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One of Funcom's Biggest Mistakes: Too Many Servers
C-L-I-C-K
Member UncommonPosts: 21
It was a huge mistake (among many) for Funcom to spread their playerbase out so much, especially in an instanced game like AoC. For an instanced game, having so many servers is simply retarded and suicide, especially given the mass exodus that's been occurring in AoC for months.
Even if AoC was a good game, having 40 servers worldwide still would have hurt the game badly. There should only be 1 PvP server and 1 PvE server. That's it.
Just look at Guild Wars, an instanced MMO (yes, it IS a Massively Multiplayer Online game). Guild Wars had over 4 million players and that game only had 1 server, Everyone across the WORLD plays on 1 server. If they had 40 servers like AoC does, that game would have died a long time ago.
The longer Funcom doesn't merge their servers, the more people are going to keep unsubscribing. I'm not saying server merges will stop the mass exodus of players, but it will minimize unsub numbers by giving those who are dumb enough to stick with this game, more people to play with.
Comments
Perhaps the game engine could not handle it all on 1 server, eventhough it is instanced.
Anyway, I doubt this is the biggest reason for the AoC failure.
Then the player base has to take part of the blame because they were screaming for more servers during early access and the first month of launch.
Funcom was banking on millions of people playing AoC.
The flaw in that theory was they thought we would think the game was good fjust because they told us it was good, seems that plan backfired.
If they merge servers they're admitting that they don't have enough subscribers and this will not look good to investors.
I seriously doubt it will happen any time soon.
I said it is ONE OF Funcom's biggest mistakes.
There are several others.
Another one of their biggest mistakes: charging a monthly fee for a broken and incomplete game. If they were to have used Arena Net's business model, there wouldn't be nearly this much hate for AoC and Funcom.
Not consolidating servers buys Funcom 2-3 months to attempt to fix things. Conversely, it also will affect its AoC subscription numbers, harming its revenue streams. It is a risky gamble. By doing this they obviously think that bleeding subscriptions out on dead servers is less painful than the headlines (and thus, cancellations) that would result from an official announcement of contraction.
Personally I think they are not realizing how the fanbase recognizes these shady tactics and this contributes to server attrition on other servers. Food for thought at least.
Lit
When the head guy dumps his stock in Funcome the investors follow suit. Stock is down from 55 a share to 13 what would you do if this was your money. They can not keep 40 servers going for much longer and then what happens to the keeps ownership. I would say these guys are ripe for take over.
MAGA
Durring the first week all the servers were full. I remember a few times there was a que to get in. Had to wait 5 to 10 minutes to get in game. After everyone discovered that the game was garbage the servers went barren.
I have never seen an mmo lose so many players so fast. 3-4 months after release they lost at least 90% of their player base (imo). Hence why all the servers are deserted. That is totally unheard of.
But another poster said that if Funcom did merge the servers now that it would prove that AoC is a total failure and they arent ready to throw in the towel yet. Give it 6 more months(if it lasts that long) and I bet they will come up with some crazy excuse like "we have upgraded our servers to allow twice the population compared at release" to do a merge.
From what I know, Funcom said each of their servers could not handle more than 5000 players at the same time.
I agree. They should have made fewer servers but had more capacity for each of them. Like what they did for Anarchy Online. This is how they weathered the storm with AO. They had all these problems but yet they only had to pay for 2 large capacity servers. So they were not really losing money when they lost alot of initial customers.
Over time they fixed the game and made it into a really good game. Even most of the big name reviewers admit that it was one of the few Cinderella stories where a game launched horrible and came back. I remember PCGamer even went back and gave it mmorpg of the year later after the problems were fixed.
I feel that Funcom will fix AoC because they already proved that they can with AO but they definitely need to cut costs. And having all those servers is not helping things. They need to remember the lessons of the not so distant past.
I think they provide more servers in anticipation that they're going to need them.
Were the player-base not jumping ship at the rate they've been, it wouldn't be an issue.
Were the game actually *successful*, and growing in population, they'd have to add more.
Give it time, they'll eventually merge servers if populations stay low enough; it's the logical thing to do in that case.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I'm reading the Funcom forums right now. They are just invective at the moment. I've never seen a more pissed off crowd. Pretty funny...wish i had popcorn.
#1 Reason - They learned NOTHING from the Anarchy Online launch.
AoC launch was way way better then AO. AO was virtually unplayable from lvl 1. AO was the worst launch in the history of MMOs.
So AoC in spite of all the problems did have a very good launch and lvl 1-20 were EXCELLENT.
I think however funcom should be acknowledged for another first. They have launched a game and duped more people then any game in the history of MMOs. Everyone thought this game was great at the start only to find it fell flat at some lvl after 20. Funcom hid that knowledge most expertly with NDA and a Beta that only went to lvl 20. They hyped the game hugely and hit the market running!! I don't think I've ever seen a game launch as strongly and fail as completely to deliver on its post starting gameplay.
