Crazy idea but since the 1.5 mil milestone...

ArchivedUser

How crazy would it be if severs were connected by the sea?

Hear me out. Since we got the enhance naval content, the main features would be cargo ships, underwater exploration, sea battles etc.

But imagine this, there are several servers, all severs have decent size population. But lets say sever 7 population decline. There aren't enough players, and everyone wants to leave to a more populated server. What can you do? You take a voyage! You can spend a lot of resource to build a ship, hire NPCs and carry as much goods with you to your new server OR you build the ship with several players and split the space up and take only the most essential stuff. Ships can go back and forth but be wary of monsters and pirates along the way. Going from 1 'continent' to another will take several in game days, so it's a lengthy process. This will allow people to migrate from server to server without having to start fresh but will be limited to how much they can bring.

Vise versa, the game is really popular and all the servers are full. The devs create a new server. Should you start a new character in the server or can you migrate from your current server to the new one? Here, it will take a longer voyage so new players have time to establish their footing before you arrive. Also you can only bring so much with you so you can't dominate the economy. Perhaps the exchange rate of gold will put your income more inline with the rest of the players.

The time for voyage can vary, lets say you have to discover where the server is in the wide oceans. Exploration will be costly and take months. But once someone finds the server, the direct route will take only a week? Or the devs can just make travel longer when the new servers first launch and decrease the time as the server progress?

Ofcourse there will probably be a load screen somewhere between the two servers. Also distance from one server to another will be different depending on what server you are in (just like real life).

This can also facilitate trade between servers instead of trades to just small islands around the coast.

What are your thoughts?

ArchivedUser

Could be an interesting and a more immersive way of transferring servers...

ArchivedUser

It seems like a great idea to me, especially given the idea of the game, which is based on a developing world, allowing players to feel like real pioneers, but... Is this feasible? Honestly asking, I don't know much about design issues.
I was thinking that for every server to be on the same world, this would need to be an incredibly huge, non-instanced world.
I guess it might work if each server is on its own instance and there could just be some landmarks at some point on the sea to delimit the end of the server and transport you to some other server, like a portal would, but, is this practical or even possible on a technical level?

ArchivedUser

[quote quote=19994]It seems like a great idea to me, especially given the idea of the game, which is based on a developing world, allowing players to feel like real pioneers, but… Is this feasible? Honestly asking, I don’t know much about design issues.
I was thinking that for every server to be on the same world, this would need to be an incredibly huge, non-instanced world.
I guess it might work if each server is on its own instance and there could just be some landmarks at some point on the sea to delimit the end of the server and transport you to some other server, like a portal would, but, is this practical or even possible on a technical level?

[/quote]

Much is possible, but I would prefer the devs focus on gameplay and fidelity for awhile before worrying about how to handle server transfers, especially in such an eccentric way as the above.

ArchivedUser

[quote quote=19996]
Much is possible, but I would prefer the devs focus on gameplay and fidelity for awhile before worrying about how to handle server transfers, especially in such an eccentric way as the above.

[/quote]

Agreed, it's better to focus on what we have ahead, this game is pretty ambitious as it is and it requires a lot of work, but, still, as a crazy idea is pretty interesting.

ArchivedUser

It is a good/interesting way to transfer servers.
Cant argue with that.

Originally I thought it was a typo for sewers.
I was thinking...sewers, land, sea ? Perhaps he means enter land via underground sewers from the sea.
:D

ArchivedUser

[quote quote=20143]Originally I thought it was a typo for sewers.
I was thinking…sewers, land, sea ? Perhaps he means enter land via underground sewers from the sea.
????

[/quote]

Not a bad idea either xD I seem to remember that WoW had some places with hidden access through sewers and such (Sylvanas?) and it was a fun way to explore.

There might be things like that related to the Underrealm though.

