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.
Dead Server Issues (idea)
JadedBK
Member
So I have been playing MMO's pretty much since UO came out, I have been in more Betas then I can remember and I've never really had that game that kept my interest. Most of the games I have quit I left for the same exact reason, the server I choose just died completely. This happens to most games and it always has the same result, people start leaving a dead server and that starts a chain reaction of others leaving.
Some games combat this in one of 2 ways, server merges which cause people to loose their land and sometimes their very identity do to name conflicts. The other way is server transfers which have the same negative drawbacks and sometimes cost money. These solutions almost always cause a snowball subscriber loss.
Splitting us up into multiple servers instead of one shared world where this problem wouldn't exist is difficult to do considering the games overall design as it would simply create another problem, over crowed servers which can be just as bad. No one wants to Q for hours to get into a game.
My suggestion is to connect all the servers together. This would prevent duplicate names from ever happening and remove the need for transfers and merges. Lore wise it could be explained as the world just being split into different shards that are loosely connected to each other with the same map yet different politics and development.
Now simply being able to jump from one shard to another anywhere on the map would surly lead to abuse as you could just jump behind an enemy wall. So I would suggest fixed portals located on every server in hard to reach places. Lets say 4 per server spread out a great distance from each other. Every shard would connect to 4 other shards directly by walking through these distance portals. The hook is that every shard will different connections. Meaning to get from server A to server D the player might have to walk through multiple shards or just one. This would also prevent the Jita effect (eve reference) of one shard getting overly flooded with players because there would be no central shard as they could be daisy-chained together in such a way to prevent their being a center.
This badly designed example above is just to give you an idea. If you wanted to you could have the portal network between shards shift every week or so to open up new challenges (enemies) for towns who choose to live near these portals but not necessary to make the overall idea work. I was just thinking it would open up even more interesting META. One week you got a friendly town on the other side who you can Tarde with and suddenly it's a blood thirsty enemy hellbent on taking everything you have. Just an idea.
Anyever, When a player creates a new character they will choose their starting shard. Anytime they login on that character they will simply login to the shard they logged out of last. This would allow cross shard commence, trade, and combat leading to some interesting META ala EVE which would lead to press and drive interest in the game. I also think alliances should be able to hold land across multiple shards if they so choose. It would basically make this a single server game without having to deal with any of the technical or server load issues that come with that.
On the database side you could simply have separate databases for each shard that sync all character data in realtime. Some data would not be necessary to share. You could even drop the realtime communication and only copy character data when necessary outside the character/guild/alliance name creation to prevent duplicate names.
Also it just seems like this would be relatively easy to implement, wouldn't really change the core idea of the game, it would solve an issue that plagues all multi-server games and basically drive the metagame especially if the gate destinations hope every week or month. You have to leave them static for long enough to create conflict or friendships if your gonna make the gates cycle.
I don't know, it's just idea. I like this game a lot but I have the worst luck picking servers. The pop of new games is always really high at launch and then drops out which again leads to mass exit. Perhaps one of you have a better idea on how to avoid this issue or can help improve this idea. Sorry for the wall of txt.
Some games combat this in one of 2 ways, server merges which cause people to loose their land and sometimes their very identity do to name conflicts. The other way is server transfers which have the same negative drawbacks and sometimes cost money. These solutions almost always cause a snowball subscriber loss.
Splitting us up into multiple servers instead of one shared world where this problem wouldn't exist is difficult to do considering the games overall design as it would simply create another problem, over crowed servers which can be just as bad. No one wants to Q for hours to get into a game.
My suggestion is to connect all the servers together. This would prevent duplicate names from ever happening and remove the need for transfers and merges. Lore wise it could be explained as the world just being split into different shards that are loosely connected to each other with the same map yet different politics and development.
Now simply being able to jump from one shard to another anywhere on the map would surly lead to abuse as you could just jump behind an enemy wall. So I would suggest fixed portals located on every server in hard to reach places. Lets say 4 per server spread out a great distance from each other. Every shard would connect to 4 other shards directly by walking through these distance portals. The hook is that every shard will different connections. Meaning to get from server A to server D the player might have to walk through multiple shards or just one. This would also prevent the Jita effect (eve reference) of one shard getting overly flooded with players because there would be no central shard as they could be daisy-chained together in such a way to prevent their being a center.
