The Details...
A shrad world (using the term from other MMO) are further regional seperations, that will hold only smaller amount of people per world, and more closely monitar. Normal game are... well, normal game.
Say a Shrad world is set to hold 1,000 people at max. So if Shrad world already have 1,000 player "living" (note, not playing, but account register at it) in it, no further player can move or create a account/character there, and a new shard world will be created. (or course the shard creation and player spread will be more complex than that) The Normal Game part can just hold X amount of people, like it is now. The Shard world, for most part, will be the same as the normal game (it might be expanded in the future to have more differnce, but for this example, we will just keep it the same)
So what would the beneift of such shard world? with smaller people, one would get more sense of community, as they will see lot more familar face. It would be a place more more community and RP purpose, away from the "LFG Faming" or "you cann't join us cause you have 0 rank, noob". There will be Mods (volunteer player) that would try to maintain the "friendlyness" such a place, with power to ban those who got bad reputations (will just ban them from that shard, not the game)
- -People can still move to normal game if they need to farm and do other activites. It would be change much like changing district.
- (say you are in Shard1 LA D1, there would be a selection in the disrict change to change to Universal (or nomral) LA D1, where once you go to it, the selection will be U LA D1...X and S1 LA D1. )
- -You can move your character freely to different shreads, or normal games. As long as there is still space, and you are not ban.
- (however, to change from S1 to S2 would require you "move" your character there, and not simply chaning the district. would take few more extra steps)
- -Shard is a sub division of region. (US, Shard 1 is differnt from Europe Shard 1)
- -The world and the game play is still the same. As well as drop rate, price, favor, etc. (it could include some extra options like Shard competitions, different unlocks, its own favort, its own dynmatic story lines, differnt from one shard to another..... etc... But for the simplicity of things, will not consider any of that for now)
- -For some stuff.. like alliance battle, GvG, PvP, and such,.. would be "Universal". Where you will be going against people outside of your shard, with other shard and normal game people, as well as international.
- -It would be assume that the technology can support such thing, at relative no extra cost.
- -There should be several volunteer mods for each shrad that help regulate the world, as well as promot communitism and holding the ban stick. (ban only from the shrad, not the game.) There should also be a hire position by Anet or NCsoft to moderate and keep community relation's with the shards, and acting as a overseer to the mods.
- -Would be better if can work out a type of Player Rating system within the thread. So if a player got too much bad review and complaines, the mod can take actions.
- -Shard World is just a term. Can also be called differently. (like Lock District, or Sub Region... etc)
I might be missing some details or not explain something too well. Concerns? Feed Backs?
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also I will use another example for comaprson, The Forum. Think about the differnece and the benefit between just having one Large Central Forum with no sub forums... to both having a central forum, as well as various little community fan site forum with sub divsion of differnt topics that can be kept regulated better.