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Server Merge Solution
Jwscoot
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
I have been saying for a while that low pop servers should trigger world threatening events that the server population can rally together and face to save the server.
If they succeed, they become a host server for low pop servers that fail. If they fail, the players will have the opportunity to caravan their goods to the divine gateway, which would be how they show up in the world of their new server. In this way, they keep the server storyline intact.
Imagine your world of Vera is threatened by a world destroying comet that can only be averted through special religious quests related to the constellation system. Imagine your server is unable to stop the disaster and the comet grows larger in the night sky over a week while players rush to save what they can and bring it to the portal, while bandits wait on every road looking to profit from the chaos.
Imagine you make it through to an alternate reality where the world has not fallen and your caravan, loaded with goods, is protected and brought to a nearby city where refugees are greeted with offers of citizenship and your housing certificate can be traded in for the gold cost of your original home or freehold. Struggling cities would compete to attract these immigrants to strengthen themselves and grow to new heights.
This is the way. Not the loss of your server, but the conclusion to its unique story. Not a restart, but instead, the beginning of your characters next grand adventure.
If they succeed, they become a host server for low pop servers that fail. If they fail, the players will have the opportunity to caravan their goods to the divine gateway, which would be how they show up in the world of their new server. In this way, they keep the server storyline intact.
Imagine your world of Vera is threatened by a world destroying comet that can only be averted through special religious quests related to the constellation system. Imagine your server is unable to stop the disaster and the comet grows larger in the night sky over a week while players rush to save what they can and bring it to the portal, while bandits wait on every road looking to profit from the chaos.
Imagine you make it through to an alternate reality where the world has not fallen and your caravan, loaded with goods, is protected and brought to a nearby city where refugees are greeted with offers of citizenship and your housing certificate can be traded in for the gold cost of your original home or freehold. Struggling cities would compete to attract these immigrants to strengthen themselves and grow to new heights.
This is the way. Not the loss of your server, but the conclusion to its unique story. Not a restart, but instead, the beginning of your characters next grand adventure.
9
Comments
Gotta love some Creativity from time to time.
Only thing I would add is that the games lore would need to include the concept of a multiverse.
Edit: @Vaknar I think this idea is really worth highlighting to the team.
An East America server that doesn't have a limit of population, but that server is divided into ''instances" that can carry maximum 15,000 players. Events on one instance should impact other instances (Node being successfully sieged on one instance, so all the other instances the node will be destroyed as well).
That is a really bad idea. I liked the mega server idea but the idea about a node being destroyed across all instances would suck. How would that make unique story lines beyond, logged out and lost all my shit due to an invisible battle.
Why post an idea that is not feasible and would break the core concept of the game? The mega server theme park is well represented in the MMO space. Even if this was possible to implement, why would you want another garbage Mega server with instanced content?
Do you also want a dungeon group finder with instant travel so you can rush through content you don't care about with people you don't care about?
It's a good thing this idea is impossible, because it would literally destroy the game and break every promise intrepid has ever made.
The game world resetting isn't really that good of an idea.
It means things like reputation, wealth and influence are only going to last as long as that server cycle. It essentially takes an MMORPG with a persistent world and turns it in to a lobby game that just happens to have "matches" that last weeks or months instead of 30 - 45 minutes.
Persistance is the most important aspect of MMORPG's in general.
Someone makes a suggestion like: "the bread should be toasted and buttered". Then, before that debate can happen, someone jumps in saying they hate bread. Another person chimes in saying gluten bread is bad for you. And then another person posts a historical defense of bread in 3 parts.
We are having bread people! How do you want your bread?
We are having 15,000 player capped servers. Low population servers will need to merge. How would you like to do that?
You expect server merges every few weeks????? What madness is that. If there are server merges every few weeks or months why would you be worried about "reputation, wealth and influence???" There would be much bigger issues at hand including not having a large enough community to worry about those things.
It doesn't really matter how long - as much persistance should be maintained as possible.
If it is something that happens every week, as much persistance should be maintained as possible. If it is something that happens once every few years, as much persistance should be maintained as possible.
