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The most subtle way to shut down servers
Trion found a nice way to shut down some servers without confessing that they lost subscribers:
Greetings!
With today's update you may notice that several shards have been marked "Trial." These shards are the ones that we will be using for future large scale Trial programs such that they do not cause undue queues on paying servers, as we've all seen in the past. (We'll roll more info out on those new programs as their time comes.)
As always, under our current Trial program, new players remain welcome to sign up and play with their friends on existing shards, Trial or otherwise.
If you happen to be on a server that is now marked as a Trial shard, here are a few things you should know:
- For the time being, character creation is disabled for non-trial users on Trial shards.
- Subscribers with characters on them are able to transfer for free to any of the available destination shards.
- Subscribers can transfer characters of any level off of these shards (We're currently looking into an issue prohibiting transfers of characters under level 15)
- Subscribers who log into a Trial shard will be informed that they should consider transferring to a new shard at their convenience.
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Comments
Well, they aren't fooling anyone, but at least they kind of addressed the issue, sort of.
Meh, I could care less. My shard Deepstrike is normally at "High" during prime time and medium the rest of the time. I lag in Meridian from all the people so not that big of an issue. To me at least.
And I thought that a bit of media had just gone about from Trion saying that the numbers are healthy and still growing...
All I can say is that Blightweald was nice and healthly before 1.3, with transfers now its overendulged itself on players and is just a lagfest...
It could be that they have forced players to another shard for whatever ideas they have, but now there are too many on each in my opinion
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That one was here in an interview with Hal Hanlin: http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/06/22/enter-at-your-own-rift-talking-1-3-with-hal-hanlin/
Speaking of population, I couldn't help but relay the accusation that RIFT's population is not growing but dwindling (or "dying," depending on your proximity to a cyberprophet of doom). Hanlin laughed and said, "I can assure you -- no, we're not. Uh-uh. We are continuing to uptrend our number of subscribers."
In fact, he revealed that one of the most-cited sources of this accusation -- the population indicators on the server list -- has changed simply because the company has severely beefed up the capacity of its server hardware to accommodate more players. So what rated as a "high" population before might be downgraded to "medium" today. He said that this upgrade was done in preparation for even more player trials coming in the future.
That was just two days ago. I guess the lag is only in the two main cities?
Currently playing: EverQuest
Waiting for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how many servers/shards became “trial”, so I compared the rift shard status list ( http://www.riftgame.com/en/status/index.php ) for NA shards, with the list of shards under the NA Shards forum ( http://forums.riftgame.com/forumdisplay.php?253-NA-Shards ). I also checked forum posts for each new trial shard where members mentioned their shard being set as trial, as a sort of additional confirmation.
20 NA-Shards are now “trial”
The amount of NA-Shards went from 58 to now 38
List of trial shards:
PVP
1- Ashstone
2- Emberlord
3- Kaleida*
4- Nyx
5- Reclaimer
6- Regulos*
7- Spitescar
8- Stonecrest*
9- Tearfall
10- Tordrin
PVE
1- Aedraxis
2- Akylios
3- Arcanis
4- Corthana
5- Dimroot
6- Endless
7- Hammerlord
8- Kelpmere
9- Perspice
10- Plutonus
* - indicates I was not able to find forum posts from community members mentioning their shard is now trial.
Now I hope this isn't taken as “rift is dying”. It may or may not be, but this information doesn't prove it. Even with less shards it can still be growing. Although I will admit that *to me* it at least suggests that Rift might not be growing as fast as when it first came out (which I think is typical for many MMOs)
20 trial shards seems like quite a bit when there are only 38 shards left. So I agree with the OP that this is a clever way to shut down servers
Yeah, it's definitely a stealth server shutdown coming, no two ways about that.
Tagging them "trial" was a really nice touch and very smart because many people haven't played mmos long enough to recognize it. But honestly, there's no way a game is going to think it will need 15-20 servers just for trial subs when they aren't even releasing a major expansion. That defies logic.
