One Character list?

dlld

The standard for "AAA" mmo's seem to be to have seperate character lists for each server instead of having one list and then you pick whatever server you want (and obviously can also change server whenever you want)

 

This isn't new, I remember runescape for example always had such a system and i'm not entirely sure but I think GW2 will also be like that but other then that I don't know of any other "AAA" MMO's that (will) do it that way.

 

So I wonder why, there must be some significant drawbacks to one character list if almost all mmo's chose the other way right? Or is it just a copycat syndrome and not thinking?

Pros

-Switch Server whenever you want for free for whatever reason, new guild, friends picked wrong server etc.

-Self correcting server balance, if BG ques are horrendous people will switch untill it even out same with login queus.

-Need to close a server? No problem just close it with a pre heads up so people can decide where they wanna go and they can do so themselves!

Drawbacks

-No extra moneh for character transfers

-Less "server pride" but that also requires the server to actually be able gain such in a meaningfull way (the only thing that currently pops into my mind is the GW2 server vs server pvp) things like "this server has all the best pvp guilds!" are not server pride.. that's guild pride and most likely it became that way because of rerolls or paid server transfers anyway making the point moot.

-Immersion? If you allow paid character transfers the point is moot, and besides you will unlikely ever meet every player on your server so you would have no idea if that new guy you just met leveled up on this server or just moved, there's far more severe immersion breaking issues prevalent in all mmo's today.

If you can't tell I don't think the drawbacks I could come up with outweigh the pros, not even close so I'm asking you what other drawbacks are there or expand upon the ones mentioned (or even pros). And why not, lets slap a poll up as well.

Adamantine

Well, that doesnt really make much sense to me, unless you are limited to one character (like Darkfall). Otherwise a per server namelist is required so people at least get SOME choices about their name. Imagine WoW would realize your idea. Very soon people would only be able to choose names like Ztzukyltotl etc. Ten million players and each can IIRC like have 8 characters PER SERVER - so theoretically that could be billions of names (if everyone would make characters on each server).



You can also completely avoid having the server problem by simply having a number of copies of the same server world and let people freely switch between the available copies. If you have more players, you can just increase the numbers of copies. If someone wants to log into the world and his current instance is full, you can make them choose from the list of available instances. If you have too many players you just connect new hardware and create additional instances for the new servers. And if there are too few players, merge instances and remove the hardware.



Of course you still would need multiple serverfarms; like one for EU, one for USA, one for Japan and one for Australia (to give a typical example). This in order to guarantee your customers high ping by having a server relatively close to their home.

 

dlld

So summed up your drawback is due to the amount of characters there will be low availability on names, true if you happen to only allow one relatively short name, EVE is a good example it only has one server 3 characters per account with free trials you can pick the name you want and just add a surname (not sure on the max total amount of characters but it can be pretty long) and as far as I know EVE isn't running out of "good" names (IE not zjskjfds) the two characters I created not so terribly long ago in terms of EVE's life span both had possible real life names and I created them both on the first try (they even had the same first name).

I don't think this is really an issue provided you allow long names and (one or two) spaces. The amount of name combinations most exceeds the earth population many times over if you allow say 20 characters and 2 spaces

Wow has a cap of 50 characters per account but nobody needs 50 characters, a good cap would be so you can play every class and if applicable on each side so in SW:TOR's case there would be a 16 character cap since there is 8 different classes on each side. Lets take a ridicoulus example, If 100 million people each created 16 characters that would be 1,6 billion names needed. The amount of letter combinations(not names) with 20 characters is 19928148895209409152340197376 even if only 0,0000001 percent of those combinations are decently sounding names that still leaves us with 19928148895(20940915234)  for emphasis the parenthesis is the billion range so it could be 10 more zeroes added to the reduction and there would still be a sizeable amount of names left over.

 

I don't really think this is a problem.

Quizzical

What you propose is slightly less bad than the alternative that you list.  But only slightly, and still far from good.  If you need 10 servers for one portion of the game to have a reasonable player density, and only 2 for another, then going with either 10 servers or 2 globally is catastrophically dumb.  Just have 10 instances of the one area and 2 of the other.  See how Champions Online does this, for example.

Also, running out of names isn't a serious problem unless a game is dumb about the naming convention.  One way to do it is Guild Wars' convention that a name must have at least one space.  Your preferred combination of at least two "names" is very unlikely to already be taken unless you've got a serious lack of creativity--and that's in a game with something like 7 million boxes sold.

Another way to do it is Champions Online's system where your "name" is a combination of character name and account name.  Your account name has to be unique, but you only have one account name.  You can only have one character with a given name on your account, but a lot of different people can have the same character name.  So if you and a thousand other people want to be Sephiroth, you all can, at least until you all get banned for stealing some other company's IP.  (Actually, a lot of trademarked names are blocked, to try to limit how much the mods have to do.  Furthermore, you'd only have your name changed and be given a warning, unless you were really persistent about IP violations.)  The name tag over your head is normally just your character name, though there are ways to see the account name, too, if you want.