nobody wants to invest lots of time for a mmo game which fortune is uncertain.
please spare me the *the journey is what counts*
comments ..its part true but if you think so, go hiking or play one of those great singleplayer rpgs.
some great out there with more imersion then any mmorpg.
And thats why gamers check the server loads.
We just dont wanna put time into a game which lives on livesupport waiting for more players to come
____________________ It`s alright
AC2,AO,D&L,Lotro,VsoH,SWG,Uo,HGL,Drunners,CoH,GW,Potbs,PWI Eq2,Dofus,WoW,WWIIO,Ryzom,Planetside,EvE,TR,DDO,RFonline,FOM,VC,..etc blabla also hobbies....staring at loadingbars
Heavy is 400 people? This game seems hardly an MMO. There should be a trend in MMOs to hold more and more people on one server, not less. And colors are not a very good indicator of a trends. Actual data and maybe an actual trend line would be better, and it would have to be over a longer time than a few days. Furthermore, if it goes to 180, to 210 and goes medium on a given day, does that really mean there is a positive trend for this game? Not really. It seems like most the servers have less than 100 people playing on it, hell you have have 64 players playing BF2 or other respectable shooters. Playing monthly for a server that holds double that on average seems like a waste of time.
As noted, "heavy" is 400 people on just ONE of the four factions of one of the many servers. No servers have "less than 100 people playing on it." For my server, at it's absolute worst, there are 1000 people playing at once. At it's best, it's over 2,000 playing at once. Plus, it's a persistent world where the actions of the players can have very real effects on the world through the capturing of ports. That is the definition of a MMORPG and it is nothing like "BF2 or other respectable shooters."
That is just false, patently false. 2000 online would mean all four nations at very heavy and that has never happened for an instant let alone on any regular basis. And 2000 at a minimum is also BS - the busiest servers have at best a light and a moderate and a couple heavy at peaks. All servers are at best a couple lights and a couple moderates at off times.
FLS could kill half the servers tomorrow and still struggle to get the remaining 5 busy to all heavy at peak times at at off times they would still have half the nations at light populations.
So given all this data, I want to play on a server that has a large spread out population. I don't want to play on a server thats dominated by whoring pirates like Blackbeard. So any suggestions?
So given all this data, I want to play on a server that has a large spread out population. I don't want to play on a server thats dominated by whoring pirates like Blackbeard. So any suggestions?
<Mod edit>
I'd like an answer from someone a good bit less negative please.
So given all this data, I want to play on a server that has a large spread out population. I don't want to play on a server thats dominated by whoring pirates like Blackbeard. So any suggestions?
<Mod edit>
I'd like an answer from someone a good bit less negative please.
<Mod edit>
As for your question, the answer would be Rackham or Roberts.
2000 people might not be "Very Heavy" as compared to other MMOs, but I think for the size of the PotBS world it is a good number. There is just 1 open sea, everything else besides towns is instanced. It takes about 30-45 minutes? to go from one end to the other depending on your currents and ship It's not a huge area so they needed to keep the numbers low.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
2000 people might not be "Very Heavy" as compared to other MMOs, but I think for the size of the PotBS world it is a good number. There is just 1 open sea, everything else besides towns is instanced. It takes about 30-45 minutes? to go from one end to the other depending on your currents and ship It's not a huge area so they needed to keep the numbers low.
Which means they need to keep the subscriptions high...
So given all this data, I want to play on a server that has a large spread out population. I don't want to play on a server thats dominated by whoring pirates like Blackbeard. So any suggestions?
<Mod edit>
I'd like an answer from someone a good bit less negative please.
Rackham is probably your best choice as classes are well spread & pirates don't dominate.
As regards to the topic bear in mind that 2000 online on one sever can be equivalent to up to 10,000 subscribers for thet server because it's a known fact that only 25-30% maximum of subscribers are online at any given time.
Originally posted by DJXeon... because it's a known fact that only 25-30% maximum of subscribers are online at any given time.
I would be interested in seeing the source of that data please.
Not a flame - I am really interested in how the populations of Online Games vary vs time and day of the week.
I can't say the exact figure but FLS ops guy Gary Noten was workng on 20-25% online when they calculated the amount of servers needed.
[Quote Gary Noten] Step one is to take our expected subscriber counts. Let’s say that the multiplier for presales to subscribers is 2.00, and we are on track to get 50,000 presales units sold. This results in an expected subscriber count of 100,000.
Step two is to calculate expected peak concurrency. The multiplier here is different from game to game, but generally falls between 20% and 25%. So for this pretend calculation, we expect to have 20% of our subscriber base active at peak, resulting in a peak concurrency of 20,000 players.
Step three is to determine how many active players are supported by a single server. This is often an art vs a science, and is certainly so for us. Sometimes there are technical limitations, and other times the limitations are design side. For us, the key metrics in determining how many players we want to allow onto a server are ‘how vibrant does the economy feel’ and ‘how crowded does the open sea feel’ ... for this fake calculation, we’ll say 2,000 players per server.
Finally, we take the numbers from step two and three and figure out how many servers we need. If we have a peak concurrency of 20,000 players, and 2,000 players per server, we need ten servers to handle that load.
In Equation form, you could look at it as:
Subscriber Base * Concurrency Rate / Players Per Server = Servers Needed
or
100,000 * 20% / 2,000 = 10 [/Quote]
So i think we can say the the servers are on average half empty (or half full) with the spread across the 11 servers going from busy on the top three servers to low on the bottom three.
There you have it - they have capacity for up to 100.000 subscribers but are currently running on just under half that figure. (~35k+)
FLS are hopefull that populations will grow over time in the same way that Eve does. Currently by no means a disaster but could be better.
