continent/landmass size thoughts

[Boomzor]

Originally Posted by Alduron

8 Square Kilometers, which would be 4km x 4km,

Ahem.. 4x4 = 16 (but it's friday so you're excused)

Math aside, I wouldn't completely write off large rural areas, as that is excellent tank country (vehicle combat in general I suppose).

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by Raymac

1 massive seemless world would be amazing, but I just don't know how technically feasible that would be. I would guess that Planetside 2 is already pushing the limits. Also, while bigger is better, in PS1 there was alot of unused space on the continents. If you spread that out even more I think you reach a point of diminishing returns. I think they need to strike a balance of a golidlocks zone where it is massive, but not too massive where it feels spread out like North Dakota.

Obviously I'm not a dev, but that being acknowledged, I don't see how this would make a difference. MMORPGs and MMOFPS may have different game mechanics, but surely the similarities in their rendering of the game world are not so different.

Meaning...if you have 6 continents, each run by one "server", then why can't you just smoosh them together and they are still run by the same 6 "servers" , there's just a need for seamless loading as you cross certain invisible boundaries, just as MMOs have been doing for several years now.

And I didn't mean that the entire world had to 1 massive continent, but that there could be at least 1 super-continent.

[Raymac]

Originally Posted by Stardouser

Obviously I'm not a dev, but that being acknowledged, I don't see how this would make a difference. MMORPGs and MMOFPS may have different game mechanics, but surely the similarities in their rendering of the game world are not so different.

Meaning...if you have 6 continents, each run by one "server", then why can't you just smoosh them together and they are still run by the same 6 "servers" , there's just a need for seamless loading as you cross certain invisible boundaries, just as MMOs have been doing for several years now.

And I didn't mean that the entire world had to 1 massive continent, but that there could be at least 1 super-continent.

To limit the populations you would need some sort of barrier. It's best to just have different continents instead of sometimes hitting an invisible wall and sometimes not. Fighting along those borders with population locks would be a nightmare.

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by Raymac

To limit the populations you would need some sort of barrier. It's best to just have different continents instead of sometimes hitting an invisible wall and sometimes not. Fighting along those borders with population locks would be a nightmare.

To limit what population? If you mean the population in any specific area, I was just reading an interview that said, as of now, they didn't have any plans to put any hard locks preventing more than a certain number of players from congregating in an area.

But if a supercontinent is run by 6 servers, and has the same number of players as 6 continents, it should still be OK I would think. They are not all going to go to the same spot, they are still going to be spread out, I think.

[Raymac]

Originally Posted by Stardouser

To limit what population? If you mean the population in any specific area, I was just reading an interview that said, as of now, they didn't have any plans to put any hard locks preventing more than a certain number of players from congregating in an area.

But if a supercontinent is run by 6 servers, and has the same number of players as 6 continents, it should still be OK I would think. They are not all going to go to the same spot, they are still going to be spread out, I think.

There will be a hardlock per continent though. Right now they are saying almost 2000 total (but that is subject to change I'm sure). Although those 2000 could all be in the same area if they wanted, obviously you can see there would be a problem with double that all congregating along invisible borders.

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by Raymac

There will be a hardlock per continent though. Right now they are saying almost 2000 total (but that is subject to change I'm sure). Although those 2000 could all be in the same area if they wanted, obviously you can see there would be a problem with double that all congregating along invisible borders.

Right, I get that, I just don't think that the supercontinent design will cause more than 2000 people to congregate in an area the size of a single continent. It's not a problem in WW2 Online, not that I want to keep referring to that game. The existence of three factions should do very well to keep fighting spread out along a front line of the supercontinent. Or so I theorize.

And besides..if it is a concern, they could have a hardlock of 3000 on the supercontinent.

[Boomzor]

Originally Posted by Stardouser

To limit what population? If you mean the population in any specific area, I was just reading an interview that said, as of now, they didn't have any plans to put any hard locks preventing more than a certain number of players from congregating in an area.

I think the implied message was there's no way to stop people already on a continent to congregate in one area.
They can how ever stop people from getting on that continent.

Also, the continental lock was referring to the ability to conquer the entire continent like in PS1.

[Raymac]

Originally Posted by Stardouser

Right, I get that, I just don't think that the supercontinent design will cause more than 2000 people to congregate in an area the size of a single continent. It's not a problem in WW2 Online, not that I want to keep referring to that game. The existence of three factions should do very well to keep fighting spread out along a front line of the supercontinent. Or so I theorize.

And besides..if it is a concern, they could have a hardlock of 3000 on the supercontinent.

It may get spread out, but in Planetside, people have a tendency to zerg together into the largest most epic battle. Of course you have alot of talented outfits that do the side skirmishes, but many people tend to gravitate to the largest battle.

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by Raymac

It may get spread out, but in Planetside, people have a tendency to zerg together into the largest most epic battle. Of course you have alot of talented outfits that do the side skirmishes, but many people tend to gravitate to the largest battle.

