Forum:NFSDrew summary answers from forum topic

All this summarised from Drews thread about Shards, so not really the offical announcement. Nothing much to add really, just clearing up questions. Diagrams and stuff: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/150/8765379.page You know how much I fail at making new pages :P

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The purpose of introducing server shards was to improve overall server stability and allow more players to be logged in at one time. As more server shards are added over the rest of the year, stabilty within shards should increase as less starin is put on each individual shard. By default, all drivers before the June 27th 2012 patch were placed in the default shard called "Apex". Any drivers created after the patch however, have the option of selecting what shard they want to join on the NFSW Launcher / Patcher screen. Simply put, any accounts created before this patch will experience no change at all. If you already have a driver on one shard, creating a new driver on another shard will not affect the other(s). This allows you to use one login account to have multiple drivers across multiple shards, more specifically three drivers per shard. Furthermore, your account's Speedboost wallet is common across all shards.

As Shards are independent of each other, you can only chat with people within your shard, whether they choose US or NA region. Selecting a region only affects who you can see in freeroam. However if you wish to chat with drivers in a different shard, you need to have an account on hat shard. To prevent impersonation, a driver name can only be registered once across all shards. This way somebody can't impersonate you on a different shard.

For future events such as "Spot the Devs", there will be developers on all shards so all players have a chance of spotting them, so no shard misses out.

Currently, there is no way to move or copy a current driver and move them to a different shard, but as this only affects newly created drivers, it won't be a problem for all existing drivers in the default Apex shard.