At present there are no plans for server merges & as one poster said Potbs seems to work well with low-medium populated servers.
In any event they should now be getting enough income coming in to continue development at full speed for a game that has lots of potential.
Originally posted by DJXeon... because it's a known fact that only 25-30% maximum of subscribers are online at any given time.
I would be interested in seeing the source of that data please.
Not a flame - I am really interested in how the populations of Online Games vary vs time and day of the week.
I can't say the exact figure but FLS ops guy Gary Noten was workng on 20-25% online when they calculated the amount of servers needed.
[Quote Gary Noten] Step one is to take our expected subscriber counts. Let’s say that the multiplier for presales to subscribers is 2.00, and we are on track to get 50,000 presales units sold. This results in an expected subscriber count of 100,000.
Step two is to calculate expected peak concurrency. The multiplier here is different from game to game, but generally falls between 20% and 25%. So for this pretend calculation, we expect to have 20% of our subscriber base active at peak, resulting in a peak concurrency of 20,000 players.
Step three is to determine how many active players are supported by a single server. This is often an art vs a science, and is certainly so for us. Sometimes there are technical limitations, and other times the limitations are design side. For us, the key metrics in determining how many players we want to allow onto a server are ‘how vibrant does the economy feel’ and ‘how crowded does the open sea feel’ ... for this fake calculation, we’ll say 2,000 players per server.
Finally, we take the numbers from step two and three and figure out how many servers we need. If we have a peak concurrency of 20,000 players, and 2,000 players per server, we need ten servers to handle that load.
In Equation form, you could look at it as:
Subscriber Base * Concurrency Rate / Players Per Server = Servers Needed
or
100,000 * 20% / 2,000 = 10 [/Quote]
So i think we can say the the servers are on average half empty (or half full) with the spread across the 11 servers going from busy on the top three servers to low on the bottom three.
There you have it - they have capacity for up to 100.000 subscribers but are currently running on just under half that figure. (~35k+)
FLS are hopefull that popultions will grow over time in the same way that Eve does. Currently by no means a disaster but could be better.
At present there are no plans for server merges & as one poster said Potbs seems to work well with low-medium populated servers.
The 20-25% is about peak time not at any time? While The FLS guys said so, did you mean literally at any time initially?
Raph Koster blogged that a prime time online populations was typically around 20% of a game total subscriber base. A few other people have tossed around similar figures and back when EQ displayed number of players online for each server it matched up pretty well with their subscription press releases.
It would only make sense that those number would be a higher percentage during the first month of a games launch as people are in the honeymoon phase and can't get enough. That is just speculation though.
Its pretty much a rule of thumb to use the 20% or 1:5 ratio (20% of subscribers are active players, or take the number of active players and multiply by 5). Granted there are variances per game, but that does give a good ball-park number.
And that is why...
Conservatives' pessimism is conducive to their happiness in three ways. First, they are rarely surprised -- they are right more often than not about the course of events. Second, when they are wrong they are happy to be so. Third, because pessimistic conservatives put not their faith in princes -- government -- they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They believe that happiness is an activity -- it is inseparable from the pursuit of happiness.
So given all this data, I want to play on a server that has a large spread out population. I don't want to play on a server thats dominated by whoring pirates like Blackbeard. So any suggestions?
Check back later is the best suggestion - the game just doesn't have any population now to speak of and it is getting worse, far worse. Add to the mix that I think FLS has fudged the population summaries as last week before this last patch a moderate population menat 200 or more people - tonight I log in and see on my server and nation that was showing moderate only 138 where online (from /whocount). Clearly they have tweaked the descriptors to try to lighten the impression from the login screen. But believe this, PotBS has an incredibly serious population problem and it is trending worse. In one week the intial 30 subscription ends and I would think it will be dramatically worse.
I believe it's headed for failure, too. It's not that bad a game, but it certainly has not convinced me to subscribe to it, either.
Even though I'm in a fairly active society, this game still feels like a single-player grindfest with a chatbox. On top of that, since everybody either talks in society chat or, worse still, uses voice chat, the game feels deserted most of the time. Especially if you play French like I do. All in all, nothing worth paying US $15 monthly for.
Sometimes I sail to the Antilles just to trade taunts with Brits and pirates, but apart from that the game just seems dead, and I'm on one of the more populous servers (Blackbeard). The economy? Not better. I make money (though my complaining about those issues basically had some people in the game calling me a troll and loser -- apparently if you find fault with the system you must be a failure at it), but in the long term I think most societies will do their production in-house and dump the rest on the market; in other words, much supply but little to no demand. All that the developers have thought of to counter this is make society organization as difficult as possible (by turning down the suggestion of a society warehouse, for starters), but without economic coordination, societies don't really have a purpose. Political power? none to speak of. Some might make diplomatic relations with other factions, but they are not binding upon the faction as a whole. Military coordination? unless they make a point in behaving like exclusive cliques, smart societies will welcome outside help to flip ports and defensive action, since it's the entire nation that benefits.
Not to mention that with the current lack of balance among factions, even with town reverts when one gets the maximum number of points the winner will probably remain the same all the time. In other words, Sisyphus Online, pushing a boulder up at $15 a month. If that's all there is to it, I'll pass.
