Server Population Management

New World continues to have significant problems managing their server populations, resulting in frustration as friends are unable to play together, queues persist, and/or servers die with populations that are too small.

Please think long and hard about how to properly manage server populations. This is especially important in AOC, where migrating to a different server has significant implications because the world is greatly shaped by player actions and each world will be very different.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

BaSkA_9x2

Hasil wrote: »

New World continues to have significant problems managing their server populations, resulting in frustration as friends are unable to play together, queues persist, and/or servers die with populations that are too small.

I'm pretty sure that NW's biggest problems were its lack of content, dupe/bug abuse, exploits (especially in PvP), bad game design, rushed attempt of turning a survival game into an MMORPG, poor optimization and, last but not least, dogshit endgame gear system.

I quit that game because of some of the issues above and I'm sure many others did as well, the other problems you pointed out that game had and still has are just the cherry on top.

Hasil wrote: »

Please think long and hard about how to properly manage server populations. This is especially important in AOC, where migrating to a different server has significant implications because the world is greatly shaped by player actions and each world will be very different.

First things first, I don't think server migration or server transfers will be available in Ashes, and I hope they never do it. If you meant server mergers, then no worries.

Server population is the biggest concern in MMOs. Low populations or full servers with long queues, both are bad for a game, although I agree that having queues is probably better than having empty servers. I remember having to spam click "connect" to play runescape, mu, priston tale, gunbound, silkroad and many other games back in the day. For some reason back then, even if every server was always full, some publishers just wouldn't spin up more servers, I guess they really liked making people struggle to play their games.

The server population subject can be divided into two specific issues: the official launch & initial hype phase and the post-hype phase.

The official launch & initial hype

I'm not sure Ashes will have a launch as big as NW's (700k people playing the game concurrently) because it won't be on Steam, but it'll probably be pretty big regardless, especially due to how many of the big streamers will be playing it during launch.

With that said, I only see two options on how to handle the hype, the influx of players and server population during launch (first fortnight of the game):

Have an absurd number of servers ready to be spun up during launch.
Have a conservative number of servers ready to be spun up during launch.

The first option means that only a handful of servers will have queues, mainly the hardcore/zerg, streamer and RP servers. The players who don't care about any of that will just move to any other server that doesn't have a queue. Virtually every person who wants to play the game will be able to, unless the launch exceeds Intrepid's wildest expectations and not even all the servers they had available were enough.

The second option means that probably all servers will have queues if the launch was a success. People who don't have a lot of free time probably won't be able to wait in queue and play the game during the initial hype. The PR is not going to be good.

The post-hype phase

It doesn't matter how the official launch goes, the hype will eventually die. It doesn't matter if Ashes is the best game ever made. It might take a few weeks like the recently launched "MMORPGs" did or it might take a year, but the player population will eventually go down before stabilizing.

When that happens, unless the number of servers was already low, servers mergers will be inevitable and there's no way around that.

I'm curious to know what Intrepid will do. I personally hope that they choose to have more servers and less queues during launch, because Classic and NW showed that it doesn't matter how many servers you have, mergers are probably inevitable.

FuryBladeborne

There is a way to deal with the problem of server populations shrinking after launch. The problem is that it is not a good solution for Ashes. The solution that would work for most any other MMO launch is mega servers. You keep the number of servers low and as they begin to overfill, you create temporary servers for players registered to a current server to play on. As the population of the registered server shrinks, you fill it with those from the temporary servers.

There are 2 main problems with this system in Ashes. One is that the temporary servers will not match the registered server. This will probably cause many problems including issues with housing, citizenship, and what is available at each node. The other problem is economic. The extra servers create many more spawns of everything. This adds to the economy. Steven has described on a number of times how resources on the servers will be carefully managed and temporary. A mega server system directly counters careful management of resources available on a server.

All that being said, I agree with BaSkA13. I can't see a way to manage the server population aside from making sure to keep the server count low on release and eventually merge servers as it becomes necessary.

Rhorden

I've wondered about this also. I can see this game exploding at launch. It's new, exciting exploration, mystery, very cheap entry price and Steven has been a relentless marketing machine with the people that really matter, streamers. After launch though I do see the possibility of people leaving in large numbers. If that happens there could be some interesting decisions needing to be made.

If it's super successful and population only goes up then crisis averted, just get more servers. But at what point do you know the population is stable? How big do you let the queues get before you open another server? How far into the game does the repetitive, boring grind start? How long until people find out how hard the crafting trees are?

