Land Mass Instancing

akabear

Low population servers are a killer for game enjoyment.
The max numbers per servers are a good start but when broken down to zones or nodes, the density will not be that high.

I would like to see areas of the map instanced such that a higher overall population could be sustained with region locking for max population at any time.

George_Black

They said they are against fragmentations of a server, like bdo and tera did.

Taleof2Cities

I'm sure Intrepid has a plan for server population decline, @akabear.

Will the devs be transparent with those details like most everything else? Probably.

Are those details important enough to share before we start Alpha-2? Definitely not.

TheDarkSorcerer

I do like what GW2 does. You get a 30sec pop up notification if you'd like to join a more populated server, you can totally decline if you like. You just get a quick loading screen and land on the same spot as before. And if you do join the more populated server you receive a small amount of XP as a gift. (GW2 relies heavy on group world events which is why they encourage more people on a server).

Sathrago

The best solution (imo) for low pop servers is to allow free, one way transfers off of capped servers and highly restrict the joining of high pop servers while also promoting the lesser populated servers.
If a server doesnt have very many people on it, that's not the players fault and they shouldnt lose their server due to merging/deletion of low pop servers.

As for the people transferring over with characters, I would investigate ways to restrict the flow of materials or money to lessen the impact they would have on the low pop servers economy.

tautau

This might happen, given the pre-launch buzz about AoC (numbers are for example purposes, not a prediction of actual):

IS estimates 100k players at launch and opens 8 servers, resulting in full servers and some wait time to log in during peak hours.

Two months later, after some attrition total players are 90k, wait time mostly disappears.

Two further months pass, word about AoC has spread and total players rise to 110k, wait time develops on some servers during peak time.

Two more months pass, total players rise to 150k, IS opens two new servers. Some servers continue spotty wait time.

Two more months pass, word continues to spread bringing in more new players than those quitting, IS starts advertising, new servers open as needed. This continues for two more years until there are now 16 mostly full servers and two or three that never took off.

Eventually some other company imitates AoC and draws away some players, total player base stabilizes, the three low-pop servers merge and we live happily ever after until Stephen is inspired to create a new game which is so wonderful we cannot even start to envision it now and we start the process again, which really is a part of living happily ever after for us gamers.

Tatiana

I'm sure they're very aware that server populations will decline over time post-launch, hopefully the game will be popular and they won't run into that issue for many years. Either way, I'm sure that would be something they are actively planning for.

PherPhur

tautau wrote: »

This might happen, given the pre-launch buzz about AoC (numbers are for example purposes, not a prediction of actual):

IS estimates 100k players at launch and opens 8 servers, resulting in full servers and some wait time to log in during peak hours.

Two months later, after some attrition total players are 90k, wait time mostly disappears.

Two further months pass, word about AoC has spread and total players rise to 110k, wait time develops on some servers during peak time.

Two more months pass, total players rise to 150k, IS opens two new servers. Some servers continue spotty wait time.

Two more months pass, word continues to spread bringing in more new players than those quitting, IS starts advertising, new servers open as needed. This continues for two more years until there are now 16 mostly full servers and two or three that never took off.

Eventually some other company imitates AoC and draws away some players, total player base stabilizes, the three low-pop servers merge and we live happily ever after until Stephen is inspired to create a new game which is so wonderful we cannot even start to envision it now and we start the process again, which really is a part of living happily ever after for us gamers.

100,000? I think you need to add one 0 to that and another 0 a couple weeks after launch.

If AoC comes loaded on launch with all it's stated features and is pretty polished, it's absolutely going to be a vanilla WoW situation all over again. It'll basically be a suped up combination of BDO, ArcheAge, GW2, WoW and Lineage without the P2W, and that alone will have at least nearly the entire US of MMO players switching over.

That is at least until the bots and gold farmers come swarming in and destroying the PvP heavy game that's built on an economy. I predict no game will have ever risen so high, and fallen so hard in the history of video games, because nothing has ever done so much so well and been so vulnerable.

AidanKD

With the Ashes design I can't see instancing/sharding working. The main issue is that each server is going to have a completely unique node progression. The node citizenship would clash - it takes away your "server reputation" if your existence is only temporary.

If your suggestion is that it isn't temporary - then that's not sharding anymore - that's a server merge.

daveywavey

ChipsAhoy007 wrote: »

That is at least until the bots and gold farmers come swarming in and destroying the PvP heavy game that's built on an economy. I predict no game will have ever risen so high, and fallen so hard in the history of video games, because nothing has ever done so much so well and been so vulnerable.