The unrest mechanism is smart on paper, but unbalanced. Creating unrest is easy but reverting it is not (don't tell me it's as quick and feasible to create the same amount of rest at the economic hub as at an out-of-the-way deserted town). The PvP system, as usual, is newbie-unfriendly (I wouldn't want to join that game in a few months), ganking is prevalent, surrendering is useless as an option, and all non-ship-of-the-line vessels will soon be obsolete in the much-vaunted port battles, meaning everyone who isn't a Naval Officer will be encouraged to desist. There has already been a case (on a server I don't play) of high-ranking players demanding of lower players that they turn down invitations to port battles, only to find a grand total of seven players going to their doom. And if you're a lowbie, no point in going anyway: Small vessels don't have the range to hit their opponent without getting well within their range nor the armor to sustain more than a handful of broadsides.
All the while getting all those EVE expats looking for domination on the Next Big Game, sometimes transplanting their whole guilds without so much as a name change, telling us how the game ought to be played (never played EVE, so I couldn't say), behaving like know-it-alls while basically overlooking the key fact that societies are *meaningless* in this game. Also that when you lose a port, you can still build and operate factories there, but that it's more expensive (never mind that if the British really took over a town with a deep harbour, the first thing they'd do is close all the foreign-owned royal shipyards in operation there). So when you lose a town, you don't really lose anything there.
POTBS is a game that does not know what it wants to be, and I think (despite all I have said before) it might have worked better as a full-PvP game. With the ganking currently going on inside the red circles, only a fool or a suicidally hardcore player would think of turning his PvP flag on, knowing full well that he will be attacked by players who don't care that they are five times his number and twice his rank. The game can't really be having it both ways, while relying on instanced missions to provide fodder for XP and money grind.
Vetarnias - you pretty much nailed it. You pointed out the PvP flaws quite clearly
I really want this game to be successful. Potentially - it can be so good.
However, the constant instances are a drag. . And the economy in theory is good, but it doesn't seem to be functioning well in reality.
There does seem to be an imbalance of nations. The french are obviously severely outnumbered.
I agree with your point that FLS simply can't have it both ways. I think the best bet is to make it a fully PvP game.
The game hasn't achieved it's potential yet. It might, and it could...
I might give it another month or two. If there aren't legitimate improvements to gameplay or population increase, I think I might reluctantly abandon it.
"I have live my life by these nine simple words: It sounded like a good idea at the time." --Livingston Taylor
This game was doomed as soon as they announced their partnership with SOE. It really doesn't matter that SOE didn't actually develop it because there are a ton of people that won't play any game that is connected with SOE in any way.
Just like most mmorpgs they are having a rough launch but considering they gimped themselves with their SOE partnership it looks like they are just going to crash and burn. Hopefully it will make other developers think twice before thinking about SOE platform publishing.
First off, being connected to soe doesnt imo really matter anymore. Most people playing potbs have never played any other mmo, so having known soe in the past is of no real importance. And at the end of the day, besides wow, soe have had 5 massive release games which all made money. At the end of the day, if you make money and 10 in 100 people are upset noone cares. We all know noone really cares anyway.
As for potbs.. well, i am not resubscribing, my main reason are lag and text bugs. The servers are based in the USA which gives me an average 3 second lag to begin with, 300ms ping. But ingame, the whole game is slightly lagged, some is video, some is latency, it isn't really serious, but it is enough to think..."maybe i don't really like this" and when you add this to the amount of text bugs like "bring 2 small arms to..." which should read "bring 4 small arms..." or "bring 19 blackpowder" when it should be 60...or mission texts all messed up...its just too much.
I personally don't like the melee combat system and i don't like the way the ship steering works or many of the sounds. So at the end of the day "maybe i don't really like this" turns into "sod this, i'm gonna play something else"
Server populations, even on roberts at Very Heavy, theres a remarkable lack of people about. I'd like to know exactly how many people Very Heavy is actually supposed to count. And the lag i get on Bonny when i turn towards Irish Point and theres maybe 20 people nearby is absolutely terrible... i can only imagine what it is like approaching 100+
Theres no support for decent video cards, no support for dual and quad cores, the graphics, the sounds, the textural bugs, the mission bugs, the melee, the ship steering, the instancing...gee...load into a port, load into a shop, load into the tailors, load out of the tailors, load out of the shop, load out of the port. Memory leak anyone?
The economy.. actually it works pretty great, it suffers alot from a lack of imagination, you can't put orders on the market or do anything intelligent. For example you can't have stuff auto dump into a warehouse for collection everything is manual, theres no safeguards against sleep induced mistakes.
But the one thing the economy really does need is PEOPLE. And on Roberts, my little Level 2 Wine Seller has over 100k in savings. On Bonny my Lv 30 has about 1 mill in savings. If bonny had a semi decent population the game would be much more managable as a freetrader. But essentially, the population at the moment warrants fewer traders. My Lv 30 has been on server since prerelease, my wineseller since release.
Overall, the game needs an injection of fun and needs alot of small changes, like any npc 20 levels below you should run from combat...forcing you to catch up to them and for sure, you should be getting attacked by ships that take 2 salvos to take out.
FLS...that is do damn frustrating...I've been attacked by 3 level 5 npc pirates...it's gonna waste 10 minutes of my time, i get no xp and almost no loot...wait a sec...that's why isn't it? To waste MY time...
Life is about Living, Sleep is about Dreaming, Games are about Strategy!
I think numbers wise, Light pop is about 1 to 100 people, medium is 100-250, heavy is 250-500 and very heavy is 500+ but, ingame it only counts about half of them. So a server with light, light, very heavy, heavy has like 50, 50, 500+ 300 on each.. ie 50 french and spanish, 500+ brits and 300 pirates. Problem is...where are they...go into OS and theres 10 fights...travel about and see 30 more...maybe 50 brit fights total... and most of those are 1v3npcs. So where is everyone? in an instance? i think not. Falsely projected numbers? i think so.