On the other side, the game takes off, booming. Queues are huge so more servers are opened up. Population continues to grow....for the first month. Eventually the whiners/complainers realize they actually have to work to accomplish anything. People with limited time may find somethings they are interested in will just take too big of a commitment. Others will like the game but are severely put off by being killed and losing items they just invested a lot of time to acquire. Others still will find out this game isn't their cup of tea. Then there's the travel time and no portal issue that New World got a first hand taste of. Eventually server populations begin to dwindle and it's not practical to keep very low pop servers up and running.
You can't merge them. No two servers will be the same because of the node system. You have elected officials that wouldn't be happy about losing their post. Could you lose your free hold? People very dedicated to a large node could be shafted if they are forced to go to a server that happens not to have the node type they want, where they want it.
What do you do?

Liniker

They already said - they are going for server queues over opening more servers, that is 100% the right call.

It's better to lose some players because they can't play at launch, but keep the ones you have than opening a bunch of servers and due to the nature of the node system fuck everyone up when you need to do merges.

I will happily take +5 hour queues at launch.

Ehrgeiz

Design the Map for 10.000 active people.
Allow 13.000 people to join.
Wait 2 weeks.
Everything is fine

Strevi

They should add legendary items only 3 months after launch. Then hypers who rush through the game will hesitate and join later

Liniker

Strevi wrote: »

They should add legendary items only 3 months after launch. Then hypers who rush through the game will hesitate and join later

takes entire Guilds to get legendaries.... not individual players

Electronn

Liniker wrote: »

they are going for server queues over opening more servers, that is 100% the right call.

Completely agree with this.

Liniker wrote: »

I will happily take +5 hour queues at launch.

This is definitely preferred to short queue times at launch, followed by an anemic server population that slowly declines to a ghost town, and eventually losing your housing, node, etc when your server is merged.

My only request for the 5 hour queue times is to have mobile visibility to your place in queue and ETA. Allow player to set a ETA text message time (e.g., text when ETA reaches 15 minutes). Basically, I want to go get things done IRL during the 5 hour wait.

Liniker

mcnasty wrote: »

My only request for the 5 hour queue times is to have mobile visibility to your place in queue and ETA. Allow player to set a ETA text message time (e.g., text when ETA reaches 15 minutes). Basically, I want to go get things done IRL during the 5 hour wait.

I like this! also.. of course, a 'grace period' - if you crash after you are already in, you should have a timer, like 5 minutes to be able to skip the queue and get back in! it's so frustrating when games don't implement this on day 1

tautau

Perhaps the date that you signed up for these AoC boards should set your place in the queue? So, someone who has been on here for three years goes ahead of someone who signed up one year ago, and someone who signs up now goes in front of a player who just registers at launch?

SongRune

tautau wrote: »

Perhaps the date that you signed up for these AoC boards should set your place in the queue? So, someone who has been on here for three years goes ahead of someone who signed up one year ago, and someone who signs up now goes in front of a player who just registers at launch?

As nice as that would be for people who've been on these forums for a while (or happened to register once, long long ago, and never returned until launch), the end result would be that players who only heard about the game on launch would have infinite queue times, because others would always be jumping in ahead of them. That makes for a terrible experience for those players, a terrible look for Intrepid, and bad PR for the game in the early weeks where they should be getting their biggest word of mouth boost.

Myosotys

Hasil wrote: »

New World continues to have significant problems managing their server populations, resulting in frustration as friends are unable to play together, queues persist, and/or servers die with populations that are too small.

Please think long and hard about how to properly manage server populations. This is especially important in AOC, where migrating to a different server has significant implications because the world is greatly shaped by player actions and each world will be very different.

Queue is a nice problem to have and I hope there will be queue in AOC. The problem of NW is that it is totally boring, bad game play, no content, useless craft, lags, desynchro, 0 pvp, low balance between classes, cheat, bots...

I think its better to make migration not possible... Just in case a server is Low pop they fusion it with another, otherwise it will be too complicated to keep progression no ?

Voxtrium

Definitely gonna need to have insane q times, at first you will lose a lot of players due to those, but after several months you will likely regain some of those players anyway

Rhorden

Liniker wrote: »

I will happily take +5 hour queues at launch.

I am never logging out and my kids are being put to work!
I do agree the longer queue times until stabilization are the way to go instead of having a bunch of dying servers that can't be merged.

