ESO had megaservers if I remember correctly. New World is different though in that it has the territory control and that sort of thing, you need multiple servers to spread out the population for that. EVE has it easier in that it’s not too hard to generate a bunch of star systems to house the entire population, in New World they’d have to craft a map that large enough and if the population isn’t there then it’s going to be empty. Individual servers with this design makes more sense but it does have this big launch period drawback!
I’d disagree to an extent. Yes, i think space in particular has it easier in that it can separate its server populations into more manageable chunks (and wow, isn’t inter-stellar travel like the best way to load discrete instances/servers), but i still think there are issues of perception that the industry needs to figure out (and imo, should have done so by now).
For instance, there’s a city of a million people 50 miles from me. I can’t see them. I really have no way of knowing for sure that they’re there, but i trust that they are. I can pick up the phone, or tablet, and connect with them in many different ways without them hopping all around me every second. The key thing is there’s a way i can interact with a broader community if i choose to do so. In the same sense, i think this could be applied to a game world. Maybe we all play a solo game, but we have ways to interact with a broader group when and if we want to. Need to hook up with a buddy to take down a particularly nasty boss, then search and find them and the server creates a discrete instance for your party. Think of world-shards (was gonna say sharding, but that sounds like a bad toilet adventure), but with all the shard names invisible and inaccessible to everyone (handled by the servers). But certain other things are shared - like world market places and pvp zones. Ya, there’s some tricky stuff that would need to be handled (like monitoring group sizes, pings and overall population density in a specific area), but given the tools we have at disposal now, i’d think we could tackle that.
Ah, I get you! I think FF14 has something called Link Shells that allow people from across servers to group up for challenging content or something like that, it sounds kind of similar. I never played around with them so maybe that’s not quite right, but my vague understanding of them is something along those lines.
Little bit like that, but simpler(from a player experience).
Lets say I’m in san franscisco and I log in. The authentication server looks around, sees my ping and connects me to a silicon valley server. You’re in Vancouver, and also log in, and the server notices that the vancouver servers are getting pretty full and places you in a seattle server that has good ping, and better resources.
Now we’re in a guild, and we can all chat, despite our guild being on like 15 separate servers right now, because chat, being relatively easy to manage is handled by a dedicated chat server. Now you and I and a guildie in New york decide to group up and tackle some adventure. Again, the server checks our pings and decides to join us to a chicago server where we’ll all enjoy reasonable play. We are successful, and we head back to the guild bank to drop off some treasure. Guild banks are also hosted by a different server, allowing us to share treasures regardless of where we are or where we farmed them. We split the group up, and i go to put some of my stuff on the auction market - again, another server group that is shared by the global community(and one of very few that are, like the find groups tool).
I think this could work very well, and most importantly from a player perspective - needs to be invisible. I think there are some great advantages to this particularly in a pvp setting. Lets say we all group together again, and click on the pvp gate to indicate we’re out for world pvp - maybe we can even say whether we want it easy or challenging. So based on our party comp(and levels) and the challenge level, it’ll try to put us in an instance with more/less of our faction and levels higher/lower than us.
I dunno, again - it seems like this is doable now…
Hey, I got my first achievement.
“You died” only 5.4% of the players have gotten this achievement, LOL
Early mages are hard, cause I don’t a 200+ gear weapon I’m stuck with the intro one. Only 382 ahead of me in the que.
I’m pretty sure you just described how Guild Wars works. I’m mildly curious about New World, but not enough to jump into whatever launch woes it’ll be suffering. I also can’t believe we’re still having to contend with this World of Warcraft server model balkanizing the player base. What year is this again?
-Tom
I can’t say I’m pleased with twice have a disconnect and starting over in the 500 person queue.
I don’t think there is any other practical way to do it. You can’t have all 200K+ people on a single server, for a host of reason including gameplay. Chunking people into groups of 1,000 (roughly the size of high school) I think make sense from a socialization standpoint. Of course, if you have super popular streamers and everybody wants to be on their server. That’s a problem.
Didn’t guild wars have servers? Hmm, i guess it did not…from the wiki
and ya, i mean, holy shit mmo-devs, get on this already!
Guild Wars 2 did have servers back in the day. They went to megaservers at some point after the populations dwindled.
I’m happy enough with the system that FF14 uses. You have a home server, and can run instanced content with anyone on your server group (data center). You can queue from the main cities to visit other servers on your data center and progress through the story there with minimal restrictions. In the next couple months they’ll be expanding the visiting system to all servers in your region (NA, EU, JP).
If anyone is playing syndicate on Sarragalla, we have captured Windsward. This gives the entire faction increased gathering quantity. Doing town board quests there will help us keep it.
Nice! The Wanderers are set up on US East / Falias, in the Marauders faction. We are working with Gaiscioch, who is trying to raise the cash to purchase First Light. They are just over halfway there. We are seeing a lot of familiar faces from Wanderers days of old (Dark Age of Camelot!) and and quite a few newer faces from around here. If you’re thinking about playing feel free to hit us up!
I joined The Wanderers back in 2009 and was the guild leader for Rift when it launched. Guild name is Elmo. If I decide to play New World I’ll definitely play with you guys. On the fence about playing at this point due to “too many games, too little time”. Hopefully you can post impressions here and maybe push me over the edge. :)
Power went out after I hit 17. 1492 in queue now. Our main company got windward and my secondary company took cutlass keys. I’ll try to get back on in a few hours.
I have been waiting in queues for hours… this is a true MMO, very pleased.
Popular at the moment. I think PUBG was the last game to surpass CS:GO on Steam.
They are getting battered in the steam reviews for the queues, name reservation system, and no south-east Asian servers. Can’t say any of it isn’t deserved, except maybe for the first one as it is impossible to have a non-queue launch for a popular MMO without using the GW system (which they should have).
28 new servers opened up for US East. I’m sure more will be coming for west. There will also be free character transfers at some point, so people can play until this gets sorted, then get onto the same server
I don’t know how you use a system like there when capturing and holding specific territories on the map is a crucial part of the design. You don’t want people to be able to switch server instances at will or else that design is totally irrelevant.
Yeah, I am sure sitting in queues for 6 hours while my 3090 is at 80% GPU usage is completely impossible to resolve while keeping people tied to instances for gameplay purposes.
How about a megaserver that ties you to one of a thousand instances at random where friends can move to their friends instances as space allows once a day (GW2 had short queues sometimes to go to a friends instance), and the number of instances gradually get merged as the population subsides?
ya, i’m not sure why i’m running at 83 degrees C as I’m queuing…i guess there’s a lot of graphics going on here?