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.
Comments
To 1st: I've seen on steam.db daily fluctuations for every game, not only mmos.
https://steamdb.info/app/294100/charts/
https://steamdb.info/app/1063730/charts/
https://steamdb.info/app/2399830/charts/
AoC servers will have a prime time. Players in a region will try to login during that time when things happen.
Those who have more time and do caravan runs at low time will have no reason to logout later.
A bad thing for a server is to keep players in a queue, or to have lags because too many players are online at the same time.
So if 10K is the maximum number of concurrent players, those will be active players who login frequently, every day. Other mmos even have dailies to encourage them do that.
And if 10K is the maximum, at 8K the server should be declared as full, to allow a decent performance during weekends too.
The numbers above the active player base are players who are away for a longer time, possibly not paying subscription unless they payed for one year in advance.
To 2nd. Natural attrition is present in all MMOs. Players need to change after a while. Considering that AoC will have a long open Alpha 2 phase, it can happen that we will not see a huge synchronized rush to play the game at release. Depends how big the hype will be for those who had no access to A2 and what they think they could miss if they don't join the first wave.
Keeping servers full by merging servers is a sad solution. Hopefully they'll not have to do it often.
It is better if players come back just to enjoy the game after a break (a break maybe caused by the fall of a metropolis) rather than all of them coming back at the same time for some story update and overloading server populations, as AoC servers cannot be split.
3rd. Very frequent content updates cannot be big and exciting. I expect that story will never have voice acting. The bigger updates may bring some world events, and new game mechanics. But funding these should rely on the core game being interesting. If that is interesting, the loyal players will keep playing the game for what it is and not for main story line. So Steven should focus on keeping them happy.
I agree that bigger player base could offer some more fancy content which require more developers but those players who need such fancy updates also chase such updates in competitor mmorpgs.
And IS said AoC is niche which means they try to bring and keep players with features which sets AoC apart from other mmorpgs.
This is what Intrepid have to say about their server population total (as oppossed to concurrent)
When I said 20 - 25k, I was basically splitting that 15k they intend to start with, and the 50k they intend to end up on.
You can link the steam stats for what ever games you want to, you can make up what ever bullshit you want, with what ever completely made up justification for it that you want, none of it matters as the above is what the people that know what they are talking about have said.
I also have no idea why you keep linking to Steam game stats, as if they mean anything. The population of Rimword (a reasonably good game, by the way), has nothing at all to do with any discussion we are having.
Your "argument" to my second point amounts to "but maybe people will do this", and is more of what you hope will happen rather than anything you presented a reasonable reason for.
Your third point - frequent content additions can be big and exciting if there is the money to put in to them. The trick is for the developers to be split in to teams, with each team working on their own content addition. This way, you can be working on the next 7 or 8 content additions at once. You have a full team working on that content addition from start to finish.
All you need to make this happen is money.
Your final point is also incorrect. Generally speaking, players leave an MMO when they are finished with the current content, not when they see a rival MMO with new content. This is why games with frequent new content have a higher percentages of their players with long term subs (EQ2 has 80% of it's players continuously subscribed for 3 or more years - almost twice the industry standard).
Obviously, some MMO developers are smart and make use of this by releasing new content for their game at a point in time when they expect large numbers of players will be done with an expansion in a rival MMORPG - but that is them using this fact to their advantage, it doesn't alter the fact.
So, in actual fact, what happens when a game has continuous new content added - as is evidenced by real world examples rather than just what you think happens - is people stay in the game longer.
I see what you say.
So they can focus on whatever features they think makes AoC a niche game but if the game is well made, more of this "niche" audience will come, audience which might not actually be really niche but they just like the well made game.
Edit:
What if during Alpha 2 they see that many players prefer the less niche aspects of the game?
Should IS focus on that type of the content?
Will that make the game less niche?
The portion of the post you quoted was in relation to player retention due to constant content additions post-launch.
It has nothing at all to do with the game being niche or not.
I have been talking about that - but not in the portion of the post you quoted.
That's true.
I quoted that part to acknowledge that I understand and agree.
And I don't want to debate about the 10K concurrent players on a server topic.
I went back to review where we started what was my initial statement and I see you explained well from the very beginning:
and then you explained again
... but I focused on BG3 more because I didn't played it and it puzzles me why is so popular. I will play it sometime in future and I will find out myself the reason.
bruh how do u find these stuff. ok that's it I'm switching to yandex.
I ABSOLUTELY RANDOMLY found this clip when I was looking for Tyrant pvp to give an example for a ranged physical class in L2. I was so fucking shocked to see "hey Sharif" in this
LOL
damn they hate steven wtf. it looks like they invited him to the party to "farm" and set him up with the dino train xD