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Ethion
guild wars doent have 1 server it seems so In fact all those districts u see during special weekends are different servers
Its just thats they allow you to hop on server without us knowing we do that
Link to source of information?
It really doesn't matter if GW only had 1 server or not. The fact is, you can play with ANYONE WORLDWIDE.
They didn't spread their playerbase out like so many MMOs do. The only downside to that is, there is no persistent world that traditional MMOs have (which sometimes may be a good thing ie. no mob camping). But again, AoC is an instanced game, just like GW is. My point was, AoC should have done what GW did and allowed everyone to play together and not split up into 40 servers worldwide.
Many AoC servers are now ghosttowns. A lot of people who want to stick it out and keep paying Funcom to BETA test their game, are now quitting because they have very few people to play with.
guild wars doent have 1 server it seems so In fact all those districts u see during special weekends are different servers
Its just thats they allow you to hop on server without us knowing we do that
In this day and age, what mean "one server"? maybe a AoC server is a python task running in a mainframe, with other python task. Like.. maybe all servers run on the same computer.
I doubt it, It smell soo bad, that maybe the server is a special build of the client, and run on windows... and need DX to be installed, and can crash because of bugs on the sound driver... I can almost see how the servers of AoC has to run on Windows XP :P
Another month or two and they might be down to 2 serversw. Right now they are lucky if they have 100k left playing within a few months that number may drop below 20k.
Honestly, that is the least of their problems.
Gdoug, currently playing Threshold RPG (role playing required MUD)
http://www.thresholdrpg.com
I can't see them merging servers, they have never done it with Anarchy Online, and with the instanced way the game works with the battlekeeps, I don't think they will have the skill to pull it of.
The game will end up like Star Wars Galaxies, a bunch of dead servers with a hundred or so players on them, and having to pay to transfer your toon over to another more populated server.
When was the last time you saw anything built in Norway? They don't build cars, motorcycles, computers, toasters.......anything. For that matter, when was the last time you went out to eat some good Norwegian food? Never. Norwegian beer? Been around the world 3 times yet I've never heard of a Norwegian beer, whisky, or any other fine spirit. After the release of AoC, we see why. Thank god they don't build airplanes.
I think they would if they could. The ycant without huge problems.
It isnt wise to keep following a bad strategy and investors know exactly what is going on.
They ar enot going to get any worse press than they are getting asnd at least people thinking of joining the game wouldnt be greeted wit hempty servers and extra neg on forums and reviews.
So it would make sennse to rediuce the number of servers and take the flak for a bit.
I dont know what would happen though wit hall the lapsed accounts which they hope will become active again soon (maybe after the summer, maybe after they fix more stuff, maybe after wow and war releases come and gone)
If you get the email from them re subscription lapsing - the ymiss a trick here
email should at least have a poll in it - to a-get data and b more importantly tell customers they care but they cba to do that either. Has t obe most inane thing to do to send sm1 an email for a subscribed mmog that says - do you know your subs have lapsed .... wtf - yes ofc i know !
Sure there are people saying there were queues on launch - but thats part of their fk up - the yshould have phsed the launch or buit in the capacity to merge in case what has happened happened.
Wit hthe way this game looks and the specs it requires a launch after xmas would have been better a/ becasue it would have given them time to fix a load of stuff b/warhammer and wotlk would have kicjked off and b/little jonny got a new pc for christmas so he can actually play the game now
I dont know if anyone considered tis model but why not get players to pay to play beta. if they subscribe when the game launches proper they get the game free (at discount) or some other deal like 6 motnsh free subs after they paid for 6 months subs. This model would possibly have netted them a good few million.
Caveat Emptor
AoC launch was way way better then AO. AO was virtually unplayable from lvl 1. AO was the worst launch in the history of MMOs.
So AoC in spite of all the problems did have a very good launch and lvl 1-20 were EXCELLENT.
I think however funcom should be acknowledged for another first. They have launched a game and duped more people then any game in the history of MMOs. Everyone thought this game was great at the start only to find it fell flat at some lvl after 20. Funcom hid that knowledge most expertly with NDA and a Beta that only went to lvl 20. They hyped the game hugely and hit the market running!! I don't think I've ever seen a game launch as strongly and fail as completely to deliver on its post starting gameplay.
Please now, lest we forget. Dark and light, or are you new, and have a limited perspective. Ever heard of horizons, not that was a scam. I could name a few more that were true scams, and deserve the hate being thrown down on Funcom.
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"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
Hey now. No need to be racist.
Not consolidating servers buys Funcom 2-3 months to attempt to fix things. Conversely, it also will affect its AoC subscription numbers, harming its revenue streams. It is a risky gamble.
Lit
Oh, this is easy to figure out. What would be the stupidist thing for FC to do? Yeah, that's what they will do. Easy.