in forever, it would spawn tons of instances to make the few hot zones not so crowded but rest of the zones would be void of players.

[u/omggga → u/newebay2]

 Layering the whole world is expensive process

oh poor blizzard indie company

[u/astro4040 → u/omggga]

Tell us how to have mega servers without sharding Mr. expert server engineer.

[u/SockofBadKarma → u/newebay2]

I don't say this because I think it will be easy or anything. I'm not sure just how complicated it would be to program.

But if they made two changes to sharding in Classic, I suspect it would resolve 99% of the issues we see in clips like these.

1. Split the shards in the middle of zones at places where the fewest number of players are at any given time, as opposed to the edges of zones.

2. Implement a rule where a person cannot be sharded if another player exists within 200 yards of them, or when they're in combat (or otherwise, shard all players within 200 yards at the same time).

This would make it so that the seam points would be basically unnoticeable most of the time, and prevent people from popping between shards to escape world PvP and such. If they made a split along, say, the middle of the central pathway in lower Barrens near the dwarf expedition, it is highly unlikely that you'll be in the location where the shard is happening at the same time as someone else. And if they implement a proximity restriction, then people won't watch as other people right beside them pop out of existence.

The sharding is currently noticeable because it's occurring at natural visible breakpoints where people funnel through to get to new areas: boats, city entrances, zone entrances, etc. Throw the shard boundaries out in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly you have way fewer pop-outs.

Edit: Third rule, if you were recently grouped with someone, you cannot be sharded away from that same person after you've left the group for at least 10 minutes. Either you both/all transfer at the same time, or nobody does.

[u/dasvenson → u/SockofBadKarma]

And which one of these rules do you break when no one satisfies either rule and you have too many people in a shard? Because if you don't the whole shard will degrade and maybe die.

They've already said what's happening is not intended and not how they want it to work. Why don't we just wait until live until they've actually fixed it rather than constantly bitch about it?

[u/SockofBadKarma → u/dasvenson]

You mistake me for someone else if you think I'm constantly batching about this. Most of my activity in this sub is barking at people to stop being Chicken Littles and making up insane hypothetical situations to justify their rage, and this is the first time I've ever commented on the shading tech. I was just generally pontificating that a potential solution would be what I described at a macro level. If they have a different solution that also works, power to them, and I am hopeful they get it right and that this is just one of the various stress tests being run in the beta.

[u/dasvenson → u/SockofBadKarma]

Fair enough, my comment was probably misdirected. Just frustrating seeing the same complaint X 1000 when we've been told already they aren't happy with how it's working.

[u/apemopo → u/newebay2]

Imo the wilderness should be empty and it should feel like a lonely place out there. Encounters with other people become more meaningful instead of having a tag-jerk with 15 other people for 3sec spawns.

[u/bufarreti → u/newebay2]

Classic didn't have mega servers. Layering the whole world is expensive process since zones would have vastly different distributions.

Why would that be more expensive?

it would spawn tons of instances to make the few hot zones not so crowded but rest of the zones would be void of players

That's what's happening right now. I think you got it backwards.

On a normal server we would see hot zones crowded and some other zones void of players, that's ok. Layering the whole world would be like having many mini servers on a bigger one.

You would log in and see the same people on all zones in that same playing session. You would only phase to a different layer by joining a party (or logging on on a different time)

[u/newebay2 → u/bufarreti]

No right now they just have to spawn more shards for individual zones. Whereas previously they would have to spawn an entire layer instance for the entire region. This means lots of very populated zones and lots of dead ones

Previous method would get costly in this new single server architecture: where every zones are going to be similarly populated, you won't see many dead zones now.

[u/CertainlyRobotic → u/newebay2]

Expensive

Oh no you'd need a company with at least $70 billion dollars to afford something like that!

Oh wait..

[u/marianasarau → u/newebay2]

They need to do it continent wise, unless they want a dead MMO in less than 1 year.

[u/Not_A_Unique_Name → u/newebay2]

Why don't they just use sharding but for a cluster of nearby areas? Obviously sharding is really noticeable when leaving a major city but less so when leaving a relatively empty zone. Just make it so all the major cities/ major player hubs and their adjacent areas(not just by walking but also by Zepplins) are in the same shard. It feels like a really simple fix tbh.