And this is where we come back to SOE... it's a well known fact that SOE loves falsely projecting server numbers. They've been doing that since the release of Everquest. I remember when the servers changed from actual to approx numbers. And when it did....it was because everyone was leaving.
Life is about Living, Sleep is about Dreaming, Games are about Strategy!
Regarding numbers: The requests for server merges (along with the possibility of transferring a character to another server) are becoming more and more persistent. I can understand that there is a bit of reluctance to do so at this time, as it would be a tacit acknowledgement that the game is in trouble, but it will have to be done sooner or later.
The screenshots posted in this thread don't lie; they give an accurate portrait of the servers at any given time. I live in North America, and have logged into the game at all times of the day -- in the middle of the night, in the afternoon, in prime-time, on weekends as well as during the week -- and there is (with the exception of Roberts, the so-called UK server, which shows relatively high numbers and might be the only fully functioning server out there) little to no fluctuation based on time of day. Occasionally you'll see a "moderate" here and there, and maybe even a "heavy" for pirates or Brits from time to time, but the rest are just "light". The only decently populated non-English server is Bonnet (German). Based on what has been posted on the POTBS forums, everybody plays French on the French server (surprise!) and the Spanish server is moribund, with players fluent in English moving to the other servers. Of the North American servers, Kidd, Bonny and Guadeloupe never showed anything above "light" for any faction. Those figures are all pretty dismal, and some people are already throwing accusations that the criteria for activity levels have been changed to make the numbers appear better than they are. But the game experience doesn't lie: it feels empty, and not just because of the instances. Nobody chats at all over channels everyone can read; that's not a pleasant gaming experience however you look at it.
I still recall the excuses people were throwing around to explain the low populations: When pre-boarding levels were low, everyone said "Oh, wait till launch". When launch came and nobody showed up, the answer was, "oh, wait for the first weekend and numbers will improve". Then when the weekend came and nothing much changed, the reason became "distribution problems", and when these would be solved all would be just fine. Then the numbers remained low, and people said "well, this is really a seventeenth-century EVE, and EVE gathered players over time". I already commented on the POTBS forums that this excuse didn't really wash because one would have expected EVE players to switch to this game if comparisons were being thrown around. Unless EVE's following is vastly overrated, one should really address the question as to why EVE's players didn't switch to POTBS.
Considering how some hardcore Shadowbane players are drooling over Darkfall, a game which they haven't even seen (and which is in fact so secret that critics have raised concerns of vaporware), how can we explain that large numbers of EVE players ignored POTBS despite TWO YEARS of closed beta and three weeks of open beta to try it out? It's all conjectural from here; maybe they stayed away because sci-fi really is their thing, or because they can't afford two subscriptions. Sure, you see some guys on POTBS overtly admitting they came from EVE, sometimes carrying their society with them, and I have seen much arrogance coming from them (basically sneering at anyone who doesn't consider PvP the primary purpose of the game).
My guess is, as I posted earlier, that POTBS isn't hardcore enough to satisfy EVE players. Let's face it, the stakes are for the most part insignificant. Sure, you lose a town, but you can still produce there and freetraders even get foreign taxes cut in half with the proper skill, so you're theoretically never shut out of a resource. Guildmasters (oh, I mean "society leaders") can't go on a power trip because they don't really have any economic or political power over the Caribbean or just their own faction, so those wishing to play pocket dictators aren't really offered the possibility to achieve that. They can't create cartels, because anyone can be a crafter at a relatively low cost (and when you don't pay upkeep on a building, you don't even lose it and back taxes don't accrue!), and foreign nationals can always come to your port and dump as many goods as they wish with you as buyer being none the wiser as to the origin of the products you're buying. Societies don't have much of a purpose; in fact game mechanisms hinder their efficiency.
The only challenge is PvP zones, and even then they are easy to circumvent by leaving ships at your key towns, teleporting there to produce your items, and letting them pile up in your warehouse until the situation is safe enough for you to ship them out to your markets. In other words, the competitive aspect of the game is inconsequential at best, and periodical town reverts when a faction wins enough points make it a wast of time at any rate.
Primetime, weekend (last weekend before re-up of subs) and pops look like the attached. Sure - no problem here. 5 of 10 servers with miserably low populations (all light meaning likely no more than 300 or 400 people total), another 2 with barely 100 or so people more, two more with a tad more than that, and one with a sort of OK population (at best) population by any normal MMO standard.
With the recent information provided, and checking on postings, I think the overall population will reach a Plateau shortly. Seems the rate is now of Slow Growth.
Agreed, the resub of the 2nd month is going to be a key point.
And that is why...
Conservatives' pessimism is conducive to their happiness in three ways. First, they are rarely surprised -- they are right more often than not about the course of events. Second, when they are wrong they are happy to be so. Third, because pessimistic conservatives put not their faith in princes -- government -- they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They believe that happiness is an activity -- it is inseparable from the pursuit of happiness.
The trend is not of growth but shrinkage - populations are noticeably lower now than just a week ago and heave been steadily sliding all week, particularly since the last patch to ver 1.1. I think the game will continue to lose people over the coming week and lose when re-up time comes in a few days - then it might reach a plateau but it is going to take allot, a whole lot, to get out of the hole that will have the game in.
This is what you get if you have a half done game and working with SOE.
I hope they learn from this that you need more then trailers and nice looking pictures.
Played: From Earth & Beyond, Anarchy Online, Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa (Beta), EvE Online, City of Villians, Atlantica Online, Guild Wars, Lineage 2, Pirates of the Burning Sea, PlanetSide, RF Online, Second Life, Fallen Earth.
