But saying "Why play x game when its the same as game y" is not a good arguement, simple because if it was we would all still be playing EQ and UO.
When WoW came out, the mechanics were similar to EQ/UO, but the philiosophy behind the game was radically different. EQ sought to make the game challenging and difficult, and actively worked to create a huge rift between those that could spend a lot of time in the game, and those that couldn't.
WoW changed that philosophy, and decided to make the game much easier across the board. Much lower death penalties, faster world traveling, quests that were very defined and easily accessible, clearly marked zones for various level ranges, and the list goes on and on. It really was the first total "theme park" game, and it held your hand from Level 1 all the way up through the highest end raids. No other MMO had really done that before WoW.
The genre that once actively endorsed elitism had shifted overnight to embrace casualism, and the subscriptions totally reflect that fact.
Just because the mechanics are similar does not make it the same game. They weren't even close in the outset. The mechanics of RIFT are clearly nothing new, the question is, is the philosophy different enough to attract and keep players.
You are right. Just because the mechanics are similar does not make it the same game. But when you have a chacolate cake and a dark chacolate cake in the end its still cake. and this time the cake is not a lie!
They underestimated the number of people in the headstart and overestimated the number of people who were not in the headstart but bought the game. I do not think the servers will ever balance out (the headstart servers will generally always have more people by a wide margin except for the "cool name" new servers like nyx which ran right up to full)
yeah IMO its better to start out with to little and add from there. that way servers say balanced. Which brings me back to my first quote. I think Trion is putting all of there eggs in 1 basket. Its gonna hurt them in the long wrong. They are just pissing money away for something they are gambeling on. I think Rift will have a decent player base. and it may at first. but in a month or 2 ur gonna see like 1/3rd or half the population go back to wow.(or whatever game they are playing.) Rift is currently the flavor of the month. (not trying to troll or fanboy anything)
Like i said i have been playing MMO's for a very long time. I have been playing video games sence i could walk. i am now 25 turning 26 in a couple months. I have always wanted to make video games and because of my past backround think i have alot of knowledge behind it. I have played alot of MMOs and have caught on to the pattern. It sucks i know.
When WoW came out, the mechanics were similar to EQ/UO, but the philiosophy behind the game was radically different. EQ sought to make the game challenging and difficult, and actively worked to create a huge rift between those that could spend a lot of time in the game, and those that couldn't.
WoW changed that philosophy, and decided to make the game much easier across the board. Much lower death penalties, faster world traveling, quests that were very defined and easily accessible, clearly marked zones for various level ranges, and the list goes on and on. It really was the first total "theme park" game, and it held your hand from Level 1 all the way up through the highest end raids. No other MMO had really done that before WoW.
The genre that once actively endorsed elitism had shifted overnight to embrace casualism, and the subscriptions totally reflect that fact.
Just because the mechanics are similar does not make it the same game. They weren't even close in the outset. The mechanics of RIFT are clearly nothing new, the question is, is the philosophy different enough to attract and keep players.
I am not sure which WoW you did play at launch but it for certain was a different than the one I did. The raids were for the most part inaccessible for the majority of the playerbase and a player wielding, say, Perdition's Blade from Ragnaros was so many times more powerful than your casual player that PvP became totally and entirely pointless. Heck, even running Stratholme or Scholomance in a 5-man group was a task few could even fathom.
When WoW did realise that not everyone wants to spend countless hours raiding due to archaic game-mechanics (loads of trash that kept on re-spawning for one) they also embraced the idea that maybe a greater proportion of their playerbase ought to have a chance to enjoy from the raids. This transition happened somewhere after the launch of The Burning Crusade expansion as the "entry" level raids on TBC used to require coordination and skill that far exceeded that of second or third tier. Not to mention heroic dungeons that did include encounters where a single mistake killed you with quite some certainty. However, the final transition did happen with Wrath of the Lich King expansion where they openly admitted that they had failed to cater the vast majority of their playerbase.
Hence, I fail to see how WoW catered the casuals and held their hands from the first level onwards. Therefore it is quite unlikely that the reason people moved away from EQ to WoW would be the significantly easier game but rather a significantly better game that had an appeal to a larger audience. Whether this holds true now for Rift vis-a-vis to WoW is an entirely different question and one that remains to be seen, though I think that most would answer on the negative. But I'd dare to say that the gaming philosophy has fairly little to do with the outcome.
