The problem of "sharding" in WoW
by Mike Schramm 
Nov 27th 2006 at 6:33PM
Alice from the great gameblog Wonderland loves playing WoW, and posts about it all the time-- I especially like the "The other me is Epic, I'm just an alt" shirt from her latest post. But, she says, "the problem with WoW" is those darn servers it seems we're all dealing with. She's got friends across almost all the servers, including US, EU, and even Oceanic, and yet she can't visit them without paying a fee again and again. In fact, she says Blizzard just changed the client software on the US and UK clients, so that you can no longer access one server from a different client-- you have to buy two seperate clients to access the US and EU servers. For players like me, who only play in one country, it's not really an issue, but for Alice, who just moved to California from England, it's, as she says, "rubbish."But that doesn't mean I don't have my own problems with Blizzards' (and MMORPGs in general, since most of them are "sharded" in some way) servers-- my friend started his characters on different server than I was on, and so since I joined him, I've now got sixties spread across different servers, and I've got to pay $25 to transfer each character-- if and when Blizzard opens transfers to my already overpopulated server. And then there's the problem of queues in general, which everyone, it seems, is dealing with in larger quantities.
So what's the solution? There may not be one. Free transfers from server to server would keep players happy, but would also freak out in-game economies, bunch populations up (more queues), and cost Blizzard even more time and staff hours to do (which means less spent on development and keeping servers up). It might be nice, as Alice suggests, to put everyone on one big server, but I doubt Blizzard has the technology to do so at this point-- even if it was technologically possible to put all seven million players in a world where they could interact with each other, doing so would require much more of a code overhaul than letting flying mounts run free, and that's not happening either. For the world of Azeroth as we know it, it's unlikely Alice's problem will ever really get solved.
Which leaves room for competitors to step up, I guess-- EVE, Guild Wars, and even MySpace are all listed as alternatives to this problem of "sharding". If an upcoming MMORPG has a great solution to these problems (and a match to the cool style and gameplay of WoW), I'd like to hear it.
Filed under: Realm News, Analysis / Opinion, Realm Status, Blizzard, Instances
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jason Nov 27th 2006 7:35PM
While EvE, GW and similar games are seen as being the solution to having sharded servers, it's really only useful on games with that small of a playerbase. It works for GW because it's all instanced once you're out of a city, which basically functions as a graphical chat room, a la Diablo 2 or Starcraft.
With EvE, I'll admit that the numbers I've seen are fairly out of date, but as of around a year ago, they were just getting up over 100k subscribers in total, with around 15k simultaeneously on the shard at any one time during peak hours. Is it an awesome feat? Yes, most assuredly. However, where WoW has 20x the playerbase in the US alone, sharding becomes necesary to divide up the populace.
Now, as to transfer fees, while it's a bit expensive for a procdure that's as simple to accomplish as it is, I can't argue with the reasoning for how they've priced it. The intent was to attach a prohibitive cost, as well as the cooldown time on it to prevent players from abusing the service to grief their fellow players. I can understand why they'd want to do this from a CS standpoint as well, since with a lower cost and no cooldown, I'm certain there would be plenty of individuals who would establish a lvl 1 alt on another server, transfer after a ninja griefing event, and change names at every transfer. Would it be trackable? Certainly, but not likely to be reported, or followed through well enough to matter.
So, while sharding sucks from the standpoint of playing with friends, the amount of characters you can create alleviates a lot of that in my eyes. As to competitors stepping up, GW hasn't been a threat since they were in predevelopment, claiming themselves as a 'WoW Killer', and EvE was never trying to compete, and at this point, never will be.
dv8r Nov 27th 2006 9:56PM
I'd like to see them implement cross server chat like SOE did. Then you could at least whisper to friends on other servers.
Poormojo Nov 27th 2006 9:56PM
In Phantasy Star Universe can't you hop between shards by using publicly placed crystals?
Sylythn Nov 27th 2006 11:30PM
I had two characters, alliance on one server (rp-pvp) and horde on another server (rp-pvp)...and I'd gotten to a point where I wanted to run instances - a lot, and work my way up to raiding. My casual group at work wasn't going to do that and I had friends on Elune both alliance and horde sides.
So, I waited for Elune to open - petitioned Blizz a little on an issue I thought needed fixing - and once the transfers were available, I really did fork over $50 for the move. It was worth it in my mind. Now it certainly wouldn't solve Alice's problem...but if she's got that many friends spread all over different servers then she's got a far better social life than yours truly...most of my friends ended up congregating together - but maybe I was just lucky.
Scott Elsdon Nov 28th 2006 1:23PM
I had to quit Wow, moved from Germany to New Zealand, no transfers available and I'm not willing to buy the game again, pay another subscription and then level up some toon to the BWL raiding status I had in Europe. But hey, its summer here and the girls are wearing small dresses so there are plus points.
Samidare Nov 29th 2006 1:58PM
Like dv8r said, if you could not play with them on their server... I would at least be able to chat with them.
While playing eq I was on Kane Bayle and was able to talk to all of my friends no matter what server they where on. Sure its not the same as playing with them, but it is much better then the status quo. We had our own private channels so it felt a bit more special between our close knit group. People had to have permission to join us, so it was like having a cross server guild. And in instances when something big went down people from all over knew it and where able to be apart of it (the first time the sleeper was killed for instance).
This would really help when dealing with the server ques. Can't tell you how much it sucks to pop in on one server just to say hello to someone. Then go back to your main server and have to wait 20 min because you are #600 in line.
I have no idea how they would be able to allow players to go cross server though. They can do it in battle grounds because its on its on server and instanced. The rest of the game is not. And with the availability... servers would blow up. Especially the already over populated ones.