Comments
and etc etc
nobody wants to invest lots of time for a mmo game which fortune is uncertain.
please spare me the *the journey is what counts*
comments ..its part true but if you think so, go hiking or play one of those great singleplayer rpgs.
some great out there with more imersion then any mmorpg.
And thats why gamers check the server loads.
We just dont wanna put time into a game which lives on livesupport waiting for more players to come
____________________
It`s alright
AC2,AO,D&L,Lotro,VsoH,SWG,Uo,HGL,Drunners,CoH,GW,Potbs,PWI
Eq2,Dofus,WoW,WWIIO,Ryzom,Planetside,EvE,TR,DDO,RFonline,FOM,VC,..etc blabla
also hobbies....staring at loadingbars
As noted, "heavy" is 400 people on just ONE of the four factions of one of the many servers. No servers have "less than 100 people playing on it." For my server, at it's absolute worst, there are 1000 people playing at once. At it's best, it's over 2,000 playing at once. Plus, it's a persistent world where the actions of the players can have very real effects on the world through the capturing of ports. That is the definition of a MMORPG and it is nothing like "BF2 or other respectable shooters."
That is just false, patently false. 2000 online would mean all four nations at very heavy and that has never happened for an instant let alone on any regular basis. And 2000 at a minimum is also BS - the busiest servers have at best a light and a moderate and a couple heavy at peaks. All servers are at best a couple lights and a couple moderates at off times.
FLS could kill half the servers tomorrow and still struggle to get the remaining 5 busy to all heavy at peak times at at off times they would still have half the nations at light populations.
--------------------------------
Achiever 60.00%, Socializer 53.00%, Killer 47.00%, Explorer 40.00%
Intel Core i7 Quad, Intel X58 SLi, 6G Corsair XMS DDR3, Intel X-25 SSD, 3 WD Velociraptor SATA SuperTrak SAS EX8650 Array, OCZ 1250W PS, GTX 295, xFi, 32" 1080p LCD
So given all this data, I want to play on a server that has a large spread out population. I don't want to play on a server thats dominated by whoring pirates like Blackbeard. So any suggestions?
<Mod edit>As for your question, the answer would be Rackham or Roberts.
2000 people might not be "Very Heavy" as compared to other MMOs, but I think for the size of the PotBS world it is a good number. There is just 1 open sea, everything else besides towns is instanced. It takes about 30-45 minutes? to go from one end to the other depending on your currents and ship It's not a huge area so they needed to keep the numbers low.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
<Mod edit>
I'd like an answer from someone a good bit less negative please.
Rackham is probably your best choice as classes are well spread & pirates don't dominate.
As regards to the topic bear in mind that 2000 online on one sever can be equivalent to up to 10,000 subscribers for thet server because it's a known fact that only 25-30% maximum of subscribers are online at any given time.
I would be interested in seeing the source of that data please.
Not a flame - I am really interested in how the populations of Online Games vary vs time and day of the week.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
I would be interested in seeing the source of that data please.
Not a flame - I am really interested in how the populations of Online Games vary vs time and day of the week.
I can't say the exact figure but FLS ops guy Gary Noten was workng on 20-25% online when they calculated the amount of servers needed.
[Quote Gary Noten] Step one is to take our expected subscriber counts. Let’s say that the multiplier for presales to subscribers is 2.00, and we are on track to get 50,000 presales units sold. This results in an expected subscriber count of 100,000.
Step two is to calculate expected peak concurrency. The multiplier here is different from game to game, but generally falls between 20% and 25%. So for this pretend calculation, we expect to have 20% of our subscriber base active at peak, resulting in a peak concurrency of 20,000 players.
Step three is to determine how many active players are supported by a single server. This is often an art vs a science, and is certainly so for us. Sometimes there are technical limitations, and other times the limitations are design side. For us, the key metrics in determining how many players we want to allow onto a server are ‘how vibrant does the economy feel’ and ‘how crowded does the open sea feel’ ... for this fake calculation, we’ll say 2,000 players per server.
Finally, we take the numbers from step two and three and figure out how many servers we need. If we have a peak concurrency of 20,000 players, and 2,000 players per server, we need ten servers to handle that load.
In Equation form, you could look at it as:
Subscriber Base * Concurrency Rate / Players Per Server = Servers Needed
or
100,000 * 20% / 2,000 = 10 [/Quote]
So i think we can say the the servers are on average half empty (or half full) with the spread across the 11 servers going from busy on the top three servers to low on the bottom three.
There you have it - they have capacity for up to 100.000 subscribers but are currently running on just under half that figure. (~35k+)
FLS are hopefull that populations will grow over time in the same way that Eve does. Currently by no means a disaster but could be better.
At present there are no plans for server merges & as one poster said Potbs seems to work well with low-medium populated servers.
In any event they should now be getting enough income coming in to continue development at full speed for a game that has lots of potential.
I would be interested in seeing the source of that data please.
Not a flame - I am really interested in how the populations of Online Games vary vs time and day of the week.
I can't say the exact figure but FLS ops guy Gary Noten was workng on 20-25% online when they calculated the amount of servers needed.
[Quote Gary Noten] Step one is to take our expected subscriber counts. Let’s say that the multiplier for presales to subscribers is 2.00, and we are on track to get 50,000 presales units sold. This results in an expected subscriber count of 100,000.
Step two is to calculate expected peak concurrency. The multiplier here is different from game to game, but generally falls between 20% and 25%. So for this pretend calculation, we expect to have 20% of our subscriber base active at peak, resulting in a peak concurrency of 20,000 players.
