Quote Originally Posted by linay View Post
On the one hand, the limited loading screen is nice. On the other hand, every time I teleport, the loading in WoW takes way longer on average for me than in FFXIV. I also suspect that open world feel of the zones is part of the reason why WoW has to resort to so-called sharding more often, which is not great to see happening.
WoW created what they referred to as "seamless instance transitions" in a documentary they released a few years back. That's why you can go from Elwynn to Westfall without experiencing a loading screen even though they are technically separate instances the way the zones in FFXIV are.

It's also why passengers would get dumped off 2 player flying mounts and fall to their deaths when crossing over zone boundaries for the first few years after CRZ was released. The server had to decide which instance it was going to place the players in and one player would load to the new instance faster than the other causing the dismount. It's possible it's related to why your load screens going between world (continent) servers takes longer but I can't say for certain.

It's got nothing to do with sharding, which is based on the population in those separate zone instances. Blizzard resorted to shoving players from too many servers into the same zone instance then has to shard to break them back up into populations the instance can handle. And sharding is one of the main reasons many of us won't go back to WoW again. Pretty disappointing to find they intend to use it for Classic (and no I don't believe them when they say it will only be temporary).