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The basic problem as server queues dissapear.
Theshadow04
Member Posts: 11
in Rift
The basic problem with Rift's players is that they are based on the "inside crowd".
Their basis comes from the following :
Old MMO players wanting to find something "new".
Bored Wow players attracted by the internet marketing campaign.
Those that jump to all new games coming out.
With this in mind, it is quite clear what will happen when a new kid comes along.
The fact retail didn't sell much confirms it. Rift is mostly played by on line players making a statement "I didn't like the latest WOW" or "I desperately need something else" or "I want new things - whatever".
But the game itself is the exact opposite of what those categories really want.
As such Rift is a spot on the radar. The above population is too fickle to let it have a decent alternative future of its own.
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Comments
I'd wait for at least the first subscription month to end before braving any predictions, good or bad.
Fair enough. In the meantime I no longer see US server queues.
http://riftideas.com/shardwatch/
Just wanted to explain what is already seen. Click on the different servers.
When the game launched I was playing for 10 hours per day (and sleeping for 2-3, still wanted to keep my day job).
Right now i'm trying to limit myself to 3 hours per day.
Bit of a strange time to check for queues. It's hardly peak hours now.
Queues appear at peak times, that's usually in the evenings and even more so in the weekends.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Try to find a US queuing server in the last 24 hours (history included).
And don't forget EU launched 5 days later, they still have 5 full servers on prime time, but the english ones are in trouble too.
'in trouble'? Aren't you a bit premature to blow the horn of doom?
iirc there were something lik 4, 5 queued servers on US side a day or 2 or so ago. The majority were high with the rest on medium. Of course that'll diminish over the course of weeks, how much remains to be seen.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
I sincerely do not use the term 'in trouble' with regards to Rift. Far from it. Sure a lot of folks will see server merges as 'Doom Hammer' but the reality is that if they didn't loosen the pressure of long queues on launch week, a lot of folks who will/might stay over time would move on in frustration. Once the inital 30-60 days is over, they will merge some of the less used servers into some of the medium population ones to reduce overhead and maintain 'balanced' levels of playability.
Obviously if they dropped from 50+ to 5 that would be alarming but that won't happen at least in the immedaite future. Just a normal slow reduction that makes sense in terms of users/populations.
To be honest the population could do with dwindling a bit for my liking.
Every Rift i attack has 50 people attacking it by the time its finished, which helps with the elite bosses. But gets a bit of a pain with the smaller group rifts. But this could be due to everyone being around the same level too.
But so far the population seems healthy and also chat seems to be full of people saying how great they think rift is! i dunno, but seems the most solid release for a long time.
Here's an excerpt from a fresh interview with the head developer dicsussing the very point raised by the OP:
Server queues seemed very long the first night but then went down dramatically over most servers by the second night of Head Start. How were you able to accomplish that?
Opening up lots and lots of new servers, for starters. If you think about how most open betas work, when you do an open beta, you're opening your game to the entire world. "It's free, come on in and play." That's usually when you get your biggest numbers. After that, the tourists go away, and you end up with a smaller set of people who are ready to pay to play the game. We had the opposite; we had larger numbers of people than we had in open beta. That doesn't happen. We were definitely taken a little by surprise, because we were expecting our population trends to trend like most MMOs, and they didn't. Having more servers on standby, and standing more servers up as we needed, was really helpful. Also, people's natural inclination, if they had only invested 20 minutes in their character, to go somewhere else, helped a lot. As people spread out through the world a little more, that helped a lot more too, because we could raise server caps. And then there's some of the normal play patterns. When a game is brand-new, people will play two to three times as much in a day as they normally would, but their hours-per-day of play settles over time. That's totally normal. When something's brand-new and shiny, you want to be there the entire day.
http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/03/15/pax-east-2011-massively-interviews-rifts-scott-hartsman/
Stop trying to explain away a normal occurance in video games:
People take of work for launches, people play games for hours and hours non-stop before launches. Many servers were overqueued at launch specifically BECAUSE the sever they selected was one of the original rather than one of the new. Groups of friends were trying to link up to play.
Over the first 2 weeks, populations settle. That is a FACT.
Over the first month, people who still remain in queue will actively go looking for another server to play immediately. It may not be their first choice but they do so.
Over the first month, guilds that develop or were pre-developed prior to launch, make decisions based on populations and queues of the server. If they are a primarily PvP-centric guild, they make decisions based on this information as well.
People cried doom at Beta 1. Trion made things better. People cried doom at Beta 7, Trion survives. People cried doom when that first player hit 50 in 2 days, but yet most of us normal players have yet to come close to 50 BECAUSE WE HAVE LIVES. Rift will survive.
Making assumptions like you are doing is like me saying the sky is blue because most of the world is covered with water and the sun reflects the color onto the sky. It COULD be true, but we know it isn't because that's just plain silliness.
Edit: USER deleted. I just wasted my time posting this.
I dunno, checking the shard status in the early morning (today) I see most of the servers at 'Medium' population. Before now (say...4 days ago) most shards at this time of day were at 'Low' status. I can't tell for sure until tonight, but it seems like there are more people playing now than there were at launch. No actual proof or anything, it just seems that way.
So if the queues have died down, do we actually know why, or are we doing the usual assume the worst/best based on whether or not we like the game?
* edit *
The sky is blue in part due to the amount of water on the planet, which means there's a bunch of it in the atmosphere. The particles of stuff in the atmosphere (some of which is water) absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light. Blue is reflected more than the other colors in the spectrum of light. The yellows, reds and oranges mostly pass straight through. It's called Rayleigh Scattering. Also, in space, the sun would look white instead of yellow because there's no atmosphere between you and the sun in space. Just another useless factoid to clutter yer head.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
There really is no good answer to this. Not only do more people play at release, they get filtered into a smaller area as well. That is why games moved to instancing world zones but players really don't like the main game world to be instanced so that avenue kind of went away.
The player base should realize that server merges are almost inevitable until some new way to handle this comes out. That or they just have to deal with grossly overcrowded servers the first few weeks which they obviously aren't able to deal with since they cry like babies every time they see a queue.
As for server populations, I check them most mornings around this time and they are definitely going down. Almost never see a US server at high during the day anymore and usually up to 8 or 9 on low when last week there were only 3-4 on low. EU server totals are going down too. This isn't some surprise though, WoW is the last game to grow the genre population so almost any new MMO is going to see a peak early with a gradual decline until something comes out that can grow the genre or steal a huge chunk from WoW.
The only way to handle this without throttling your servers is to instance every zone until:
Everyone is spread out so you don't need the extra instances or
The server loses enough people after the first/third/whatever month and no instances are needed.
Great link
Problem with that is who would join anything but the highest pop servers, knowing they'll be merged soon? At launch I'll gladly wait in a queue to get into a good server (that I've researced).
Great link this, i am on Icewatch EU shard, i bought the game retail on monday 7th March and couldn't get on the server for a queue. A week on, haven't had any issues with queues no matter when i log on. Interestingly the shard i am on was a headstart shard and the amount of people lfg for dungeons has dropped off in the week i've been playing it (although could be most are doing guild runs, perhaps).
I think the next few weeks when peoples subscriptions come up, there is going to be a drop in numbers, I also think they will be doing server mergers in the next month possibly for the lowest population shards. Just my take on what may or may not happen, I hope i'm wrong with my guess on shard mergers as i am enjoying the game.
The OP is a ghost account.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy.
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