Champions Online Interview
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WC: Rather than traditional sharding, Champions is entirely instanced. What was the reasoning behind this? Were you worried it would make the playerbase feel more fractured?
Roper: It's kind of a mix. I think that sharding is what players who are used to EQ or WoW are accustomed to, but there's been a good number of other MMOs that use the open shard system. I think the biggest reasoning behind it was that it makes it so that you can always get together with your friends, and you won't have a situation where you and your friend are like, "I'm level 17! I'm level 15! But we're on different shards and can't play together."
It's really easy to have a more open community with a shardless system. In order to make a friend, all you have to know is their display name. I've met people in-game who I've wanted to be friends with, send an invite to their "@name" and boom, they're on my friend's list no matter the character. So the single biggest reason was that the developers liked the idea that people could just get together and play.
We do a lot of very under-the-engine things in terms of trying to get people together. When there are people playing on your friends list, we'll automatically put you in the same layer of a map as long as there are openings - I think as you go around the world and play the game and meet people, it's a simple matter to friend them and then you'll see them around a lot.