Ha - well said! It happens in almost every thread!
People seemingly going purposely out of their way to totally miss the point / derail yet another attempt at a constructive debate.
I love this idea btw. The best ideas are always the ones that never occurred to you and yet seem obvious in hindsight. I'm all for it.
Love this idea!!! I saw your comment/idea on YouTube and it’s getting positive traction.
Fantastic to the server merge issue. Makes it very interesting.
Maybe even include a time concept. Like if there are a lot of servers then the first server to defeat this event is the host server winner.
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For the sake of balance I suppose you would kinda have to do it this way. I'm on the fence about whether the players should actually be made aware of the progress of the other server making it a true race.
Wouldn't it be more immersive for the players to only know that the threat is time sensitive? Wouldn't this make the threat more urgent regardless of if one side is way ahead?
I'm also not thrilled about pitting two servers that are about to merge against each other, which is the other popular idea I have heard. Even if it isn't some PVP invasion type mechanic, would the losing server feel they are being forced to merge with a group of players that had a hand in destroying their word?
Well this isn't exactly something required soon, or even at launch. And big server events seem pretty baked-in to Ashes dev, I imagine it's pretty fundamental to the framework they've built.
Also the value is quite high considering how many people have been put off previous MMOs by the way they've handled this problem.
So personally I'd say the effort : value ratio works out.
These are my thoughts as well. You wouldn't want to spoil a storyline like this in alpha anyway. There will be plenty of server wide event quests they can test to iron out the larger event system that will already need to be in place.
This wouldn't need to be ready until servers start merging well after launch. And the best part is it could be implemented using the server wide event system that would already have to exist and that players would already be familiar with.
It would also be good to have a nefarious warlock, a dark portal, and an unborn orcish hero to be delivered shortly after the server migration.
Server merge could bring together two equally low population servers.
Why not let the comet first destroy one of the 2 continents?
The religious quests could influence which one is destroyed.
On each server players would move to the other surviving continent before or after the comet hit but definitely before the merge. Could also be some other event which would force players onto one side, like increased frequency of NPC attacks:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Corrupted_areas
If players fail to address these corrupted areas, the frequency of NPC events against their node will increase. These can lead to node buildings and services being disabled, increasing the node's vulnerability to node sieges.[11]
Also resources could stop spawning on half the world to encourage players to move.
Final step before merge would be to prevent traveling toward the destroyed continent. The lore could place it under quarantine with a dense fog covering the ocean for 2-4 weeks.
Then eventually the server merge would "heal" the land and each server would get the destroyed continent back with the population of the other server settled and owning their own nodes and freeholds.
There are some really interesting ideas here. I especially like the hall of hero's, which seams a bit tangential, but is also undeniably awesome.
However, I think we have to start with the premise that forced server mergers have to exist. There is no way to avoid this. No one wants their server to have to merge. The best solution is no one ever leaves and no server ever dies. Unfortunately, for the health of the game, your server will have to combine with another if the population falls too low.
Building in a mechanic to avoid this defeats the entire purpose of this exercise. How do we make forced server mergers palatable when servers aren't compatible by their very nature?
This is the dilemma we should be aiming to address.
I had not considered this. It removes some of the player agency and would be devastating to whoever lived on the wrong continent, but it would keep the server continuity for everyone.
From the perspective of a player on the wrong continent is it better to escape across the sea rather than escaping to a divine gateway? Would the world event be more compelling knowing you are fighting to save your continent rather than your server? How would the the player agency be preserved for that world quest if you know that the two populations have to end up on different continents?
Your idea has a lot of merit and I would be in favor of either one. For me, I guess it would come down to which one is easier for the devs to implement. And for that you would have to ask them. I honestly have no idea.
Players that move through first by themselves perhaps get some benefit before a forced server shutdown move..
Or something to that effect!
I do understand the point above about whether it's a good use of dev resources. It's a valid point. However, this could be a true paradigm shift for a common problem in the genre, so maybe worth it anyway.