ArchivedUser

[quote quote=20159]There might be things like that related to the Underrealm though.[/quote]

It would be awesome if this was the case. Maybe a key feature is darkness(with some pockets of lights via glowshroom or lightgems)? Need torch to see and monsters could jump out from the shadow, can have the same vibe as a horror game?

ArchivedUser

Not a bad idea, but from what the devs said on the livestreams you cannot change what servers your characters are on. You can have different characters on different servers, but you can't jump between them on the same guy.

ArchivedUser

[quote quote=20758]Not a bad idea, but from what the devs said on the livestreams you cannot change what servers your characters are on. You can have different characters on different servers, but you can’t jump between them on the same guy.

[/quote]

For sure. It's only something you might think of in extreme case where 1) sever population dies or 2) severs are too full.

ArchivedUser

That would be an awesome idea!! Though the only thing is that "switching servers" would inevitably require a loading screen, so it would technically mean it's not 100% open world if they did it this way. If that was something they're okay with, then it would be awesome :D

ArchivedUser

This is a great idea. Unknown whether the Devs would like it or not as it would take some extra effort to put such a system together.

I would go about it from a player tech level approach. You need a certain quality of ship to be able to get that far. You need a certain level of navigational skill and science lvl. And finally you need a serious level of risk to attempt to find a "new" continent or "land mass" or whatever...

Use a loading screen to get your ship(s) across server boundaries. Those screens are really a massive storm area which after tech to build the ship, skill to master the navigation obstacles, and luck or skill to survive the monstrous denizens of the deep oceans you finally have to make it through the raging storm barrier.

You can only bring what and who can fit on the ships and some of those don't survive. Now you have to find a place to land and deal with any political stuff there to get a foothold established.

ArchivedUser

Furthermore (don't want to risk an edit), have it be an extended adventure that takes several real days or a week. The ships could be log off points. Other players could take shifts at progressing the forward motion, or sometimes failing their checks to set the correct headings.

What a great piece for the "Exploration" part of the game.

ArchivedUser

[quote quote=19924]How crazy would it be if severs were connected by the sea?

Hear me out. Since we got the enhance naval content, the main features would be cargo ships, underwater exploration, sea battles etc.

But imagine this, there are several servers, all severs have decent size population. But lets say sever 7 population decline. There aren’t enough players, and everyone wants to leave to a more populated server. What can you do? You take a voyage! You can spend a lot of resource to build a ship, hire NPCs and carry as much goods with you to your new server OR you build the ship with several players and split the space up and take only the most essential stuff. Ships can go back and forth but be wary of monsters and pirates along the way. Going from 1 ‘continent’ to another will take several in game days, so it’s a lengthy process. This will allow people to migrate from server to server without having to start fresh but will be limited to how much they can bring.

Vise versa, the game is really popular and all the servers are full. The devs create a new server. Should you start a new character in the server or can you migrate from your current server to the new one? Here, it will take a longer voyage so new players have time to establish their footing before you arrive. Also you can only bring so much with you so you can’t dominate the economy. Perhaps the exchange rate of gold will put your income more inline with the rest of the players.

The time for voyage can vary, lets say you have to discover where the server is in the wide oceans. Exploration will be costly and take months. But once someone finds the server, the direct route will take only a week? Or the devs can just make travel longer when the new servers first launch and decrease the time as the server progress?

Ofcourse there will probably be a load screen somewhere between the two servers. Also distance from one server to another will be different depending on what server you are in (just like real life).

This can also facilitate trade between servers instead of trades to just small islands around the coast.

What are your thoughts?

[/quote]

I remembered an anime, which had a kind of feature like that <strong>log horizon</strong>. But the game map was made using world map.. Like Chinese server in China, Japanese server players in Japan in the game map

ArchivedUser

Switching servers honestly requires very little work on the game manager's end, as long as the game is well designed. It should be as simple (for just character transfer) as copying one to three database lines to the other servers database, and removing them from the old one. So it would probably be most appropriate to do some basic server transfers by buying passage on a ship in game.