Sounds like 'ask people to move now', then 'tell people to move later', then shut down 'trial servers'. But it does take the bad taste out of 'server shutdown'.
As usual, the people on the highly populated ones don't see a big deal because they don't actually have to move any toons or worry that their guildies/friends/spouses can't get into their server because of the big log-in queues.
Didn't this happen in Warhammer? Ask people to move, then tell them to move, then shut down a bunch of servers?
My guess is they are gaining subs, but not enough to keep solvent as in:
We gain 1000 subs. We lose 900 subs. Overall gain= 100 subs. Yeah, that's an increase in subs but not enough to keep the game running over a long period of time and to justify costs for dead servers.
"TO MICHAEL!"
So how does one "beef up" capacity of servers? and do it without taking down the servers for extended maintenance? I think it's as the poster above mentioned, cram them in on existing server spec's.
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I don't really see how a game can be growing when you shut down servers, which is all this "trial" malarky is, when the game launched all servers were high or full for at least six weeks. So the game dropped down so far that its now begun to grow again I don't think so. I feel players that enjoy Rift and want to stay for the longterm will have to get used to this until its down to a few servers each side of the pond similar to what happened to Warhammer, you cannot release a lackluster, bland MMO and expect marketing to keep it growing, though I don't doubt Trion got their initial investment back. I think back to claim from the lead dev that the servers could only hold roughly 1500 concurrent players and to me that has been spot on give or take a few hundred so no this game is not growing at all.
Cal.
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Oh god that made me laugh so hard I almost spat my coffee. That has got to be the BEST spin I ever heard about a growing population but servers are showing a drop from high pop to medium pop.
I bet SOE are kicking themselves that they didn't think of this little gem of bullcrap when talking about DCUO's population.
not so sure myself.. have received.. albeit unconfirmed.. report that Rifts subs now were approaching 2 million.. i didnt really give it much credence but... have to wonder ...
Labeling about a third of their servers "trial servers" to be able to shut them down withoutt having it look like "the population is dwindling", but rather because
a) "we just haven't handed out that many trial keys out there recently, therefore less need for that many trial servers".
b) "we have upgraded our trial servers' hardware to hold more trial players, so we were in the comfortable position to shut some of them down".
Whatever way, to me it smells just like a PR spin in the end. Until they release hard numbers, i'd rather stay suspicious about this whole move.
pffff SOE was using that excuse about 7 years ago for server pops. In their case is was true and a cost cutting excersise to squeeze every last cent of profit.
On the whole server closing thing though, it seems to me a bad launch will instantly kill a game now, no matter how good the actual game may be. Having lag/performance issues, queues or extended log in problems is as good as killing the game before it's begun.
So having more servers than are needed is the best way to get around this. Combine this with the fact that the mmo crowd has changed in recent years where there is a pottentially a massive crowd which (with the right hype) will buy any mmo that goes gold, 50% of which will be hitting the forums a few weeks later to slag it off.
Where games used to start with under 100,000 (or much, much less) pop and work their way up from there growing along the way, the demographic now seems to be 1million plus box purchases at release, a massive exodus, then if it's good enough they'll hand on to a half or a third subs and work from there, in order to get that far though they have to go through a period of too many servers and redundant worlds.
Edit: On top of that you will also get the usual code improvements and optimisations meaning the servers can start to handle more players.
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so its nothing to do with limiting trial players to trial servers so that they can stop the Gold farmers etc.. in their tracks.. nope.. nothing to do with that at all.. in fact.. wouldnt it be truer to say that by limiting trials players to trial servers, that keeps them away from the main servers, meaning regular players arent forced to sit in queues waiting to login to a server because of them.. it also means that server numbers on none trials servers are paying customers.. if anything doesnt this kind of activity actually prove that Rift is doing pretty well.. .. perhaps the reports of Rift having around 2 million subbed players is accurate after all...
