Server Population: A Modest Proposal

[Atreides]

Every day and every night it seems the server population for the shards shows PVP1: High to Medium  PVP2: Medium to Low  PVP3: Low.  In the past two weeks there has been a mass exodus of players from PVP2 to PVP1 due to the more aggressive RVR and better chance of various nations being under siege, whilst laying siege to their neighbours.  You can read the forum posts in National News to see the imbalance that is growing steadily.  Many clans have abandoned PVP2, or even worse, use it as a de facto PVE arena with the occasional PVP opportunity to grind ranks and crafting levels.

 

At the same time many do not want to leave PVP2 for ping issues, friendships made or other reasons, which leaves PVP3 as a overflow server, and PVP2 a ghost town.

 

I propose the the Devs to eliminate PVP3, this will force players to either go back to PVP1 while encouraging the American and Oceanic players to return to PVP2.  We do have the player base to support two servers, but the cost of three seems to be higher than the benefit of having two mostly empty servers, with one being a vibrant area.

 

Assets could be mirrored to make this switch less painful to the players, but the gameplay dynamics would benefit from the population cohort being more regional for prime time, as opposed to half the player base in a given server being asleep or at work as the other half are playing, which encourages more clan participation and better coordination of fleet actions.

 

Thank you for your attention.

 

British Post Captain Atreides,  PVP2

[Prater]

American and Oceanic players have no reason to be on PVP2, we can play fine on pvp1.

[Nash]

 a lot of pvp3 already join pvp1.

[Capt. Rice]

American and Oceanic players have no reason to be on PVP2, we can play fine on pvp1.

i beg to differ while playing on pvp 1 i can get up 350 ping....which is a lot even for a game that says  it doesn't effect game play.  The slpit sec or less when getting a perfect broadside or the one split sec when you can board a player...it can all really have an effect on it.

[Bigvalco]

My concern that I stated before they created more servers for the steam release, a lot of players simply won't make the change from the server they started on and quit the game due to low population. This has already hurt the game in the long run because those players aren't very likely to come back when they left with a bad taste in their mouth. It was a huge mistake to open up several/regional servers just to deal with the influx of players during launch which are now no longer needed at all, and we are stuck with a shitty situation.

[Konali89]

http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/8316-a-discussion-on-separate-regional-servers/

 

In that thread made by the guy above me, the poll speaks clearly for itself.

Having multiple servers was most likely doneto get rid of the massive queu times we had at EA release.

 

I think money wise and community wise it might be usefull to maybe eliminate one server.

[MikedaBike]

At some point map (not xp) wil be reset, ships and gold will be wiped. At this point in time people will be happy to change servers, and if any server needs to be taken down to help this, then that is the time to do it, Moving servers when you lose nothing is the best time to do this and the player base will balance itself out then. So much knee jerking going on in an alpha developing game in ea, really, numbers will always fall from release date, they will continue to fall as people decide the game is not for them, or they need more content and will come back after patches. The end of the world doom crew are exactly that, they base their 'game is dying' opinions on a personal and singular point of view with no substance except me me me. Chill the game is going forwards, all be it slowly, but upon full release it will be a game very worth new players time to purchase and has the full potential to be one of the classis you talk about in 20 30 years time. Let the moaners and whiners cry themselves to sleep, soon they will be doing exactly the same in another forum somewhere, it is what they do. Creative input is a worthy thing, pointing out negatives is part of the process, but really the end of the world is nigh has its place on street corners within a sandwich board, not NA.

 

edit aimed at general masses not the OP

Edited March 25, 2016 by MikedaBike