WoW's latest Hearthstone event crushed to death by a tide of roleplayers, as selectively-applied server sharding causes utter chaos

World of Warcraft's latest Hearthstone event is receiving some mixed feedback. Mostly because it's a little confusing, but also because of its chaotic world bosses. In case you're unfamiliar, here's the rundown:

In three major cities (Stormwind, Orgrimmar, and Valdrakken) there are hotspots with Hearthstone tables in 'em. Well. Table singular, unless you go to a shady merchant and get a special Hearthstone Wild Card—which'll let you right-click the item to, uh, play a card near a table. This gives you the vague suggestion of having fun while also letting you complete the quest. If you or one of your mates has the Hearthstone Game Table toy, you can put one down, but it does seem like a bizarre choice from the get-go.

That's not even the main problem players have been having, though. Every so often, a gnome by the name of Whizbang will tear open a portal and huck a bunch of monsters at the festivities. This has resulted in a great deal of lag. While I was able to log in and complete one of these just for testing's sake (snagging myself an on-brand belt in the process), I did so in the middle of the day GMT, and my frames still tanked.

On roleplay servers, the problem's been multiplied tenfold:

Argent Dawn chooses violence today in World of Warcraft for the Hearthstone event pic.twitter.com/kI4jVJr96aMarch 11, 2024

Here's the issue. Typically, World of Warcraft splits populated zones into shards. As fully explained during some Season of Discovery drama by senior game producer Tom Ellis, sharding came into use during Warlords of Draenor's catastrophic launch, and while «it made the game feel less cohesive», it also «meant the realm cap and zone capacity were now disconnected entirely.» 

In simple terms—pre-sharding, if you wanted to split populations up to handle heavy loads, you had to do it for everybody. Post-sharding, you could apply it to select zones.

But there was a problem: In roleplay servers, places like Stormwind have become major hubs where players will run