Step three is to determine how many active players are supported by a single server. This is often an art vs a science, and is certainly so for us. Sometimes there are technical limitations, and other times the limitations are design side. For us, the key metrics in determining how many players we want to allow onto a server are ‘how vibrant does the economy feel’ and ‘how crowded does the open sea feel’ ... for this fake calculation, we’ll say 2,000 players per server.
Finally, we take the numbers from step two and three and figure out how many servers we need. If we have a peak concurrency of 20,000 players, and 2,000 players per server, we need ten servers to handle that load.
In Equation form, you could look at it as:
Subscriber Base * Concurrency Rate / Players Per Server = Servers Needed
or
100,000 * 20% / 2,000 = 10 [/Quote]
So i think we can say the the servers are on average half empty (or half full) with the spread across the 11 servers going from busy on the top three servers to low on the bottom three.
There you have it - they have capacity for up to 100.000 subscribers but are currently running on just under half that figure. (~35k+)
FLS are hopefull that popultions will grow over time in the same way that Eve does. Currently by no means a disaster but could be better.
At present there are no plans for server merges & as one poster said Potbs seems to work well with low-medium populated servers.
The 20-25% is about peak time not at any time? While The FLS guys said so, did you mean literally at any time initially?
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
As you can see it's good enough populations but has plenty of room for improvement.
Raph Koster blogged that a prime time online populations was typically around 20% of a game total subscriber base. A few other people have tossed around similar figures and back when EQ displayed number of players online for each server it matched up pretty well with their subscription press releases.
It would only make sense that those number would be a higher percentage during the first month of a games launch as people are in the honeymoon phase and can't get enough. That is just speculation though.
Its pretty much a rule of thumb to use the 20% or 1:5 ratio (20% of subscribers are active players, or take the number of active players and multiply by 5). Granted there are variances per game, but that does give a good ball-park number.
And that is why...
Conservatives' pessimism is conducive to their happiness in three ways. First, they are rarely surprised -- they are right more often than not about the course of events. Second, when they are wrong they are happy to be so. Third, because pessimistic conservatives put not their faith in princes -- government -- they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They believe that happiness is an activity -- it is inseparable from the pursuit of happiness.
Check back later is the best suggestion - the game just doesn't have any population now to speak of and it is getting worse, far worse. Add to the mix that I think FLS has fudged the population summaries as last week before this last patch a moderate population menat 200 or more people - tonight I log in and see on my server and nation that was showing moderate only 138 where online (from /whocount). Clearly they have tweaked the descriptors to try to lighten the impression from the login screen. But believe this, PotBS has an incredibly serious population problem and it is trending worse. In one week the intial 30 subscription ends and I would think it will be dramatically worse.
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Achiever 60.00%, Socializer 53.00%, Killer 47.00%, Explorer 40.00%
Intel Core i7 Quad, Intel X58 SLi, 6G Corsair XMS DDR3, Intel X-25 SSD, 3 WD Velociraptor SATA SuperTrak SAS EX8650 Array, OCZ 1250W PS, GTX 295, xFi, 32" 1080p LCD
I believe it's headed for failure, too. It's not that bad a game, but it certainly has not convinced me to subscribe to it, either.
Even though I'm in a fairly active society, this game still feels like a single-player grindfest with a chatbox. On top of that, since everybody either talks in society chat or, worse still, uses voice chat, the game feels deserted most of the time. Especially if you play French like I do. All in all, nothing worth paying US $15 monthly for.
Sometimes I sail to the Antilles just to trade taunts with Brits and pirates, but apart from that the game just seems dead, and I'm on one of the more populous servers (Blackbeard). The economy? Not better. I make money (though my complaining about those issues basically had some people in the game calling me a troll and loser -- apparently if you find fault with the system you must be a failure at it), but in the long term I think most societies will do their production in-house and dump the rest on the market; in other words, much supply but little to no demand. All that the developers have thought of to counter this is make society organization as difficult as possible (by turning down the suggestion of a society warehouse, for starters), but without economic coordination, societies don't really have a purpose. Political power? none to speak of. Some might make diplomatic relations with other factions, but they are not binding upon the faction as a whole. Military coordination? unless they make a point in behaving like exclusive cliques, smart societies will welcome outside help to flip ports and defensive action, since it's the entire nation that benefits.
Not to mention that with the current lack of balance among factions, even with town reverts when one gets the maximum number of points the winner will probably remain the same all the time. In other words, Sisyphus Online, pushing a boulder up at $15 a month. If that's all there is to it, I'll pass.
The unrest mechanism is smart on paper, but unbalanced. Creating unrest is easy but reverting it is not (don't tell me it's as quick and feasible to create the same amount of rest at the economic hub as at an out-of-the-way deserted town). The PvP system, as usual, is newbie-unfriendly (I wouldn't want to join that game in a few months), ganking is prevalent, surrendering is useless as an option, and all non-ship-of-the-line vessels will soon be obsolete in the much-vaunted port battles, meaning everyone who isn't a Naval Officer will be encouraged to desist. There has already been a case (on a server I don't play) of high-ranking players demanding of lower players that they turn down invitations to port battles, only to find a grand total of seven players going to their doom. And if you're a lowbie, no point in going anyway: Small vessels don't have the range to hit their opponent without getting well within their range nor the armor to sustain more than a handful of broadsides.
All the while getting all those EVE expats looking for domination on the Next Big Game, sometimes transplanting their whole guilds without so much as a name change, telling us how the game ought to be played (never played EVE, so I couldn't say), behaving like know-it-alls while basically overlooking the key fact that societies are *meaningless* in this game. Also that when you lose a port, you can still build and operate factories there, but that it's more expensive (never mind that if the British really took over a town with a deep harbour, the first thing they'd do is close all the foreign-owned royal shipyards in operation there). So when you lose a town, you don't really lose anything there.