It's this now typical cycle which makes it hard for me to believe Rift is growing. Sure, it's not failing, it seems to be holding up and maybe the subs are 2 million as said above, but a ton of people (including me) have had their month or two, got bored and moved on. Surely since launch they have seen a decline in population, it's now common and we will see it in GW2 and TOR as well.
How clever of you to work that out.
Who cares? It's a great game and they obviously created more servers than necessary and numbers haven't met expectations (exactly like 99.9% of all other mmos). This is just pathetic nit-picking from the OP.
It's good of them to offer free-transfers instead of dooming subscribers to tiny communities on unpopular servers, like most other games do.
Anyway, back to Rift {mod edit}
I'm not sure if I have ever seen an MMO company with this good of PR skills.
God damn they're good.. Lol.
Kudos to them though, for finding a second way to put a good spin on the faults newer MMOs tend to have post-launch.
.. But in a good way.
If a product is really good, people will wait in lines for it. They will wait in lines to buy it, and they will wait in lines to see/use/play it. That's any product from a movie, Ipod, or video game. (Black Friday video game sales?)
Performance and lag I agree could kill those games, but that was never supposedly RIFT's problem because it was so 'polished'.
The interesting thing now is there is all kinds of lag people are reporting in game that just showed up after this patch. While I attribute it to less servers/more lag because of more people on now fewer servers, players say their 'state of the art' server system was designed to handle that as 'next gen'. They say they 'broke something' with the patch, which could be possible as I've seen that before in other games.
"TO MICHAEL!"
I was under the impression that the RIFT community wasn't so petty.
"TO MICHAEL!"
Why so many trial servers? You only have the trial for 7 days as far as i know, after that if they subscribe they will move from these.
Now when i did give this a shot a couple of months back (not been in for the past month), alot of servers were low pop (barely touching medium), so yes some servers could have been closed in my opinion. They would just let the player base shuffle themselves around and block the low populated servers from being moved to, instead of being forced (Blizzard, to go where stated and always from bad to worse).
No chance on this, they havent even sold 1 million games digital + box, so there is simply no chance to have 2 million subs.
Maybe they got with their very agressive trial campaings sort of a million or two trials out of the house.....but that is only an expense and not an income!
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That's like keeping up 38 condemned crack houses that bring down the value of the entire neighborhood, but wanting to keep them there because the people who frequent them "may" become ideal citizens (subers from the 7-day trial). What a poor way to waste both time and money. Why not just crackdown on spammers and refine your trial program to combat it rather than making whole servers dedicated to them? Smells like a terrible PR spin again.
Foolish marketing tag lines
Misleading 2 million forum user spin
Misleading Father's Day trial (with no gametime included)
And now this...
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
lol I know right?
The one thing Trion ecell at is their PR... it's amazing.
They have managed to sell, and keep selling, a very medicre product with incredble success. Other devs should be taking note.
Ofc, the real test for them comes when SWToR hits, because it's in direct competition with Rift (more then any other game) and has the power to hammer them. It will be interesting tosee the spin they come out with then.
Whoever came up with this should have gotten some kind of raise or promotion.
The other MMO companies could learn a thing or two from these guys lol.
It was a smooth way to force reduction of servers, we all know they will shut down at lest 8 of each pve and pvp. hell with the way they are marketting, they are sly dogs.
At least the transfer off a "trial server" did not kill my guild (as all moved with).
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Do you know how many RIFT subscribers actually believe that Trion is expecting 20 servers worth of 'trial subs' so they have to cordon off that many, lol? Gullible people are gullible.
Anyone playing any mmo understands that at launch and MAYBE two months after, that game is going to get the most subs it's ever going to see for the most part.
It isn't like there's 300k people who haven't heard of Rift (thanks to their WoW targeted ads) and are all of a sudden going to come rushing in and fill those up.
I tell you, Rift may be an average WoW clone, but their PR department is anything but average. Those guys are even better than Paul Barnett in my book, and that's saying something.
"TO MICHAEL!"