WAR was pushed out the door WAY to fast to justify the vast number of servers they launced with. All of WARs features that made it cool were very population dependent. Rifts is much more population tolerant, mechanics wise, from what I'm hearing from my friends in there. Had a substantial portion of WAR not been scrapped, and it released with the finish and polish that Rifts has shown, it would have fared much better. Even though I'm not playing Rifts I think they are handling the server additions correctly. Keep in mind, we can't see how many copies they have sold as accurately as Trion can.
Always better to have too much of something than too little. If it gets to the point they need to merge servers, is that really a big deal?
~Miles "Tails" Prower out! Catch me if you can!
Yeah, it is a big deal. I've been through two mergers when playing WAR and it really sucked; you build up a guild and settle in; get to know people, learn who you can cooperate with and who your noteworthy enemies are, etc. Every server has a kind of social cohesion going on, on some the nice folks stand out, on others the bad. People enjoy working on reputations for themselves and their guild; you kind of build a bond with the server you play on. I know it sounds a little dramatic but at a merge that is all forcefully taken away from you and you have to start off again.
The rp-pvp server we were on was to be closed, offering us the choice of an rp-pve server and a pvp server to go to; a real dillemma for some people. Around a month and a half later a similar choice had to be made. The guild lost around half its members each time, due to quitters who gave up on WAR and people who went to the other server option offered. After the second merge I lost interest and quit as well. Also because WAR wasn't a game that held my interest in the long run though, but the mergers sure speeded it up.
Had Mythic delivered the goods, it wouldn't have been too many. Rift delivers the goods...
I can show you three or four game review sites (Good reputable sites like IGN and GameSpot) that gave WAR a great score.
Game sites always give great scores to the games who put the big, expensive ads all over their site... and just like WAR, which had a million players at launch, Rift will quickly start merging servers when the game begins to lose players.
There just ain't much content in Rift to keep people around for the long haul. (I thought WAR was a *lot* more fun than Rift, personally.)
They might be, but its very importand to merge servers when they get low and do it fast.
Noone likes to playt by them self, you can do it for a short time but the chances are that paying costumer will quit if they leave it at low for to long.
i think aion would have done it better if they was faster to merge low population servers same with war, war eu used so long to merge servers the 1st time i ended up quiting for that reason alone. War Na was faster on this
was pointless to play on a low pop server in war
Everyone that think merge looks bad are foolish, if you have playd at release the last 10 years its a given. Its better to merge servers and keep the already paying costumer happy then it is to avoid merge but look good for the potential paying costumer.
People will notice decline in sub merge or no merge and there will be a decline in rift just the same as aion/war and every other mmo releaseing after em.
Mmo gamers are just like others gamers they like to try new games, this is why you need alot servers at start and merge em when the people that only here to test the game returns to what they prefer to playing.
Haveing ques is not an option, nothing worse then getting home from work/school and see an 1-5h que
Say you have Bob on Black Server and Bob on White Server.
They decide to merge Black and White into a Grey Server.
Which Bob gets to stay Bob? How will people know which Bob they are dealing with...?
What if one is a GOOD Bob and one is a BAD Bob? The BAD Bob, if he/she got the name, could wreak a little bit of havoc there, no?
Really was surprised that they dropped out 19 more servers for NA. There were already 39 shards. Did they really expect to have half of the people from the pre-order headstart show up today as new accounts?
Given that a 60 some person queue is only around 6 minutes now, there are 20 shards with a queue ranging from 7 to 403 (the top 6 waits are on PvP servers). There are 18 shards with low pops...
...given a 5-10 minute queue, I would see no reason to reroll on a low pop server. The disadvantages simply outweigh the advantages.
If I go back to Reclaimer, there are 182 people in queue with around a 24 minute wait. If I stay on my 4th server, Carrion - there is no queue to login - but the avg wait for a WF is 23 minutes.
WoW... I just got WARNED by a moderator because I insulted "White Bob". What an interesting beginning to the day...
Always better to have too much of something than too little. If it gets to the point they need to merge servers, is that really a big deal?
~Miles "Tails" Prower out! Catch me if you can!
It's bad press if you're merging servers 3 months after launch.
It's a hard situation. Do you want to merge servers after the immediate start of a mmorpg, and have bad press, or do you want people to advertise the game for the first month on every single gaming board as something that you buy but cannot play.
Kinda a loose-loose situation the way I see it. Personally I think there should be enough servers to allow people play what they pay for, and just take the bad press afterwards.
