World of Warcraft's latest Hearthstone event has received mixed reviews. The main reason for this is that it is a bit confusing, but also because of the chaotic world bosses. For those who don't know, here's the rundown:

Three major cities (Stormwind, Orgrimmar, and Valdraken) have hotspots with Hearthstone tables set up. Well. If you go to a shady merchant and get a special Hearthstone Wild Card, you can right-click on the item and play the card near the table. This allows you to complete your quest while having some vague fun. If you or one of your fellow players has a Hearthstone Game Table toy, you can place it, but it seems like an odd choice from the get-go.

That's not the only main problem players are having: a gnome named Whizbang is breaching portals and sending a lot of monsters into the festival. This has resulted in massive amounts of lag. I was able to log in for a test and complete one of these (got an on-brand belt in the process), but I did it in daytime GMT and my frame was still tanking.

On roleplay servers, the problem is multiplied tenfold. Typically, World of Warcraft divides population zones into shards. As Senior Game Producer Tom Ellis amply explained in his "Season of Discovery" drama, sharding came into use at the catastrophic launch of Warlords of Draenor and "made the game less coherent" and at the same time meant that "realm limits and zone capacities were completely disconnected."

Simply put, before sharding, if you wanted to split a population to handle a high load, you had to do it for everyone. Post-sharding, it could be applied to specific zones.

However, there was a problem. In a role-play server, a place like Stormwind would be a major hub, where players could run in-character events, socialize, and engage in over-the-top death matches while telling tragic backstories. Perhaps while the guards stand by and watch. Can't blame them. They probably won't even be dentists.

Sharding, however, divides these communities at random. You can't have an organic, public role-play with someone who isn't there; Blizzard began turning sharding on and off for role-play realms, even targeting atypical zones to facilitate large events.

Despite this, it appears that sharding technology was not enabled in Stormwind for Argent Dawn to handle Hearthstone events. Every time a portal spawned, loot-hungry players on the same shard would rush in to kick off a horde of Whizbang monsters, and all Fel would go berserk. A thread that dominated the WoW subreddit yesterday describes the carnage.

"We've been fighting this Hearthstone memorial boss for 40 minutes now, and it's just a big mess. She added, "Everyone on the same shard was trying desperately to get a tag on the boss, and we were bombarded with 500 AoE casts. The server did not appreciate this behavior.

I expect a temporary hotfix will be provided soon, but Blizzard has temporarily re-enabled sharding on roleplay servers before. At the same time, this event offers transmogs, pets, and mounts, and one should not underestimate how often players, regardless of the MMO, crave all three.