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Lots of Servers or Layering?
Scarbeus
Member
What would you like to see? Lots of servers being used per world zone or utilizing layering as much as possible to reduce the numbers or servers by as much as possible per zone? I'll admit this isn't something I know a huge amount about.
If you don't know what layering is, it prevents overcrowding of areas of a video game. Each layer will support a certain number of players up until when new people log on they will be added to a new layer which will be seemingly more empty that the previous one. It does, however mean you can party up with people on the same sever as depending on what type of layering you use it will merge you together or put you on a layer where your party fits the space. Neverwinter made you choose a layer where you had to fit in where as I think WoW was more lenient.
If you don't know what layering is, it prevents overcrowding of areas of a video game. Each layer will support a certain number of players up until when new people log on they will be added to a new layer which will be seemingly more empty that the previous one. It does, however mean you can party up with people on the same sever as depending on what type of layering you use it will merge you together or put you on a layer where your party fits the space. Neverwinter made you choose a layer where you had to fit in where as I think WoW was more lenient.
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If the game could only have one huge server that would be great, but I don't think time dilation would work in Ashes.
Personally speaking, it's hard for me to feel invested in a game world where creatures / players are regularly phasing in and out. I'd much rather wait in a queue and know that everyone's occupying the same space; it makes the world feel more tactile because we're all competing for the same resources.
Besides, I don't think it would work well with IS stating that each server would be different in how world events took place, cities formed, etc.
One world per server, please and thanks.
this is where im at as well i dont think it can work with the node system
but thinking on release the release window will pretty much always be higher by a large margin than a few months out and it would suck to get stuck in a low population server i dont really know how this would be solve-able without majorly impacting things... maybe if the log in queue had literally 0 issues you could get away with less worlds
PvP and layering shouldn't be on the same sentence, Classic WoW showed that.
I want to push my system and this game to the max, everybody on the server meet at X @ this time!!!
Ideas like land management- and as you draw resources from your surrounding area- what type of effect does that have on the land; and then also how effectively can you draw those resources without having such a deleterious effect on the land, which might impact future resource gathering for some period of time: And it makes relevant the movement of these players who are collecting these goods from the environment, that they actually cannot always just do so in one particular area, as the land management begins to degrade. So it actually encourages movement across the world to discover new areas that might not be as perturbed as the ones you're coming from. It's a very interesting idea. It's something that we're going to be prototyping in Alpha 2 and getting feedback on and testing
I think the developers have decided already.
It would be a mistake to switch to layering at late stage of development.
I'm not saying layering is the answer but players need to be prepared for a tough choice when the launch rush dies down.
if there is one server with lot of layers : we will be so many that all other will be "random dude" again.
Also, for pvp, such system is full of flaws as was said...
Would be easy for a red player to stay few minutes on a layer, kill, then swap, again, etc. Limiting people to track him down. reducing the effect of the corruption system.
There's no way to tell if you're right or wrong regarding what percentage of the population will drop once the hype is over. I agree that it will drop, that's almost guaranteed, but nobody's really are able to predict by how much.
With that said, server mergers are problematic, but they are preferable over layering (gameplay point of view) or losing players because of a lack of servers and 6 hour queues for the first month (economic point of view). Intrepid has to capitalize on the hype, because that only happens a few times in the lifetime of a game. I believe that, although this doesn't prevent mergers, a good strategy is to implement "server clusters" so that if server mergers were to take place, you'd already know which pool of servers would participate in a server merger, per cluster. Again, server clusters are irrelevant unless a merger takes place, it doesn't change anything gameplay related like layering does.
So the best idea I can come up with is to have X different clusters with 1 or 2 servers per cluster for launch. If demand for more servers grows, i.e. every server has a 1k+ player queue, start spinning up servers one per cluster until all clusters have 3 servers, then repeat until every cluster has 4 servers, rinse and repeat.
Once, let's say, all 20 server clusters have 5 servers and demand for servers stabilize or you hit the maximum number of servers they can/want to have, you have 100 servers but, in reality, you have at minimum 20 different servers if the highest number of mergers take place. Or have 10 clusters and 10 server per cluster, 5 clusters and 20 servers per cluster, the result is basically the same, but I believe that more clusters is better than less so you can more easily predict how mergers are going to look like.
Regarding how server mergers will work, I hope they implement some lore and special events behind them so that even though it's a shitty inevitable situation, at least it's somewhat interesting. Once a server has a daily peak of X hundred players online concurrently for a period of 2 or 3 weeks, that's when the "merger event" begins. The 2nd lowest population server will receive all of the incoming players and it might even be an interesting thing to see take place.