Guild Wars 2

As far as I’m aware the only game which actually calls their servers shards in Ultima Online. That was because it started way back when MMOs were a new and unusual idea and they wanted to firstly have a lore explanation for having multiple copies of the world and secondly wanted to hype the idea that each server would have it’s own unique community and things could play out quite differently depending on which one you’re on. (I think early on they had big ideas about doing one-time events that would change the world and each server having their own outcome, but as far as I’m aware that didn’t happen.)

So they came up with this whole story of the world being trapped in a gem, which wkittentered during a fight to get it back and each shard of the gem held it’s own unique copy of the whole world.

Other games use other names for their servers, often just servers or worlds or factions or whatever. I don’t claim to be an MMO expert but I haven’t heard of another one that calls them shards.

And yet I see that name used here quite often. I’ve even seen Anet staff call worlds shards.

Does it come from UO? Did that one game really have that much of an impact? Or is there another origin I’m not aware of?

I’m sure that UO had some sort of impact to it. Shards are now used as a technical term from what I understand to show a partition in a large database. It’s becoming a more common name for servers nowadays as I believe even Rift used it as a name for their servers?

Maybe they now consider the player base to be one mass and the different servers that appear and disappear as populations moves in and out of a map to be ‘shards’ of this one mass, as a shard is a piece of an object.

I do think it is because of the mists. Every server is an alternative realitywithin the mists with the major events being the same, but other people. In WvW, we actually fight people of the alternative realities in order to get resources that lie withing the mists. Most of the things you do while wandering in the mists, you actually lose your memory of, upon coming back. The Mist Vetaran Npcs only have vague dialogs and so on.

This basically just is to support the whole idea of the different planes in the Mists. Those planes it seems, were decided to be called shards, which certainly fits them.
In Fractals, every Fractal is (as far as I know) referred to as a Fractal Shard or something similar? So yeah, it is just a lore name based on the mists. It seems they found it to be the most fitting one.

I’ll second the first answer. I haven’t heard anything related to the lore, but shards are absolutely a term in server architecture. They are a way to horizontally partition a database so that each instance of the database (or World in the case of GW2) contains everything needed for a subset of players to fully experience the game, without the server needing to maintain the relationship with all other players. Having all players on the same instance (shard) of the server is very resource intensive, on the client side and the server side. See the wiki post for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shard_%28database_architecture%29

The way it used to work (before the April 2014 feature pack) is players were “stored” on their World’s shard and each World had a shard (subset of server) set apart for its players to play on. You defaulted to your own World’s shard, but could move between them. Number of shards available to play on = number of worlds (plus overflow). 31 Worlds = 31 Shards (plus overflow).

With the new Megaserver system characters are still "stored’ on their World’s shard. But when you play PvE, each world no longer has it’s own shard; there is a shared set of shards, as many as are needed to handle all of the players on a given map. Number of shards available to play on = number of players in a map / max number of players allowed in a map. 500 players / 100 max = 5 shards (for that map). 550 players / 100 max = 6 shards (for that map)

Holdover term from UO.

I have never heard the term “shard” used in DB lingo. If it were, it would be talking about replication most likely.

Not sure where this term became poplular in GW2 other than from other MMOs (as Anet has NEVER used that term that I recall).

A Megaserver zone is an instance of a world map that is generated as needed (exact specs are unknown) and destroyed when depopulated (again, no exact tech info has ever been given). The work similar to how overflow zones worked when server specific zones became full.

Probably the same reason zergs are called zergs. The term got popular with one game, and the migrating player base carried it over to the next one, making it a standalone term for a specific part or aspect of any given game.