Developer side should begin making tech that support somekind of flexible server systems to avoid these problems (I'd rather not see this solution to be shard-style servers like CO and some others). Or make "server pairings" at launch with a single name, that gets merged after the launch under that single name. Server numbers go down but "realm" names stays at the same number as launch. Best solution from business point of view is to develop such a game that the numbers go only up
These games are really limited by landmass and the amount of people that landmass can support before the game stops being fun. Unless people are ok with instanced zones (the way AoC tried it and was an outcry), I don't see it happening any time soon. Even with instances you may end up in the instance where the cool event is not taking place, or have people congest the area where that event is about to take place.
If we want persistent one instance worlds we'll have to excuse both long queue times and merges.
well you did notice all the threads complaining about 6 hour ques for headstart right? ALL but maybe 3 was HIGH or FULL and most of those was completely full for headstart.
true true, i got to play 2 times in the headstart...now that i am paying for it i dont want to wait anymore.....add them
Always better to have too much of something than too little. If it gets to the point they need to merge servers, is that really a big deal?
~Miles "Tails" Prower out! Catch me if you can!
That's actually the least desirable scenario.
To draw from history, WAR and AION are two examples of MMOs that went server happy at release rather than just managed the load and deal with queues. They put themselves in situations where they exacerbated population issues and had to remedy them with drastic measures (server merges).
About hafl the people that buy an MMO retail box don't stay after the first month or so. Almsot everyone that plays during the first month will play more often and for longer periods than they normally will play. Combine those two and you have an excessive load on the servers the first 30 days. If you create servers to accommodate that load, you end up with a heap of dead servers with empty starter zones and sparse populations. So not only do you have the expected reduction in the population, you also have a following of people leaving a 'dead game' because of low player populations.
Turbine did a great job with LOTRO. They weathered out the queues and reasonably predicted what would be needed for healthy servers in months 2 and 3 after release. As a result, they maintained much healthier populations across the board, which in turn leads to better retention and stronger communities.
Also, ice cream sales drive murder rates.
Correlation is not causation. The reason that those games didn't keep their servers full is because they weren't very good. You're going to lose a lot more frustrated players from not being able to play, than you are from server mergers.
"The reason that those games didn't keep their servers full is because they weren't very good."
Which is why I said it exacerbated the population issues, not caused the population issues.
"You're going to lose a lot more frustrated players from not being able to play, than you are from server mergers."
History has shown that players will weather out weeks of queues. The most classic example of that was WOW. Players will not stick around on dead servers.
Do you have examples of MMOs where queues at release caused players to leave? I'm curious where you got that idea from.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Reduce the servers NOW and just have players deal with sitting in a queue. It's better then having 200 people on a server 3mths from now. I do not want to see this game suffer the server issue WAR did. I ended up getting moved 4 times because of server shut downs, it pushed me away from the game.
Originally posted by Garvon3 Originally posted by Miles-Prower Always better to have too much of something than too little. If it gets to the point they need to merge servers, is that really a big deal? ~Miles "Tails" Prower out! Catch me if you can!
Traditionally speaking, yes its a big deal. Almost every single one of the AAA MMOs to come out in the last 5 years have had to merge servers after launch, which leads to a spiral down in subscriptions.
they have to merge because people play beta as far as possible then when launch comes they max out in a couple weeks then quit saying there is no end game. face it, this will be the new trend for quite sometime. no mmo will survive anymore because of the lack of wow content that everyone feels all mmo's should have on launch day.
There WILL BE SERVER MERGES, at some point. Feel free to necro this and throw it back on me later.
Server merges shouldn't automatically spell doom for X game that experiences them. I think all modern MMO's will have an overflux of population at first. It's understanding that it's an overflux, rather than an abandonment later on.
Only 2 games have been an exception. Eve and WoW. 2 out of dozens does not an example make.
Sticking to MMOs that have a few years under their belt, here's some MMOs that never had a server merge:
Ultima Online
Puzzle Pirates
Asheron's Call
A Tale in the Desert
Runescape
Maple Story
DOFUS
zOMG!
Ashen Empires
Florensia
Pirate Galaxy
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Reduce the servers NOW and just have players deal with sitting in a queue. It's better then having 200 people on a server 3mths from now. I do not want to see this game suffer the server issue WAR did. I ended up getting moved 4 times because of server shut downs, it pushed me away from the game.
You can't have the same issues. Rifts are scalable, the WAR public quests were not.