The interesting thing is that I often plug the idea of a Battlefield MMO over at Mordor and people raise the issue of lag from too many people in the same area. I always said "surely the game can, while not providing a hard barrier to congregating in the same area, encourage people to stay spread out in various ways". Surely they can do something other than split up into islands.

Of course I guess I'm arguing this point partially for desire to light the way for BF MMO, not that EA would ever listen

[Eyeklops]

Even if you put hardware issues aside, handcrafted maps are expensive as hell to make. If you hand craft 6 maps, then stitch them together in a super-continent, your wasting money by limiting it to 2 or 3 thousand players when those 6 maps could have done 12,000 players. And you can't really let 12,000 on there because at some point in time, they will all meet on one server, probably frequently. Then it would crash, constantly.

[Eyeklops]

Originally Posted by Stardouser

I always said "surely the game can, while not providing a hard barrier to congregating in the same area, encourage people to stay spread out in various ways". Surely they can do something other than split up into islands.

Matt has said, recently actually, that if all 1000+ players went to the same area in a PS2 map it may lag to shit (paraphrased). They are developing the mission system to help evenly distribute players along the battle lines.

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by Eyeklops

Even if you put hardware issues aside, handcrafted maps are expensive as hell to make. If you hand craft 6 maps, then stitch them together in a super-continent, your wasting money by limiting it to 2 or 3 thousand players when those 6 maps could have done 12,000 players. And you can't really let 12,000 on there because at some point in time, they will all meet on one server, probably frequently. Then it would crash, constantly.

I already answered that one though, they could put them together at as a supercontinent, but reuse individual continents separately, ie you would have the supercontinent, and then you would have individual copies of 1/6 of the supercontinent spread around. I don't think too many players would complain about that.

And, there's any other way - they could use the handcrafted features of a continent but kind of...randomize it. Which might mean that occasionally, when you are on Pangaea(as we will call the supercontinent), you might say, hey, that mountain there kind of looks kind of like a mountain on (insert other continent name).

Surely we can tolerate the occasional duplication in order to not sacrifice maximum strategic gameplay. Most people will not see the doppelganger of a geographic feature they've already seen until weeks or months later and probably won't remember it anyway. And even though it might be computer randomized, it will still be based on handcrafted originals, and thus should still look handcrafted.

[ThGlump]

Originally Posted by Knocky

I would rather have a couple of conts that are awesome then one huge computer generated land mass.

But variety is good, and only 3 continents at start will limit population on server, so it will feel a lot emptier when another 3 continents are added (3cont worth of population will be spread on 6th). You cant expect that huge influx of ppl to instantly populate new continents. not without merges.

What about 3 handcrafted continent, and rest 5-10 computer generated. They wont be that awesome, but theyll be playable enough, and give more room to populate on that server. And later instead of adding new continent, just rework one of the computer generated like you would add one.

[Raymac]

Originally Posted by Stardouser

The interesting thing is that I often plug the idea of a Battlefield MMO over at Mordor and people raise the issue of lag from too many people in the same area. I always said "surely the game can, while not providing a hard barrier to congregating in the same area, encourage people to stay spread out in various ways". Surely they can do something other than split up into islands.

Of course I guess I'm arguing this point partially for desire to light the way for BF MMO, not that EA would ever listen

You make a great point that a game design can certainly encourage players to spread out, and it sounds like that is what Planetside 2 is doing. However people will still do what they want to do, and Planetside proved that large numbers concentrated together can melt through any defense (i.e. Max crashes, tank columns, Lib raids, etc.)

So, even with encouragement to spread out, without hard rules in place, people will still congregate.

Don't get me wrong, I like how you think and I think it would be amazing if it was implented someday, but after my experience with PS1, I even have my doubts PS2 won't be a lag fest already as it is.

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by Raymac

You make a great point that a game design can certainly encourage players to spread out, and it sounds like that is what Planetside 2 is doing. However people will still do what they want to do, and Planetside proved that large numbers concentrated together can melt through any defense (i.e. Max crashes, tank columns, Lib raids, etc.)

So, even with encouragement to spread out, without hard rules in place, people will still congregate.

Don't get me wrong, I like how you think and I think it would be amazing if it was implented someday, but after my experience with PS1, I even have my doubts PS2 won't be a lag fest already as it is.

Well, here is what I was thinking would be done for a Battlefield MMO: For example, no individual base will allow more than 50(or insert appropriate number here) players to spawn at it (once there are 50 living people spawned from a base no more can spawn until one dies. Or, instead, it's not just how many are spawned from that base, but how many are "logged into" the base). If your team wants more people than that to attack the nearest base, another 50 players can spawn at another base and travel the extra distance. If they want more than 100, then 50 more will have to spawn from an even further away base and travel to the attack site. And in this way, while there's no physical limit on how many people can drive or fly to a target, at some point people decide to attack somewhere else because of the increasing distance factor.