What are shard locks, and why do servers become unresponsive?
TL;DR"Shard lock" is a community term for a character being kept on its last shard; if that shard crashes the character is stowed back over time, though a bug left some stuck until manually fixed.
Shard lock, we never really call this shard lock. This is like a community term. You're never really locked into a shard. Your character can only be in one. And so if you get matchmade into one of, let's say, USE1B-010, everybody's favorite shard, which it is true, that shard is cursed. I mean, right now, it's always 010. I don't know why, but that one is always the one. It doesn't matter which patch, the USE 010 shard for some reason is the bane of our existence. Anyway, so you go play there, your character will get unstowed. So the hybrid will unstow your character, move it from the global database that allows you to go anywhere to that shard. Now you are, according to the community, shard locked, right? Because you're playing in that shard right now. What's supposed to happen is that if you quit the client or you get disconnected or a client crashes, when you come back, you're going to be matchmade on this shard again. Now, if that shard is no longer available during the time where you decided to come back or whatever, then that's going to give you a nice little 60K error, which will say, hey, your character is there, that shard is no longer available. Now, what that means is that behind the scenes, if the shard is crashed, there's a process that's currently processing that shard and it will stow back your character. So it's time. Time will fix it, right, in this case. During the 4.0 preview, some players got into a state where the character could not get stowed back. That was a bug that prevented that from happening. And so their character was kind of seemingly corrupted. And so we had to go in and fix a lot of those. That caused a permanent 60,030, I think is the one, where basically some players were stuck in that mode for a long time, so we had to actually do manual actions to solve that. But otherwise, most of the time, time will make your character go back to the stowed position. And then once you're stowed back, you're able to go back in there. So that's what I think the community calls shard locking.