Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Shards or Megaserver?
Vraak
Member
I was a WoW vet and now an Elder Scrolls Online Player. I prefer the ESO megaserver over the shards. Which is Ashes of Creation going to be. Game looks amazing I hope it becomes a success.
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Comments
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Servers
If you connect the servers, you're just going to have 31 slightly different variations of vanilla ice cream.
Can there be multiple servers per geographical location like NA, EU, APAC?
What is the max population per server?
Server population
Population limits will be enforced on each server.[33]
Around 8-10k concurrent users per server is projected.[34][14][35][36]
Initially there will be a limited number of registered accounts (approximately 15,000) per server to help mitigate login queues.[37]
This limit will increase over time to around 50,000 registered accounts per server.[37][38][39]
There may be queues to get into high population servers, but the aim is to avoid excessively long queues.[39]
The developers intend to carefully manage server populations via the use of character creation throttles to avoid the need to merge servers.[38][40]
Due to the comments I’m in. I enjoy ESO but I like the class/race passivities this game has.
Thanks for taking the time to explain it.
Seriously, this game is gonna pull a New World in the sense of - it's gonna get 1+ mil users, but eventually 70-80% of these fuckers are gonna leave for another game or hype or whatever. They arent mmo players.
20% of 1 mil is 200k which is still an amazing number, but ppl will see it as "fucking lawl, AoC Dead, lost 80% of its userbase, trash game, dead game. And Servers going from 10k to 2-4k because we choose to accomodate an absurb influx of players on hype.
EQ Server felt great at 2k
WoW Server felt great at 2.5k before they did the thing
FFXI has a 8k cap, never played the game to say how it feels.
UO:R current pop is 1.2k out of 1.5k when shards were created.
is 10k too much for a server, when 5k is probably a more manageable number?
PoE = 950k active users
WoW = 1.11 mil active user
Runescape 1.3mil active user
FF14 = 3.5 mil active user
New World Fresh Start = 100k active users (All time peak was 900k)
EQ p99 = 3.5k (3 servers. Blue peaks 1.5, Green peaks 2k, Red is Dead)
UO:R = 1.5k (1 shard, private server)
City of Heroes (private) = 1.5k (1 server)
I got caught up in RL and forgot my point lol
I think what may end up hurting AoC unironically is the hype and having the game inflate so large, creating servers, for it to finally pop and then we got server merge issues, low number of players across all servers that doesnt fill the world with 10k.
Hell, in in that crappy New World game, with fresh start, new servers are a cluster fuck mess.
I do believe a 10k server cap is too large and most importantly
what happened to REPUTATION Matters, when we got 10k playerbase. I aint gonna know all 10k players.
a 2k server, YOU WILL KNOW PEOPLE, you will remember, ppl will be held accountable.. at 10k... you just blend in, as everything becomes blurry.
everyone is just a walking npc at this point.
I think at the end of the day 10k might not be so bad based on size of world, but that will be a feel thing for sure. I think the real "hold your breath" pain point area will be what you said when the exodus after "hype" is over. There is no doubt that people will leave when they realize the game isn't for them and Intrepid needs to be prepared to make mergers as seamless as possible as I am pretty sure that will ruffle hella feathers, but if they put in the work to make them go somewhat smoothly it might not be a shit show like most other attempts at merging.
Where did you buy your crystal ball? I've been trying to find one for a while but they're always out of stock
Steam Crystal Ball Stats
My take on current times. People have so many options for entertainment now and MMO's generally have to have broad appeal to the casual gamer. PvP just isn't what most people want to do. I've tried training the non-gamers types to get into PvP and some just aren't ever going to get it. They don't have what I call Mario skills to make it in a player vs player environment.
Anyway, I'm going to throw down some bones and get into the alpha/beta. After seeing some of the footage my hopes are high. It looks like it is going to be a lot of fun.
So even if AoC does lose 80+% of its release playrbase, as long as those remaining 20% stay and keep their sub (with a few cosmetics here and there) I think the game can survive just fine and be one of those "many options for entertainment".
I doubt the hype will be big in the context that the game may be released in 2024 - 2025 and meantime they reveal the game mechanics in great detail and even have a long Alpha 2 with no NDA. Will be like an early access game. I think this model cannot create hype. The Early Access principle is to sell unfinished games early, before they are ready but the release itself does not create as much hype as the moment when the game becomes accessible first time.
Don't you think that "a good game with great devs that's about to get twice as big with fresh servers" would get a shitton of people?
During Alpha 2 streamers and youtubers and gaming sites will be spreading news.
I doubt at release there will be players who will join to discover the game and leave because they expected something else.
Maybe some will overestimate their tolerance to pvp and losing during caravans and node sieges and leave when their node falls? Can those cause a need to merge servers?
prob be cash shop item tbh eventualy to server transfer but yeah wanna make sure ur on same server at launch
Hopefully not. It would mess with the local economy. Unless they transfer a naked character.
What is really important is that the world feels alive, but not overwhelmed. It'll be interesting come launch day. There will be a countdown, a 1200sqm sandbox and hundreds of thousands of players waiting to enter in through one of the 4 divine gateways.
Stephen has talked about pre-registration before launch which I think would be a good idea. I just wonder how they intend to deal with thousands of players pouring in through the gateways at launch. The areas around the gateways could easily become overwhelmed. Perhaps each Gateway will be "capped" to only letting through 2500 players each so you will have an equal distribution of arriving players across the gateways and the world?
I think the number is fine, it is just about managing the population.
If done again, I would like to see 3-6 additional sized maps with instanced bridged links to each other (if not capable as on instance) and if localized population overload was an issue, then build migration populations limits into the design and lore.
Then, if the game expanded or decreased in population, instead of shutting down a server and moving players, they could be made or able to migrate within the current server by means of event or equivalent with a map swelling or shrinking size, and maintain a degree of harmony and overall population density target.
I was thinking to post a similar suggestion, the servers to be chained on a virtual Vera with timezones like on Earth.
But there are two drawbacks:
- resource respawn rate which now is balanced for a server might not work well if servers are chained and players can fetch them from low populated ones, which cannot even be closed because the few players who may live there
- all such servers would be the same, which brings no exploration feeling when traveling to new instances.
They could limit the distance of traveling to only one server away from the original one and even make them look different but then would end up feeling like just a bigger map with one server which have some resources coming from other servers and players seeing slightly different map depending on which continent they start.
They are a relic of a period of time where software were monolithic deployables running on single machines.
Times have moved on significantly since then.
I would love to see and EVE Online -esque realm. Everyone from around the world in 1 virtual world.
I would however be content with a single realm for each geographic region for ping.
I would not like to see a population base fractured within a single geographic region.
You get fun and surprising interactions when you have to deal with groups of people from nationalities you dont generally interact with.
Don't agree with this, essentially you are saying they need to make the world smaller. This is a huge issue with new world with the server being so tiny it is hard to even play with your friends and they need an infinite number of servers and those will still die from the same exact issue.
Server merges will always be a thing now adays. Should not be a reason to create a smaller world that will suffer from the same issue. Do to the larger server sizes they can have a much higher population before locking a server.
The answer for how ESO pulled it off is not well, lag was always an issue and world PvP was at times unplayable.