You have to consider that a casual gamer may have one hour per day to play, during prime time. If he has to wait half of it in a queue, he'll quit. And since the casual gamer is the vast majority, guess who's getting enough servers so he doesn't have to wait in queue
They are adding to many servers at once. People complain about queues but a lot aren't willing to move servers. They have friends or guilds on those servers with huge queues so adding so many new servers is a tad clumsey in my opinion. They should focus on increase the server capacity little bits at a time whilst maintaining a good balance for performance and other issues increased population gives you.
I think they have taken the easy and lazy option to be honest. They could have a lot of people that bought the game but I'm playing on a server that is usually full and haven't exactly seen the swarm of people i saw in beta 1.
The only people who prefer queues to new servers are people with a lot of free time (either unemployed or students ussualy). For the rest, time is ussualy precious enough, to waste it in queue when they want to play game. I can better go play another game than wait in queue, but than it's raises question : why do i pay for the game when i cant play it when i have free time ?
There are 2 alternatives to launching this many servers. Having everyone waiting for hours before they can log in or by restricting the number of copies you sell (Wow and DF both did this).
Reduce the servers NOW and just have players deal with sitting in a queue. It's better then having 200 people on a server 3mths from now. I do not want to see this game suffer the server issue WAR did. I ended up getting moved 4 times because of server shut downs, it pushed me away from the game.
You can't have the same issues. Rifts are scalable, the WAR public quests were not.
You have to consider that a casual gamer may have one hour per day to play, during prime time. If he has to wait half of it in a queue, he'll quit. And since the casual gamer is the vast majority, guess who's getting enough servers so he doesn't have to wait in queue
the main problem was using server name from the beta, many ppl join that server because are used whit the name and may join because of guilds, ppl wont change servers because they have to move all the guild and some guild play on a server because a rival guild is on the enemy faction the only solution is to increase server caps
the main problem was using server name from the beta, many ppl join that server because are used whit the name and may join because of guilds, ppl wont change servers because they have to move all the guild and some guild play on a server because a rival guild is on the enemy faction the only solution is to increase server caps
A balloon can take so much air before it finally bursts.
The final beta stress tests were made to see how far you can push the balloon. Unless they are throttling the servers (aka allowing only few people at a time to login to servers thus spreading the population on all zones and level ranges), they can't push the servers over a certain limit, before they become unstable.
The only people who prefer queues to new servers are people with a lot of free time (either unemployed or students ussualy). For the rest, time is ussualy precious enough, to waste it in queue when they want to play game. I can better go play another game than wait in queue, but than it's raises question : why do i pay for the game when i cant play it when i have free time ?
One thing that I've seen remain a constant in each branch of the entertainment industry that I've worked in is that people, in general, will tolerate delays in receiving their desired entertainment when there is no additional perceived cost to them or when they are receiving some level of compensation for the delay. Satellite or Cable installs? A company would need to delay up to three or four weeks before most people say "Screw it. I'll cancel and go with the other one." Even then, if the company offers a free month of service or a free channel pack for a period of time, most people will still give it another week or so.
Now, this may very well be different in other countries, but that behaviour is so consistent here in America that a company can almost bank on it. This also is only in relation to receiving or the initial install. Once they have the entertainment they are far less tolerant of outages, delays or lack of access to it.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Comments
You are right. Just because the mechanics are similar does not make it the same game. But when you have a chacolate cake and a dark chacolate cake in the end its still cake. and this time the cake is not a lie!
yeah IMO its better to start out with to little and add from there. that way servers say balanced. Which brings me back to my first quote. I think Trion is putting all of there eggs in 1 basket. Its gonna hurt them in the long wrong. They are just pissing money away for something they are gambeling on. I think Rift will have a decent player base. and it may at first. but in a month or 2 ur gonna see like 1/3rd or half the population go back to wow.(or whatever game they are playing.) Rift is currently the flavor of the month. (not trying to troll or fanboy anything)
Like i said i have been playing MMO's for a very long time. I have been playing video games sence i could walk. i am now 25 turning 26 in a couple months. I have always wanted to make video games and because of my past backround think i have alot of knowledge behind it. I have played alot of MMOs and have caught on to the pattern. It sucks i know.
I am not sure which WoW you did play at launch but it for certain was a different than the one I did. The raids were for the most part inaccessible for the majority of the playerbase and a player wielding, say, Perdition's Blade from Ragnaros was so many times more powerful than your casual player that PvP became totally and entirely pointless. Heck, even running Stratholme or Scholomance in a 5-man group was a task few could even fathom.
