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''One mega server which is smart about putting you with your friends'' - no thanks.
D_TOX
Member UncommonPosts: 269
I was captivated by the Elder Scrolls video until they touted this game-breaker as if its a good thing. They basically just admitted the game will be heavily sharded/instanced all in one server. What this means is you will have a world much like Star Trek Online, Age of Conan, TOR and other flop MMO's that makes you and other players invisible to each other even when you're standing in the same Inn/house/landscape until you click a little button that swaps you into another version of that zone.
I really hate this retarded direction ALL MMO's are taking now. There's nothing MMO about them, just cheaper server architecture to ease the workload in return for a weaker player experience and community. Then you have games like Planetside 2, an MMOFPS that happily allows thousands of players to be connected simultaneously in one server zone. Maybe i'm just an old-schooler who enjoyed the days of SWG, EVE and WOW when everything you were experiencing was being experienced by other players too. You never missed a thing. Now it's all about minimizing waiting for 'mobs' to spawn and creating a streamlined fast-track experience for players which completely detracts from the real MMO experience of community, patience and dedication.
We're moving into the future of gaming but game development appears to be going backwards. Instead of creating BIGGER worlds with MORE quests and MORE ways to level, they are creating SMALLER worlds and INSTANCING them to sh*t instead. I just don't get it. There's no boldness in developing any more, only shortcuts and unoriginal 'creativity'. I would have thought of all developers the Elder Scrolls team would be brave and bold with their development but it looks like i was wrong.
I despise instancing!
Comments
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Cloudsol/
If you support that (Blindly, of course) then you probably enjoy all of these unimmersive lobby style RPGs that call themselves MMOs because they have grinding. Games that aren't a legitamate world that renders all of the players in your world are going backwards in technology, no matter how powerful this server tech is, they are missing the point. The very first MMORPGs render all of the players in your world at one time, why are there multiple servers and invisible people in front of you that you can't see? Makes zero sense, proves they aren't making an immersive game but another friend-teleport-lobby based RPG. Enjoy THAT bandwagon, this will be the 10th one in a row now.
Currently playing - FF14ARR
Previous games - SWG, World of Warcraft, ShadowBane, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall, Planetside Asheron's Call, Everquest, Everquest 2, Too many.
I'll answer that: it's called immersion, due to playing in a persistent world. when you have instancing, the world can never be persistent (which game instance is persistent compared to your previous play session? no one can tell).
That resembles lobby gaming; which in and of itself is not a bad thing, provided it doesn't try to convinve people it is an MMO.
An instanced game with 1 server and multiple copyes of the zones is NOT an mmorpg.
I hear ya brother. The NeoMMO gamers will never understand what it means to be apart of a real community. Players can no longer make a name for themselves using server models like Star Trek Online or Champions. Sure you can find players anywhere, anytime, but chances are you may never see this player again unless you befriend them. People become as meaningless as the NPC's in every zone.
It is nice to have a single large servers with small populations in which the community gets to really know each other. This helps build reputations, good or bad.
People want to feel needed and want to be recognized for their accomplishments, not become part of a mindless train of random player names.
Overall, this business model has been designed for MMO's they know will fail after 3-5 months. They want to make their money up on the initial box sales, then by micro-transactions, followed by a free to play model. This is the game designed for todays NeoMMO gamin community, a community hollow and meaningless players.
MMOs are more mainstream these days. Hell, I remember when Mythic were proud and did a server broadcast because they had 500 users online at one time in Dark age of Camelot.
It is in that light you need to be realistic about your servers. You need to accept the fact your game might attract MILLIONS of players now. You can either choose to entertain the instancing system or you need to set up more and more servers.
Sure, you lose a bit of immersion with the instancing systems but a "game breaker?" Not sure i'd call it that. Especially if each instance holds 2000 players. It becomes a mild annoyance when wanting to play with friends.
Frankly i'd rather see MMOs go with this type of architecture because inevitably you avoid the age old problem of server A which has lag, queues and 10,000 people vs server B which has 1000 players and is dead as a doornail, thus forcing even more onto server A.
I'm struggling to see how having 10 unique servers with a 2000 player cap vs one server with a 2000 player instance cap is in any way different.
Sadly this is seen less these days because we are mmo jumping, often players in general dont stick with an mmo longer than a few months after launch. But this again could very well be due to the said system decisions and designs. Devs shouldnt be afraid to think outside thebox if they want something long lasting. But finding out how with a proper balance isnt all that easy.
Currently playing - FF14ARR
Previous games - SWG, World of Warcraft, ShadowBane, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall, Planetside Asheron's Call, Everquest, Everquest 2, Too many.
When I first heard of TSO i just though "Meh... not interested at all" (even as a former DAoC player). Then they announced some changes to the combat system etc and I thought "Oh great.. now I might look into it" and then I read about their server/instance system and decided not to touch this game at all.
Since the OP very much nailed it I am not going to elaborate on this
@ OP : Please explain how this is worse than all the "invisible players" being on a completely separate server that one of you would have to pay to be switched to?