This badly designed example above is just to give you an idea. If you wanted to you could have the portal network between shards shift every week or so to open up new challenges (enemies) for towns who choose to live near these portals but not necessary to make the overall idea work. I was just thinking it would open up even more interesting META. One week you got a friendly town on the other side who you can Tarde with and suddenly it's a blood thirsty enemy hellbent on taking everything you have. Just an idea.
Anyever, When a player creates a new character they will choose their starting shard. Anytime they login on that character they will simply login to the shard they logged out of last. This would allow cross shard commence, trade, and combat leading to some interesting META ala EVE which would lead to press and drive interest in the game. I also think alliances should be able to hold land across multiple shards if they so choose. It would basically make this a single server game without having to deal with any of the technical or server load issues that come with that.
On the database side you could simply have separate databases for each shard that sync all character data in realtime. Some data would not be necessary to share. You could even drop the realtime communication and only copy character data when necessary outside the character/guild/alliance name creation to prevent duplicate names.
Also it just seems like this would be relatively easy to implement, wouldn't really change the core idea of the game, it would solve an issue that plagues all multi-server games and basically drive the metagame especially if the gate destinations hope every week or month. You have to leave them static for long enough to create conflict or friendships if your gonna make the gates cycle.
I don't know, it's just idea. I like this game a lot but I have the worst luck picking servers. The pop of new games is always really high at launch and then drops out which again leads to mass exit. Perhaps one of you have a better idea on how to avoid this issue or can help improve this idea. Sorry for the wall of txt.
0
Comments
so another uo?
shards = servers and servers = shards.
if the access point is the issue, they could just offer free server transfers with a long cooldown, maybe a month or two. maybe an item from a month long quest.
but they dont want server transfers, maybe for the same reason they dont want sharding
It's not really the same, Albion has one single mega server, this is multiple server copies that are loosely connected. You would still have individual worlds, some with heavy populations, and some less crowded. It's either that or have to deal with merges and transfers when the population starts to drop after the initial release which happens to pretty much every new MMO that I have played for the last 30 years. If any one server became too crowded you could just walk through a gate and find someplace with a population that more suits your playstyle without having to transfer or have to start over or change your name.
server merges and transfers arent bad imo.
also if these gates are at the corners of the map, and it takes about 2 hours to move from one corner to another (remember no fast travel), and you have to check multiple shards (if each server holds 10k players online, and lets say there are 100k in na east) are you really willing to spend hours a day, maybe a good 6-10 traveling and checking a few shards just to decide where to play?
It's so he can fit his whole following onto one server for a mega guild take over.
Also, "just move to another shard if you don't like your current one" only works for homeless people with 0 connections on the server. Everyone else wouldn't just be able to move and would still be sitting in queues if they happened to play on a popular shard.
Also also, what about server limits? You suggest linking shards through each other instead of directly to each other. This could potentially mean that you might not be able to move across shards if your own got stuck between 4 completely filled ones.
x3 Also, farming rare mats. People will already be farming some stuff in the middle of the night, because that's when there's the least amount of people online. And usually there'd only be a super limited amount of stuff to farm, simply because that's how Steven wants it to be. But with shards you could farm that super rare stuff right around the portals and just keep hopping between the 2 shards to get more than you would've otherwise. This would in turn make more people hop between shards, because that is now the optimal way, at which point you completely lose the sense of server identity and community.
In other words, pls no. Find a better approach for inevitable player exodus.
Regarding the shared world: This would be basically a whole restructuring of the game, not only from a point of geography but also from a lore perspective. This is, to make it short, unfeasible to implement a system that is not realiably better than server merges. The consequences for zone design and the implication on the story would go way beyond anything that would make sense imo. And as Steven mentioned previously, there are hard limits for him when it comes to lore changes.
The larger the community you are a part of is, the less important your behavior within that community becomes.
No idea how that compares to the current top MMOs.
And thought that if the population declined by 90% it would still be more populous that the server that keep me interested all that time ago..
Guess it is not just the population capacity but the attendance of populus?
How about a new idea? Players take responsibility for keeping their own server engaging and fun so players don't leave? Instead of this being a problem that someone else should solve, we take personal responsibility for solving it ourselves?
They could probably populate servers evenly just by displaying the total nodes that exist and what stages they are on the server page. That way, new players could see that and they'd have an incentive to join for a better chance of developing their own node or contributing to an existing one at an early stage.