I hadn't thought about the long queue scenario for this idea, but it would work here also. I mentioned in a previous post, that before launch when the character creator comes out, they should have a small solo test area where people could test different classes with high level abilities so they know for sure what they want to roll. Kinda sucks being days, or weeks, in only to find out you hate your class.
If that solo test area existed it would give people something to do while waiting in queue. Could practice rotations, different ability damage outputs, combat movement, better UI configuration, try new classes, find out pros and cons of other classes pvp wise and probably a myriad of other benefits I haven't thought of.
I think if something like this existed in New World it probably wouldn't have helped the bad PR because their queues were insane. At the same time though people close to getting in would have had something to entertain them until the queue popped. New World doesn't have a very deep combat system and only one class (just different weapon types) so maybe this wouldn't have been that great for that game but for AoC I could see people spending a lot of time in the test area while they wait.

Hasil

[/quote]First things first, I don't think server migration or server transfers will be available in Ashes, and I hope they never do it. If you meant server mergers, then no problem. [/quote]

Yep I was really talking about both transfers and mergers, but especially mergers. As others above have said, housing, node ownership, Castle ownership, Etc, are all going to make mergers especially difficult.

Glad to see this topic being discussed, because it is important and as I said in the original post I hope it receives significant thought.

Hasil

I just wanted to drop another note in here about the way servers are being managed by Amazon with the recent Brimstone expansion in New World. Again, Intrepid, please head over there and take a look at the Forums. They simply have not managed servers and populations well in connection with the expansion, causing friends to be stranded and unable to play with friends for their first major expansion. It's been pretty mismanaged and it's a case study in maybe what not to do with ashes server mergers.

I'm also super happy, by the way, that in the recent Q&A server populations and mergers were discussed. As I said in the original post, it's really essential to be thinking about these things now.

Karthos

Players in part need to take responsibly for this. This is an incredibly unpopular opinion, because no one wants to admit they are part of the problem, but I've seen so many MMO launches where 1 or 2 servers are just jammed with people, while others are barely even able to function due to lack of people.

Spread the fuck out people.

I know you want to "play with friends", but lets be honest, you have FOMO hard and you want to be on the "popular" server where all the "big players are". This tired excuse of "playing with my friends" would be more believable if players went into the lower pop servers with their friends so they actually COULD play. But your friends are on the popular server and they won't leave? Well, sounds like they don't want to play with you that much, why sacrifice your own playtime for someone whose made 0 effort to play with you?

I will finally acknowledge that this isn't in part a player problem when people will stop using the excuse of "playing with friends" and spread out to play with their friends on other servers AND we still have these issues.

Hopefully Intrepid really does do server pre-registration and lock new players creation BEFORE the game even launches to make sure people actually do spread out, and so they have an idea of their launch population.

Electronn

Karthos wrote: »

lets be honest, you have FOMO hard and you want to be on the "popular" server where all the "big players are".

Perhaps this is the case for some people, but this does not describe why I choose the "popular" server.

I will choose a heavily populated server at launch, even if it means long queues. Reason? I don't want to land on an anemic server that dies a slow death and ends up getting merged in 3 months. So yeah, I'm choosing a "popular" server, but for damn good reason.

This is even more true in Ashes. Steven said that if a "weak" server gets merged with a "strong" server, the people on the strong server sound much more likely to keep their names, land, etc. So choose an unpopular server at launch? No.

Regarding that last point, IS really needs to think this through. Given how Steven said they will handle server merges, this is going to be an issue fsho.

Hasil

Karthos wrote: »

I know you want to "play with friends", but lets be honest, you have FOMO hard and you want to be on the "popular" server where all the "big players are". This tired excuse of "playing with my friends" would be more believable if players went into the lower pop servers with their friends so they actually COULD play. But your friends are on the popular server and they won't leave? Well, sounds like they don't want to play with you that much, why sacrifice your own playtime for someone whose made 0 effort to play with you?

There is also something to be said in a PvP game of wanting to be on populous servers where there will be good competition. But I do see your point -- people don't want to be on desolate servers so to a degree they force overpopulation issues on themselves

Strevi

mcnasty wrote: »

Karthos wrote: »

lets be honest, you have FOMO hard and you want to be on the "popular" server where all the "big players are".

Perhaps this is the case for some people, but this does not describe why I choose the "popular" server.

I will choose a heavily populated server at launch, even if it means long queues. Reason? I don't want to land on an anemic server that dies a slow death and ends up getting merged in 3 months. So yeah, I'm choosing a "popular" server, but for damn good reason.

This is even more true in Ashes. Steven said that if a "weak" server gets merged with a "strong" server, the people on the strong server sound much more likely to keep their names, land, etc. So choose an unpopular server at launch? No.

Regarding that last point, IS really needs to think this through. Given how Steven said they will handle server merges, this is going to be an issue fsho.

I think low population servers will be better.
Lower rent for appartment.
More resources for everyone.
Less grind to keep gear repaired.

Child Item