Blizzard's Treatment of EU

To echo the information we received during with during our out of office hours, which Ornyx already posted:

Over the last couple of years, we've begun using some new technology we've occasionally referred to as "sharding" in non-instanced zones, which separates players in high-traffic areas out into separate "shards" of a particular zone. The benefit to our server performance has been massive - it was a huge part of why Legion's launch went so smoothly - and so, as a whole, we've been very happy with the system.

The one exception has been on RP realms, where player-run events are much more common. On RP realms, we believe that the overall loss to game performance is worth it in order to support those events. If players on RP realms choose to organize an event and congregate somewhere, and have a laggy experience as a result, that's their choice, and we'd like to allow them as much freedom to do so as possible.

So, we've recently applied a hotfix that should disable realm sharding in the vast majority of the outdoor world on RP realms. That includes Kalimdor, the Eastern Kingdoms, Northrend, Pandaria, Outland, Draenor, and all related sub-zones. This has actually been our intention for some time now, but as part of investigating some reports involving a player-run event in Northrend, we discovered some secondary issues that were causing it not to function properly.

There are still limits, of course; we don't want playing on an RP realm to mean you can't properly experience core game content due to low FPS or heavy input lag. As such, all Legion zones (including all of the Broken Isles, the Broken Isles version of Dalaran, and soon, Argus) will still have sharding active, as they do on non-RP realms. Similarly, when the game itself points players toward a specific area of the non-Legion world (such as for a holiday event or new patch content), we may temporarily re-enable sharding in that area until things settle down.

In general, however, our goal is to follow the general rule of thumb that RP realms do not shard, except in current-expansion zones, or when temporarily necessary to support gameplay. This should now be the case on all RP and RP-PvP realms worldwide. This is in addition to our existing rule that RP realms do not automatically fill areas using our Cross-Realm Zones system (although you can still enter an RP realm using CRZ if you're grouped with a player on an RP realm).

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I'm sorry that your event on Argent Dawn was overlooked. In the future, if you are hosting a very large roleplaying event that is being impacted by sharding (which, given the above changes, shouldn't happen very often anymore) I'd encourage you to bring it to the Community Team's attention by dropping an e-mail to [email protected] with the details of the event.

In regards to the EU forums being ignored, I can accept that there's room for improvement but at the same time I think we have also come a long way over the past year or so.

In most cases Lore and Kaivax now mirror information onto the EU forum as soon as it gets posted on the NA forums rather than there being a delay of several hours. Yes, sometimes things fall the cracks or get missed and ideally we want to avoid this.

More recently (since Legion), the EU forums have had developers contributing in the Class Development forum and Watcher (Ion) has also posted several times on the EU forums in topics that were of interest to EU players but not necessarily to NA players.

When it comes to feedback, it isn't considered in a vacuum. We compile feedback from all the game regions (both EU and NA as well as ANZ, China etc.), this includes what players are saying on social media, fan sites, other forums, YouTube videos etc. We will drill down deeper if one region is resonating with something far more than others, to understand why that is the case and what (if any) action is appropriate.

There is also a 9 hour time difference between France (where the EU Community team is based) and California (where the developers are based). When we are in the office, the majority of the staff across the ocean are asleep or going to sleep. This means we don't have immediate access to get answers or information, so we send any requests or relevant details via email. More often than not, the feedback being raised by the EU player-base isn't that dissimilar to what is being raised by the NA player-base, so such matters become topics of discussion during office hours in California, this is often why information comes out during that time rather than during EU hours. Though there have been cases where information has been posted first on EU, which has lead to similar complaints from NA players about being ignored.

The information that we receive and post, in most cases, is a direct result of feedback relaying on a global level, not because one forum is preferred more than the other.

At the end of the day, our priority is to get any information we receive out into the community, it's not really a considered a problem whether that happens to be on the NA forum first, the EU forum first, or another platform entirely if it's more appropriate for the audience in question.

09/08/2017 17:19Posted by Thete

Sorry, did you just copy/paste a response from a Dev post on US forums in response to a complaint that Devs never respond to posts on EU forums? Did someone dare you for a laugh?

Yes I did, because it was information we received during the night that we were asked to share globally. Considering part of this thread was about the RP event in Europe that got missed I felt like it was the best place to put that information as it pertained specifically to the sharding topic. That being said, Community Managers aren't Developers.