I mean seriously? This solves the problem of realizing an acquaintance also plays your fav. MMO, but on a different server. Ah well, that sucks.
For the slow among you, ESO won't have that problem. So please, tell me what the actual problem is.....
I agree fully! DF:UW is a game that invokes strong emotions(good and bad). You feel really connected to your character and become deeply immersed in the world around you.
Games like GW2, STWOR, etc, never got my heart pumping, or gave me an overwhelming since of accomplishment. I think the Neogamers of today never really got the chance to experience this type of game-play. They basically wish to support large scale zone based server models, that turn out to provide only a single player experience, which becomes boring after a while or get bored when reaching the so called end-game content.
@sirmaki
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/5425137#5425137
Next time read the whole thread.
Hold on - because GW2 does the same thing, using "overflow" instances of the same zone, I thought this concept had been official upgraded to AWESOME.
While I understand, and partially agree, with the OP, in that I'd prefer truly separate persistent worlds, I also believe that in a themepark game it really doesn't matter much. Most games don't let the players actually change anything in the world in an even semi-permanent way, so what does it matter if there are multiple instances?
The answer is that it doesn't really matter. And this solves the problem of low pop servers before it even starts, and allows friends to get together easily without having to pay money to transfer servers.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
i am pretty sure you stay in your same phase and it is persistent, unless you chose to switch to a different one.
it doesn't seem to me to be any different than if it was a traditional multi-server set up.
The idea is that everyone on the server should know each other and there should be a server "community", with the "bads" being pushed out of content, and the "elite" rising to the top.
That's the best I can come up with. Maybe it's the opposite end of the spectrum from the people that lament the focus on single player game play. There are now too many people to play with instead of not enough or no incentive to play with other people.
I'm not sure to be honest.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Would it be possible to make persistant phasing? Such as you would have phases 1-10 and the megaserver picks say phase 5 for you. Every time you play you would play in phase 5 until you decided you wanted to move to phase 7 to play with your cousin Johnny who just bought the game and didn't know you played.
In that case it would make the phased instances on the megaserver more like individual shards. I don't even know if that's possible. Just throwing it out there.
THIS and then some.
Take the idea of unique nicknames. It ain't just the xbox mentality that leads to GW2 having some really lousy names (xX Shit For Brains Xx) is NOT a RPG name.
But when you got millions of players each with half a dozen characters to name, you got to do SOMETHING. WoW and its endless server list is just not workable anymore. Some server gets named as good and it is full all the time while other servers are barren.
TSW did the unified server approach, you play on your own named shard but are part of a larger server base. It ain't perfect but frankly MMO tech and users are far from perfect to begin with.
You can't have hundreds of players in the same space anyway and even chat gets messy. It would be better if players behaved and didn't hold private convesations in general chat or spam emotes just to annoy but... well... people do.
So TSW has roleplay shards and non-rp shards. So people can play together but two different groups don't have to deal with each other if they don't want to.
Getting switched between instances between logins MIGHT mean the world is slightly less persistent (but no MMO is persistent anyway) but it also means that if an asshole is being an asshole, a simple relog will get you away from them. Entire servers in traditional MMO's have been ruined because of the antics of a handful of trolls.
Simply relog to get away from them?
Sign me UP!
Yep this hits the nail on the head.
With a game as popular as the Elder Scrolls you will either end up with dozens to hundreds of servers of unaccessable players, or they can do the instancing option.
Would anyone claim that EQ2 isnt a MMO? No. Yet that game has multiple instances of zones when they get overpopulated (usually only at the start of an expansion). Its just a fact of life. Yes eventually there will be servers capable of handling millions of players at once, but for now they have to be realistic with the options.
My guess would be that this is the opposite of what would happen. The point of having those shards is that they can keep a decent population around all players. So channel 1 would get nearly full then channel 2 would get nearly full, then channel 3 would get nearly full, etc. Whatever channel you're in when you login is determined by the population and where the other people in your friends list are, not by which channel you were in last night when you logged out.
The persistence would be the people you normally hang out with. Since it's a theme park, the server itself would have persistence, but that's because nothing really changes in a theme park server except the people. There wouldn't be any persistence in the people you didn't know and didn't usually hang out with. But then...how much persistence is there in the people you don't know on a theme park server anyway?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The difference being that ESO will have many more players. Its easy to tout having a single game world without instancing when you are a niche game with few players.
I will answer that.In a Single Server you eventually get to know other players, that creates a community.
In Megaservers, you are just a number who plays together with another number. This is not why MMORPGs came about. This is more a Multiplayer design.
I finally gave up on WOW because the Megaservers. Personally I hate them, they are so community unfriendly and I believe it will harm any MMO who abuse it.
You don't need to do all this immersion breaking instancing nonsense.
Look at the degree of character customisation in Planetside 2. Or lack thereof I should say.
If you use fewer assets you can fit more players in.