When WoW did realise that not everyone wants to spend countless hours raiding due to archaic game-mechanics (loads of trash that kept on re-spawning for one) they also embraced the idea that maybe a greater proportion of their playerbase ought to have a chance to enjoy from the raids. This transition happened somewhere after the launch of The Burning Crusade expansion as the "entry" level raids on TBC used to require coordination and skill that far exceeded that of second or third tier. Not to mention heroic dungeons that did include encounters where a single mistake killed you with quite some certainty. However, the final transition did happen with Wrath of the Lich King expansion where they openly admitted that they had failed to cater the vast majority of their playerbase.
Hence, I fail to see how WoW catered the casuals and held their hands from the first level onwards. Therefore it is quite unlikely that the reason people moved away from EQ to WoW would be the significantly easier game but rather a significantly better game that had an appeal to a larger audience. Whether this holds true now for Rift vis-a-vis to WoW is an entirely different question and one that remains to be seen, though I think that most would answer on the negative. But I'd dare to say that the gaming philosophy has fairly little to do with the outcome.
WAR was pushed out the door WAY to fast to justify the vast number of servers they launced with. All of WARs features that made it cool were very population dependent. Rifts is much more population tolerant, mechanics wise, from what I'm hearing from my friends in there. Had a substantial portion of WAR not been scrapped, and it released with the finish and polish that Rifts has shown, it would have fared much better. Even though I'm not playing Rifts I think they are handling the server additions correctly. Keep in mind, we can't see how many copies they have sold as accurately as Trion can.
Warhammer fanatic since '85.
Yeah, it is a big deal. I've been through two mergers when playing WAR and it really sucked; you build up a guild and settle in; get to know people, learn who you can cooperate with and who your noteworthy enemies are, etc. Every server has a kind of social cohesion going on, on some the nice folks stand out, on others the bad. People enjoy working on reputations for themselves and their guild; you kind of build a bond with the server you play on. I know it sounds a little dramatic but at a merge that is all forcefully taken away from you and you have to start off again.
The rp-pvp server we were on was to be closed, offering us the choice of an rp-pve server and a pvp server to go to; a real dillemma for some people. Around a month and a half later a similar choice had to be made. The guild lost around half its members each time, due to quitters who gave up on WAR and people who went to the other server option offered. After the second merge I lost interest and quit as well. Also because WAR wasn't a game that held my interest in the long run though, but the mergers sure speeded it up.
My brand new bloggity blog.
Game sites always give great scores to the games who put the big, expensive ads all over their site... and just like WAR, which had a million players at launch, Rift will quickly start merging servers when the game begins to lose players.
There just ain't much content in Rift to keep people around for the long haul. (I thought WAR was a *lot* more fun than Rift, personally.)
They might be, but its very importand to merge servers when they get low and do it fast.
Noone likes to playt by them self, you can do it for a short time but the chances are that paying costumer will quit if they leave it at low for to long.
i think aion would have done it better if they was faster to merge low population servers same with war, war eu used so long to merge servers the 1st time i ended up quiting for that reason alone. War Na was faster on this
was pointless to play on a low pop server in war
Everyone that think merge looks bad are foolish, if you have playd at release the last 10 years its a given. Its better to merge servers and keep the already paying costumer happy then it is to avoid merge but look good for the potential paying costumer.
People will notice decline in sub merge or no merge and there will be a decline in rift just the same as aion/war and every other mmo releaseing after em.
Mmo gamers are just like others gamers they like to try new games, this is why you need alot servers at start and merge em when the people that only here to test the game returns to what they prefer to playing.
Haveing ques is not an option, nothing worse then getting home from work/school and see an 1-5h que
Servers will end up merging, thats what happens in a MMO. Rarely do they get it just right.
If there would be only 30-50 servers people would whine because of 20k+ queue times. Now they whine because there is to many servers. /facepalm
WoW... I just got WARNED by a moderator because I insulted "White Bob". What an interesting beginning to the day...
It's a hard situation. Do you want to merge servers after the immediate start of a mmorpg, and have bad press, or do you want people to advertise the game for the first month on every single gaming board as something that you buy but cannot play.
Kinda a loose-loose situation the way I see it. Personally I think there should be enough servers to allow people play what they pay for, and just take the bad press afterwards.
