Portfolio / New World: Social Heuristics for Shards

Shards Overview

New World introduced a server feature, Shards, to help with population density. Shards are duplicated “layers” of defined areas in the open world to accommodate more players in the same space.

Why Shards?

At the launch of New World, we dealt with significant player queues to enter the starter zone. Even if the server itself wasn’t full, the starter area could only handle so many new players at one time. In anticipation of our console launch and to prove server architecture for our future Lord of the Rings MMO, the server team introduced Shards. Shards allowed an area of the map (sector) to spin up and down “shards” – layers of that area that split up players between them. Two players may be in the same world and same location on the map, but not see each other because they are on different Shards. Once they move out of the sector and into an unsharded area, they would see each other again.

Social Heuristics for Shards

One of the primary goals for Shards was that players should never notice them. This meant designing and implementing in-world experiences such as seamlessly exiting shards without loading screens and ensuring AI were tucked well within sector boundaries, but it also meant a seamless social experience. I designed Social Heuristics so players’ social relationships were prioritized when a Shard was chosen for them as they entered a Sharded sector.

For example…

• Groups and raids always entered shards together.
• Social connections such as friends, platform friends, and company (guild) members were weighted in a player’s shard selection.
• If a player exited and returned to the same sector, the last shard they were in would be weighted.

I also took into account player states such as PvP flagged or not (all PvP players were in the same shard regardless of social connections) and whether players were dueling. I also explicitly ignored some social statuses such as a player’s Faction to avoid monotone shards.

Outcome

At launch, players barely noticed shards which was the primary objective and we were able to reduce starter area queues at console launch by order of magnitudes.

Launch Announcement