POTBS is a game that does not know what it wants to be, and I think (despite all I have said before) it might have worked better as a full-PvP game. With the ganking currently going on inside the red circles, only a fool or a suicidally hardcore player would think of turning his PvP flag on, knowing full well that he will be attacked by players who don't care that they are five times his number and twice his rank. The game can't really be having it both ways, while relying on instanced missions to provide fodder for XP and money grind.
Vetarnias - you pretty much nailed it. You pointed out the PvP flaws quite clearly
I really want this game to be successful. Potentially - it can be so good.
However, the constant instances are a drag. . And the economy in theory is good, but it doesn't seem to be functioning well in reality.
There does seem to be an imbalance of nations. The french are obviously severely outnumbered.
I agree with your point that FLS simply can't have it both ways. I think the best bet is to make it a fully PvP game.
The game hasn't achieved it's potential yet. It might, and it could...
I might give it another month or two. If there aren't legitimate improvements to gameplay or population increase, I think I might reluctantly abandon it.
"I have live my life by these nine simple words: It sounded like a good idea at the time."
--Livingston Taylor
This game was doomed as soon as they announced their partnership with SOE. It really doesn't matter that SOE didn't actually develop it because there are a ton of people that won't play any game that is connected with SOE in any way.
Just like most mmorpgs they are having a rough launch but considering they gimped themselves with their SOE partnership it looks like they are just going to crash and burn. Hopefully it will make other developers think twice before thinking about SOE platform publishing.
First off, being connected to soe doesnt imo really matter anymore. Most people playing potbs have never played any other mmo, so having known soe in the past is of no real importance. And at the end of the day, besides wow, soe have had 5 massive release games which all made money. At the end of the day, if you make money and 10 in 100 people are upset noone cares. We all know noone really cares anyway.
As for potbs.. well, i am not resubscribing, my main reason are lag and text bugs. The servers are based in the USA which gives me an average 3 second lag to begin with, 300ms ping. But ingame, the whole game is slightly lagged, some is video, some is latency, it isn't really serious, but it is enough to think..."maybe i don't really like this" and when you add this to the amount of text bugs like "bring 2 small arms to..." which should read "bring 4 small arms..." or "bring 19 blackpowder" when it should be 60...or mission texts all messed up...its just too much.
I personally don't like the melee combat system and i don't like the way the ship steering works or many of the sounds. So at the end of the day "maybe i don't really like this" turns into "sod this, i'm gonna play something else"
Server populations, even on roberts at Very Heavy, theres a remarkable lack of people about. I'd like to know exactly how many people Very Heavy is actually supposed to count. And the lag i get on Bonny when i turn towards Irish Point and theres maybe 20 people nearby is absolutely terrible... i can only imagine what it is like approaching 100+
Theres no support for decent video cards, no support for dual and quad cores, the graphics, the sounds, the textural bugs, the mission bugs, the melee, the ship steering, the instancing...gee...load into a port, load into a shop, load into the tailors, load out of the tailors, load out of the shop, load out of the port. Memory leak anyone?
The economy.. actually it works pretty great, it suffers alot from a lack of imagination, you can't put orders on the market or do anything intelligent. For example you can't have stuff auto dump into a warehouse for collection everything is manual, theres no safeguards against sleep induced mistakes.
But the one thing the economy really does need is PEOPLE. And on Roberts, my little Level 2 Wine Seller has over 100k in savings. On Bonny my Lv 30 has about 1 mill in savings. If bonny had a semi decent population the game would be much more managable as a freetrader. But essentially, the population at the moment warrants fewer traders. My Lv 30 has been on server since prerelease, my wineseller since release.
Overall, the game needs an injection of fun and needs alot of small changes, like any npc 20 levels below you should run from combat...forcing you to catch up to them and for sure, you should be getting attacked by ships that take 2 salvos to take out.
FLS...that is do damn frustrating...I've been attacked by 3 level 5 npc pirates...it's gonna waste 10 minutes of my time, i get no xp and almost no loot...wait a sec...that's why isn't it? To waste MY time...
Life is about Living, Sleep is about Dreaming, Games are about Strategy!
I think numbers wise, Light pop is about 1 to 100 people, medium is 100-250, heavy is 250-500 and very heavy is 500+ but, ingame it only counts about half of them. So a server with light, light, very heavy, heavy has like 50, 50, 500+ 300 on each.. ie 50 french and spanish, 500+ brits and 300 pirates. Problem is...where are they...go into OS and theres 10 fights...travel about and see 30 more...maybe 50 brit fights total... and most of those are 1v3npcs. So where is everyone? in an instance? i think not. Falsely projected numbers? i think so.
And this is where we come back to SOE... it's a well known fact that SOE loves falsely projecting server numbers. They've been doing that since the release of Everquest. I remember when the servers changed from actual to approx numbers. And when it did....it was because everyone was leaving.
Life is about Living, Sleep is about Dreaming, Games are about Strategy!
Regarding numbers: The requests for server merges (along with the possibility of transferring a character to another server) are becoming more and more persistent. I can understand that there is a bit of reluctance to do so at this time, as it would be a tacit acknowledgement that the game is in trouble, but it will have to be done sooner or later.