Developer side should begin making tech that support somekind of flexible server systems to avoid these problems (I'd rather not see this solution to be shard-style servers like CO and some others). Or make "server pairings" at launch with a single name, that gets merged after the launch under that single name. Server numbers go down but "realm" names stays at the same number as launch. Best solution from business point of view is to develop such a game that the numbers go only up
These games are really limited by landmass and the amount of people that landmass can support before the game stops being fun. Unless people are ok with instanced zones (the way AoC tried it and was an outcry), I don't see it happening any time soon. Even with instances you may end up in the instance where the cool event is not taking place, or have people congest the area where that event is about to take place.
If we want persistent one instance worlds we'll have to excuse both long queue times and merges.
true true, i got to play 2 times in the headstart...now that i am paying for it i dont want to wait anymore.....add them
"The reason that those games didn't keep their servers full is because they weren't very good."
Which is why I said it exacerbated the population issues, not caused the population issues.
"You're going to lose a lot more frustrated players from not being able to play, than you are from server mergers."
History has shown that players will weather out weeks of queues. The most classic example of that was WOW. Players will not stick around on dead servers.
Do you have examples of MMOs where queues at release caused players to leave? I'm curious where you got that idea from.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Reduce the servers NOW and just have players deal with sitting in a queue. It's better then having 200 people on a server 3mths from now. I do not want to see this game suffer the server issue WAR did. I ended up getting moved 4 times because of server shut downs, it pushed me away from the game.
Momo sucks, I have proof.
they have to merge because people play beta as far as possible then when launch comes they max out in a couple weeks then quit saying there is no end game. face it, this will be the new trend for quite sometime. no mmo will survive anymore because of the lack of wow content that everyone feels all mmo's should have on launch day.
Sticking to MMOs that have a few years under their belt, here's some MMOs that never had a server merge:
Ultima Online
Puzzle Pirates
Asheron's Call
A Tale in the Desert
Runescape
Maple Story
DOFUS
zOMG!
Ashen Empires
Florensia
Pirate Galaxy
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
You can't have the same issues. Rifts are scalable, the WAR public quests were not.
You have to consider that a casual gamer may have one hour per day to play, during prime time. If he has to wait half of it in a queue, he'll quit. And since the casual gamer is the vast majority, guess who's getting enough servers so he doesn't have to wait in queue
They are adding to many servers at once. People complain about queues but a lot aren't willing to move servers. They have friends or guilds on those servers with huge queues so adding so many new servers is a tad clumsey in my opinion. They should focus on increase the server capacity little bits at a time whilst maintaining a good balance for performance and other issues increased population gives you.
I think they have taken the easy and lazy option to be honest. They could have a lot of people that bought the game but I'm playing on a server that is usually full and haven't exactly seen the swarm of people i saw in beta 1.
The only people who prefer queues to new servers are people with a lot of free time (either unemployed or students ussualy). For the rest, time is ussualy precious enough, to waste it in queue when they want to play game. I can better go play another game than wait in queue, but than it's raises question : why do i pay for the game when i cant play it when i have free time ?
There are 2 alternatives to launching this many servers. Having everyone waiting for hours before they can log in or by restricting the number of copies you sell (Wow and DF both did this).
No solution is good.
^ im with him
the main problem was using server name from the beta, many ppl join that server because are used whit the name and may join because of guilds, ppl wont change servers because they have to move all the guild and some guild play on a server because a rival guild is on the enemy faction the only solution is to increase server caps
BestSigEver :P
A balloon can take so much air before it finally bursts.
The final beta stress tests were made to see how far you can push the balloon. Unless they are throttling the servers (aka allowing only few people at a time to login to servers thus spreading the population on all zones and level ranges), they can't push the servers over a certain limit, before they become unstable.
One thing that I've seen remain a constant in each branch of the entertainment industry that I've worked in is that people, in general, will tolerate delays in receiving their desired entertainment when there is no additional perceived cost to them or when they are receiving some level of compensation for the delay. Satellite or Cable installs? A company would need to delay up to three or four weeks before most people say "Screw it. I'll cancel and go with the other one." Even then, if the company offers a free month of service or a free channel pack for a period of time, most people will still give it another week or so.
Now, this may very well be different in other countries, but that behaviour is so consistent here in America that a company can almost bank on it. This also is only in relation to receiving or the initial install. Once they have the entertainment they are far less tolerant of outages, delays or lack of access to it.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre