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I Wish every MMO had just one server
metalhead980
Member Posts: 2,658
You guys know my deal, I play Eve. The game uses only one server for its 250-300k accounts.
While 250k doesn't seem like alot since everyone plays on one server Its packed and has a great economy and Large community.
Technical lmitiations set aside for a second, wouldn't you rather have a MMO that lets the entire community play on one server, in one game world?
Look at the MMOs that released in the passed 4-5 years, they have what 50-400k subs (with the exception of wow) these MMOs release with 5,10 maybe even 20+ servers for a community of 200k or less.
Imagine a Game like WAR with all 200-400k accounts on one server. Its would be chaos like the developers intended. A game like Lotro with 100-300k accounts on one server would be amazing you would never have a hard time grouping for a dungeon again.
I know atm due to technical limitations this isnt possible, but lets say it was possible.
Would you prefer a MMO with one server/game world for the entire community or the multi- server system we have now where only about 5%-10% of the community actually plays together?
I'll toss up a poll I'm actually interested in reading what you guys think.
PLaying: EvE, Ryzom
Waiting For: Earthrise, Perpetuum
Comments
WoW a typo on the Poll, god I suck im sorry guys
PLaying: EvE, Ryzom
Waiting For: Earthrise, Perpetuum
Hi,
Well I choose for multiple servers. Because in some games you already see that there are too many people playing on one server (waiting for mobs, lag in towns, ...). And that really sucks, it drains the fun of playing a MMORPG.
But on the other side I also agree with some of your points. Sometimes (in WoW) you really need to wait a long time till you find yourself a decent party to party with.
Of course I'd want one game world, given that the game itself was massive enough to support it (and had some nice, clever network partitioning to actually make it possible). One of the major things that's fallen by the wayside as a result of multiple servers is GMs interacting in a meaningful way with the players (as in stories and live events rather than just customer service). It started before WoW, but I believe WoW was one of the first to outright say that they don't do cool GM-run events because they don't want to favor one server or another or have to deal with having staff to run it on every server.
With a single server, you can dedicate any resources to that single server. You can even have a branching or dynamic storyline since any changes that are made to the game would make sense - you wouldn't have one server killing big, bad monkey boss deluxe and the other server having their town destroyed. It makes having an impact on the game world a viable option.
Obviously there are community benefits as well, a stronger in-game economy, more people to associate with, more complex social and political dynamics, etc. The only possible downside is if the game world simply isn't designed to accomodate a large population... well, that and the inevitability of mega-barrens-chat somewhere in game.
Yeah I can see WoW having a problem with this. The game does have a massive community.
Maybe they could just have a single server for each Region.
One for NA, Euro, Korea something like that.
I think NA has 2-3 million that would be a crazy amount of players in a game world.
PLaying: EvE, Ryzom
Waiting For: Earthrise, Perpetuum
I'm fine with instancing quite a bit. I don't like the separate servers route, as that's a clumsy way to do it. I like the Guild Wars route of implicitly having separate servers but not an identifiable number of them to players, so that there can be as many or as few instances of a given area as appropriate at any given time. For a lot of games, that can be hard to pull off, so failing that, at least something like what Wizard101 does, where there are separate servers but you can freely switch from one to another whenever you feel like it (well, you can't switch twice within 60 seconds), is a big improvement over what most games do.
One server, multiple channels, which you can freely switch between. Then you can choose to be on a busy channel or a quiet channel, depending on your mood.
First reaction was NO WAY I WOULD WANT THAT with current games.
But okay you said you know due to tech it aint possible with current MMO's.
So lets indeed say it's technically possible, no lag, high polish, great graphics/animations/gameplay, well balanced quests meaning no camp for mobs to spawn senario's, but such a grand playing field, where we truly walk worlds and not maps..........
THEN HELL YES I WOULD LOVE THAT.
I agree with this, Maplestory has a feature like this implemented. By this feature u can join a crowded channel if you're in the mood to party, and when you would rather play on your own, you can always decide to log on to on of the less-crowded servers.
For me, I want a virtual world.
World that doesn't have many copies of itself, world that you have to accept both the good and bad, and look for the fun within.
Instances are what I dislike, and servers are actually similar to large instances.
So yea, I would like one game world, provided the game can support so many people and not being too busy.
MMO played (paid):
AION
DragonRaja
Dungeons & Dragons Online
Lineage
Lineage 2
Tibia
Ultima Online
Warhammer Online
World of Warcraft
MMO tried:
Atlantica Online
Darkfall
Dead Frontier
Dungeon Runners
EverQuest
Lord of the Rings Online
Monster Hunter Frontier Online
Ragnarok Online
Requiem
Runes of Magic
Runescape
The 4th Coming
and some other Chinese/Korean or beta MMOs
As a player of Guild Wars and loving that there's only one server, although split up in different districts I choose one server. Main problem I've always had with servers is that for some reason your friends have a tendency to choose different ones ending up with you and all your friends playing on different servers. Additionally the world doesn't feel very living when most areas are close to completely empty; the feeling of a living world is replaced by a feeling of a major devastation causing all living beings to aimlessly wander around in circles and for some reason charge towards you... One server is just in every aspect, except lag, much, much better.
I chose multiple servers for one reason: the polution of roleplay servers is already bad enough without being forced to join a server where the vast majority runs around with names that no parent would call their child.
I don't think I will ever understand why many give their character such awefully moronic names...
I know it shouldn't annoy me as much as it does, but I can't help it, whenever I see someone with such a name I just grind my teeth with anger.
A singleserver game just gives me too much frustration.
BLAM results are in and my choice wins..of course it's the only logical one.
damnit I want an MMO..not a game with the possiblility to run lan smoothly, I want a "Massively" multiplayer game..bwahahaha..
400k player worlds..bwahahaha..mwahahaha LOL combine that with a true full loot PvP server, bwahahahaha..no law system either. Only the laws of chivilry
and respect..as well as the rules of hatred 
1 server would be great for just about every game but WoW lol. Server caps of a couple million would be the kind of revolution the gaming community would like imo.
-Almerel
Hello my old friend.
Technical limitations aside, I think this would be great in most cases.
What I really don't get is why these games make you pay extra money if you ever want to swtich servers to play with your friends. Shouldn't this be something that is covered by the $15 or so you are already giving them every month.
D&D Home Page - What Class Are You? - Build A Character - D&D Compendium
Yes, but with a caveat.
The game world would have to be frickin' huge and probably sandbox.
Just can't imagine that WoW, WAR, AoC and such would work with a much greater population. Technical aspects aside, can you imagine 200 people camping a spawn or farming mats for crafting?
It'd be a nightmare; the reason that EVE can get away with it is because, by design, it doesn't suffer from any of the problems that a theme-park would.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
Me too. Server clusters are becoming more and more popular. I never understand why more work towards these goals hasn't been implemented. Who cares if WoW has 11 million subs when you will only play with 3-4k of them at a time? It makes for stagnant and aged servers and a divided community.
At least have a lobby where players can then divide themselves out amongst servers at login or something. The old way should be archaic, or free server transfers should be offered anytime at will. Just my opinion.
good post.
i also hate what the word "instancing" usually refers to. however, like you pointed out, the whole concept of having more than one "server" is itself having huge instances (entire worlds), and when you think about it, it is inevitable and necessary that ALL virtual worlds have instancing of SOME type. people will say vanguard, darkfall and others don't have instances, but since they don't have just one "server", they actually DO have huge instances of their entire world.
my main problem with "instancing" is it usually means there's some arbitrary line you cross where the game becomes single player or small scale multiplayer (just your group), which very much goes against one of the main reasons i play these games.
like most dungeons in WoW. which is THE main reason i've never subbed WoW, i like its world design quite a bit, but i love dungeons and "instances" are so lifeless and anti-MMO.
however, i don't mind the way THE CITIES in Guild Wars are handled (i hate the rest of the instancing in GW), because they are MMO instances. they are not just for you, and not just for your party, so they can be full of life. people coming and going doing their own thing.
and this form of instancing WITH THE RIGHT FORESIGHT AND ENGINE SUPPORT built into the FOUNDATION of a games engine could be applied to ANY mmo, without sacrificing its MMO qualities. well there would be the small sacrifice of sometimes having to choose from a menu which instance to join when you cross a boundary line from one region to the next, and i can see why people would say that breaks immersion, but i wouldn't mind that at all, in exchange for the great benefits a game would see from such a system.
take EQ1 for example. alot of people would resubscribe to it out of nostalgia, if nothing else, if the gameworld wasn't mostly dead and lifeless. its a ghost town in most starter towns. seems downright single player in many areas. but what if when you enter Qeynos or whatever, every player in the whole world (the REAL world, planet earth that is) that was in also in Qeynos was sharing the same zone as you, in other words, you would be able to interact with players that otherwise might be seperated into seperate instances (such as on the Xegony server, the Druzzil Ro server, the Prexus server (dunno if those even exist anymore with all the server merges) ).
the game could then live up to its full potential. you'd only have to choose an instance from a menu when going into very popular zones that are over xx number of players.
you could group up with friends from ANY "server" also.
and there could be an exponential effect. the more rejoin the game, the more full of life it is which cause even more to join. its practically impossible for an old game like EQ1 to pick up any momentum (no matter whether they made some magical change that got most past players interested in the game again or not).
EQ1 is just an example. i don't think there necessarily could or should be renewed interest in the game (i'll save sentiment that for Vanguard 8) ). its a good example cuz the world is seperated into TONS of different zones (most empty), and then segregates EVEN MORE by having whole seperate world instances ("servers") of all those mostly empty zones.
the whole point of zoning is to partition players so you don't have more than xx players in one area potentially interacting with each other because of bandwidth concerns. so theoretically its pointless (of course in reality they aren't gonna rewrite the eq1 engine to make it ideal when they have their fingers in so many new pies) to then furthermore seperate into whole seperate worlds
instead you could (for a NEW ENGINE based game) have a server for every zone, and then a bunch of extra servers to handle the extra needed instances for the most popular zones.
thats basically how Second Life has just one "server"/world. there's a seperate server for every region. and its fairly seamless to walk between them (often you have no perceived pause or lag), so this type of scheme could even apply to "seamless" games such as Darkfall/Vanguard (which have quite noticeable lag changing from region/chunk to region/chunk.
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Corpus Callosum
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Multiple servers, but I like the way that Runescape did it.
I don't know why more games don't do it this way.
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Guys! I'm hopelessly lost in a mountain of mole hills! Them damn moles!
I wouldn't mind multiple servers if my subscription fee included a monthly transfer once a month for free instead of trying to charge me loads for it. Frigging every time a new mmorpg comes out I meet a whole load of new friends after and turns out we're all on different servers and noone wants to make new chars or pay to transfer, so instead of playing together we quit the game.
I don't understand why zoned games like EQ2 and AoC don't have one server because they can clone each zone over and over again.
Games like SWG obviously need more than one server but right now it only has the population to fill one and theres far too many out there which kills the game.
Yeah, WoW has such a large population. maybe if they grouped people up by region.
a NA server, Euro server and Korea server.
They might need to expand the gameworld a bit and make portal links to every city so players spread out more instead of all being in 1-2 cities.
I could see it working with maybe 2-3 million a server.
And keep in mind even though 2-3 million accounts are on a server doesnt mean thats how many players would be playing at once.
imo a server with that many accounts could probably have a steady stream of 500-750k players on during prime time. Which wouldnt be bad and with a few tweaks would work with WoW.
PLaying: EvE, Ryzom
Waiting For: Earthrise, Perpetuum
It depends on the land mass. You fit 10M people in the WOW world, even there is no technical problems, every single inch of the land will be filled with people and it is no fun with that crowded a world.
WoW already makes heavy use of instancing.
no reason they couldn't (conceptually, the reality of legacy code is often different of course) just instance every region and allow people to choose whether they want that region all for themselves or if they want to play it with small amounts to huge amounts of players (having a choice on which instance to join).
they wouldn't even HAVE to have a menu to choose from whenever you cross a region's line. they can have an option for what kind of population you prefer for overworld and dungeon areas, and then automatically select an appropriately populated (or unpopulated) instance for you (which you could always change manually, and could have you and your party member's synched to go to the same instances).
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Corpus Callosum
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bear in mind such games are designed with smaller populations in mind while single server games are designed with bigger populations in mind.
Another great example of Moore's Law. Give people access to that much space (developers and users alike) and they'll find uses for it that you can never imagine. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates 1981
So am I going to get to know all of these 300k people? I don't think so.
I would rather have small free to run servers, so a group of 200 or so could all have their own server. For hardcore roleplayers this is the way to go. Especially if the game allowedfor GM interaction.
How could you possibly fit 300k people into a game world like WoW's?
I'm pretty sure Eve can pull it off because most of the game "world" is empty space, so it can be pretty much as big as they want it to be.
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im to lazy too use grammar or punctuation good