The screenshots posted in this thread don't lie; they give an accurate portrait of the servers at any given time. I live in North America, and have logged into the game at all times of the day -- in the middle of the night, in the afternoon, in prime-time, on weekends as well as during the week -- and there is (with the exception of Roberts, the so-called UK server, which shows relatively high numbers and might be the only fully functioning server out there) little to no fluctuation based on time of day. Occasionally you'll see a "moderate" here and there, and maybe even a "heavy" for pirates or Brits from time to time, but the rest are just "light". The only decently populated non-English server is Bonnet (German). Based on what has been posted on the POTBS forums, everybody plays French on the French server (surprise!) and the Spanish server is moribund, with players fluent in English moving to the other servers. Of the North American servers, Kidd, Bonny and Guadeloupe never showed anything above "light" for any faction. Those figures are all pretty dismal, and some people are already throwing accusations that the criteria for activity levels have been changed to make the numbers appear better than they are. But the game experience doesn't lie: it feels empty, and not just because of the instances. Nobody chats at all over channels everyone can read; that's not a pleasant gaming experience however you look at it.
I still recall the excuses people were throwing around to explain the low populations: When pre-boarding levels were low, everyone said "Oh, wait till launch". When launch came and nobody showed up, the answer was, "oh, wait for the first weekend and numbers will improve". Then when the weekend came and nothing much changed, the reason became "distribution problems", and when these would be solved all would be just fine. Then the numbers remained low, and people said "well, this is really a seventeenth-century EVE, and EVE gathered players over time". I already commented on the POTBS forums that this excuse didn't really wash because one would have expected EVE players to switch to this game if comparisons were being thrown around. Unless EVE's following is vastly overrated, one should really address the question as to why EVE's players didn't switch to POTBS.
Considering how some hardcore Shadowbane players are drooling over Darkfall, a game which they haven't even seen (and which is in fact so secret that critics have raised concerns of vaporware), how can we explain that large numbers of EVE players ignored POTBS despite TWO YEARS of closed beta and three weeks of open beta to try it out? It's all conjectural from here; maybe they stayed away because sci-fi really is their thing, or because they can't afford two subscriptions. Sure, you see some guys on POTBS overtly admitting they came from EVE, sometimes carrying their society with them, and I have seen much arrogance coming from them (basically sneering at anyone who doesn't consider PvP the primary purpose of the game).
My guess is, as I posted earlier, that POTBS isn't hardcore enough to satisfy EVE players. Let's face it, the stakes are for the most part insignificant. Sure, you lose a town, but you can still produce there and freetraders even get foreign taxes cut in half with the proper skill, so you're theoretically never shut out of a resource. Guildmasters (oh, I mean "society leaders") can't go on a power trip because they don't really have any economic or political power over the Caribbean or just their own faction, so those wishing to play pocket dictators aren't really offered the possibility to achieve that. They can't create cartels, because anyone can be a crafter at a relatively low cost (and when you don't pay upkeep on a building, you don't even lose it and back taxes don't accrue!), and foreign nationals can always come to your port and dump as many goods as they wish with you as buyer being none the wiser as to the origin of the products you're buying. Societies don't have much of a purpose; in fact game mechanisms hinder their efficiency.
The only challenge is PvP zones, and even then they are easy to circumvent by leaving ships at your key towns, teleporting there to produce your items, and letting them pile up in your warehouse until the situation is safe enough for you to ship them out to your markets. In other words, the competitive aspect of the game is inconsequential at best, and periodical town reverts when a faction wins enough points make it a wast of time at any rate.
And now the "free" month is about to expire...
Primetime, weekend (last weekend before re-up of subs) and pops look like the attached. Sure - no problem here. 5 of 10 servers with miserably low populations (all light meaning likely no more than 300 or 400 people total), another 2 with barely 100 or so people more, two more with a tad more than that, and one with a sort of OK population (at best) population by any normal MMO standard.
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Achiever 60.00%, Socializer 53.00%, Killer 47.00%, Explorer 40.00%
Intel Core i7 Quad, Intel X58 SLi, 6G Corsair XMS DDR3, Intel X-25 SSD, 3 WD Velociraptor SATA SuperTrak SAS EX8650 Array, OCZ 1250W PS, GTX 295, xFi, 32" 1080p LCD
With the recent information provided, and checking on postings, I think the overall population will reach a Plateau shortly. Seems the rate is now of Slow Growth.
Agreed, the resub of the 2nd month is going to be a key point.
And that is why...
Conservatives' pessimism is conducive to their happiness in three ways. First, they are rarely surprised -- they are right more often than not about the course of events. Second, when they are wrong they are happy to be so. Third, because pessimistic conservatives put not their faith in princes -- government -- they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They believe that happiness is an activity -- it is inseparable from the pursuit of happiness.
The trend is not of growth but shrinkage - populations are noticeably lower now than just a week ago and heave been steadily sliding all week, particularly since the last patch to ver 1.1. I think the game will continue to lose people over the coming week and lose when re-up time comes in a few days - then it might reach a plateau but it is going to take allot, a whole lot, to get out of the hole that will have the game in.
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Achiever 60.00%, Socializer 53.00%, Killer 47.00%, Explorer 40.00%
Intel Core i7 Quad, Intel X58 SLi, 6G Corsair XMS DDR3, Intel X-25 SSD, 3 WD Velociraptor SATA SuperTrak SAS EX8650 Array, OCZ 1250W PS, GTX 295, xFi, 32" 1080p LCD
This is what you get if you have a half done game and working with SOE.
I hope they learn from this that you need more then trailers and nice looking pictures.
Played:
From Earth & Beyond, Anarchy Online, Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa (Beta), EvE Online, City of Villians, Atlantica Online, Guild Wars, Lineage 2, Pirates of the Burning Sea, PlanetSide, RF Online, Second Life, Fallen Earth.