The Problem of Sharding In WoW
Alice Wonderland, a fantastic gameblog Wonderland, loves WoW and blogs frequently about it. I especially like her "The other me, Epic, I am just an alt" shirt. However, she states that "the problem with WoW" is those darn servers it seems we're all dealing with. She has friends on nearly all servers, including the US, EU and Oceanic, but she can't access them without paying a cost each time. In fact, she says Blizzard has recently changed the software for clients on both the US and UK clients, so that you are unable to access a server with another client. Instead, you need to purchase two seperate clients to access the US and EU servers. For players like me who only play in one region, it's not really an issue however for Alice who just relocated to California from England, it's according to her, "rubbish."
However, that doesn't mean that I don't have issues with Blizzards (and MMORPGs generally, since most are "sharded") servers. My friend started his characters on a different server from mine, which means that I have sixties scattered across several servers. I have to pay $25 for each character transfer in the event that Blizzard allows transfers to my already overpopulated server. There's also the issue of queues which everyone seems to be having to deal with in greater quantities.
What's the solution? It's possible that there isn't one. Free transfers from server to servers would keep players content but they would also freak out in-game economies, bunch populations up (more queues) and cost Blizzard more time and staff time (which means less time spent on developing and maintaining servers). Although it might be nice to have all players on one server, I don't think Blizzard has the right technology at this time. Even if it was technically feasible to place the entire seven million players into an environment that allowed them to communicate with one another it would require a much larger overhaul in the code than allowing flying mounts run wild. This isn't happening. Alice's issue is unlikely to will ever be solved in the world of Azeroth.
This leaves room for other competitors to join I would guess. EVE, Guild Wars and even MySpace are all mentioned here as alternatives to the issue of "sharding". I'd love to hear about any MMORPG that has a fantastic solution for these problems and is in line with the gameplay and style of WoW.