Systems: Dynamic Server "Merging"

[Deflagrate]

The enjoyment factor of Ps2 will depend entirely on a server's ability to provide at least one near full raging battle at any given time. I believe the current plan for servers is to have characters tied to their respective servers. This is ideal because then you get to play with the same people consistently and promotes community rivalry, alliances and all the good things that make MMO's so great.

With MMO games typically starting off strong, and Ps2 being a AAA F2P there will be times during the year with more players, and other with less. Contributing factors being summer, release of competing titles, among others.

To prevent the occasional population lows from effecting servers there needs to be a system in place to bundle servers into clusters in which all names in that cluster are unique, and during any time where populations drop to a point where game enjoyment would be effected, two servers would be be bridged to compensate during that time. Since names are unique among clusters, there can not be any confusion of character names, such as when Emerald and Markov merged in PS. The bridge would happen at a time such as 3-4 AM, and would be announced an hour in advance, with players being able to log back in to the server immediately and resume playing. The hexes would be set to an even split on each continent.

Another case where this would be beneficial would be to keep intense battles raging 24/7, so a player could get the same enjoyment be it 3 AM on Monday or 6 PM on Friday, of course due to the reset this can not happen every week, but for transitions during summmer/holidays, this could be a good system to balance out populations.

[NewSith]

There's a thread here created by me that has almost the same name I think...

[berzerkerking]

great Idea

[ZaBa]

1) It's not looking like people will be tied to a specific server this time around, which solves this problem immediately; in slow hours people will just go to the most populated server first, lag be damned.

2) What you describe is essentially instancing in reverse, and will hopefully never happen because it would destroy the permanency the game is shooting for. Also server resets of any kind are pretty much a terrible idea for any continuous territory control game.

[Deflagrate]

Originally Posted by ZaBa

1) It's not looking like people will be tied to a specific server this time around, which solves this problem immediately; in slow hours people will just go to the most populated server first, lag be damned.

2) What you describe is essentially instancing in reverse, and will hopefully never happen because it would destroy the permanency the game is shooting for. Also server resets of any kind are pretty much a terrible idea for any continuous territory control game.

Ahh, if 1) is true then that fixes the pop thing. I just wonder how it will play out in scenarios where one empire is starting to fall back, will people just hop over to a server where they are winning?

Perhaps the cluster system might work in this case? Where each player has a home server, but are only allowed to hop during slow times?

People leaving was a problem in Ps1, it basically turned a contested fight (albeit with one empire slowly gaining steam) to a steamroll with little resistance, not fun for either side.

[Dagron]

Originally Posted by ZaBa

It's not looking like people will be tied to a specific server this time around

Where did you get that from? As far as i know they haven't released info on how servers are going to work in that aspect, all we have are speculations.

[ZaBa]

From the end result of the pro7sat1 fiasco. It would seem a little silly to say "European accounts will be able to play on both American and European servers" if what was actually meant was "we won't limit which server you can lock your account to based on your geographic location" (which I admit is conceivable since other games do just that). Not that it really matters since F2P means having as many accounts as is necessary to enjoy the game the way you want; if accounts are locked to servers, you just make one for every server you want to play on (which btw isn't the impediment it would be in many other F2P games, since we have offline leveling).

Either way, people will go to the fight on their own, there's no particular need to mess with the persistent game world to bring it to them.

[Dagron]

Originally Posted by ZaBa

It would seem a little silly to say "European accounts will be able to play on both American and European servers" if what was actually meant was "we won't limit which server you can lock your account to based on your geographic location".

Actually, what that means is that you can make characters in any server you want (EU players can play in US servers if they want to). Also, since accounts won't be limited to one server, you can have a character in an EU server and one in a US server. If there are paid character transfers (very likely imo), you'll even get to transfer between servers in both regions. But the issue here is not having your account locked to one server, it's having a specific character locked to a specific server.

That's a good thing, it prevents server hopping, creates a sense of community and gives persistence more meaning. But when there are too many servers and some of them start to die out after the launch rush starts to fade, people don't want to forget a character they put a lot of effort into and make a fresh one. When this kind of problem happens, if something isn't done to concentrate the population spread throughout empty servers or a free way to move the characters to more populated servers isn't offered, people would stop playing if the only alternatives were to start from scratch, stay in a ghost town or pay to move.

That said, i think the OP's concerns are valid and i kind of like the suggestion, but i agree that messing with persistence is a bad thing. I wish i had a better suggestion, but every idea i thought of so far would cause just as many problems.

I guess free mass transfers is still the best solution, despite it being a hassle and causing people to lose their names.