Bad news for all purist Classic fans. At the start, WoW: Classic will likely implement sharding and separate players from each other. We will tell you what it’s all about.
At BlizzCon 2018, fans had the opportunity to ask their questions about World of Warcraft during the “Developer Q&A”. Some questions also addressed World of Warcraft: Classic. A player wanted to know why there was sharding in the demo of WoW: Classic and whether this would also be the case in the final version of the game.
What is Sharding? Sharding is sometimes referred to by users as “phasing” and basically ensures that there are multiple instances of a place, for example, when it is overcrowded.
So that not 500 players are standing in the Stormwind Auction House, there are two different instances, each accommodating 250 players to minimize server load.
Sharding planned for launch: In the Q&A, Hazzikostas explained that they are considering using sharding for the launch of Classic. This may be necessary because a huge number of players will come to the servers at launch. Many of them will probably disappear after a week or two.
To handle this particularly heavy load and to promote the gaming experience at the beginning, they are considering sharding.
The details of how the subscription for Classic will work have also been revealed.
In the end, there should be “only one world”: However, Hazzikostas assured that sharding, if at all, will only be used at launch to facilitate a smooth gaming start while thousands of players are in the starting areas. Once the initial load has been handled, and the population of a server has stabilized, they want to have only a single world per server without different phases / shards.
“When Lord Kazzak is present and the guilds are arguing, we need to ensure that there is really only one Lord Kazzak.”
This is part of Classic, and they definitely want to preserve it.
Sharding will probably only be used at the launch of WoW: Classic in the summer of 2019. After that, all players will be able to meet permanently on one server – in a unified game world.
By the way, not all Classic content will be available at launch.
Do you consider this solution good? Is it acceptable to use new technologies at launch to ensure a smooth launch? Or should Blizzard stay away from it?
