Clans/people not following the pvp1 zerg rush

[Bert Beard]

It doesn't matter now and Krakken is right.......the dev's are planning to merge the servers.

 

After the 8 hour surprise shutdown of PVP 2 yesterday the player numbers have taken another big drop.........down to 94 a few minutes ago.

Never seen that before in the morning.

 

That shut down was not good.

Edited April 4, 2016 by Bert Beard

[[MCC] Die Antwoord]

So what’s the flip side of merging the servers?  Iirc one server can handle 3k players, by merging are the devs conceding that out of the 70k that bought into NA no more than 5% of the user base will return or continue to play no matter what they do?

70k????!! I'd be surprised if they sold more than 20k copies half of which are crafting/spy alts.

You do have a point though that eventually, if they somehow manage to convince new people to join or come back, it will be a problem.

[KrakkenSmacken]

Admin said on page two of this thread.

 

"Merging and transfer will happen after War & peace/rvr/port battles changes are approved by players and coded."

 

That sounds pretty "sure thing" to me, and any thoughts to the contrary seem to me to be wishful thinking.

 

Note: I have a dog in this fight, with all my assets on PvP2 the server threatened with extinction.  I'm not going to ask the devs to spend(waste) their time saving my stuff. If they can do a simple copy of assets (regardless of port), or even just save the stuff in the Capital, which is the approach I would take as its the one sure port to remain in your nation, then that is just a super bonus to me.

 

Since they mentioned window is 1-2 months I am going to burn as many assets and time into XP as I can under the assumption the only thing moving over is XP.  It's the only prudent thing to do to make the most out of the time I spent setting up my supplies.

 

 

Here I said I would not ask the devs to waste their time saving my assets.  I am however going to say that this does give the devs the opportunity to consider a more Risk like "game over, you win/lose" model, and put the work towards how ending a world and starting a new one would work.

 

If they plan on trying that route, now would be a pretty good time to look into that model and decide what if anything besides experience they would port into a new world. That does fit in with the conquest/rvr/pirate mechanics we all just voted on and Admin indicates is the next go around on development.

Edited April 4, 2016 by KrakkenSmacken

[graphite]

70k????!! I'd be surprised if they sold more than 20k copies half of which are crafting/spy alts.

You do have a point though that eventually, if they somehow manage to convince new people to join or come back, it will be a problem.

 

Hey Clegg,

Glad someone realises what I was alluding to. It has come down to the choice that the devs have made, between not supporting a low population server in favor of one that may become so overpopulated  you will have to queue up to get into it.

Regarding the owner base figures, they have changed since I last took a look and are subject to further change, but as they stand currently:

 

cheers all

[Mrdoomed]

Yes what will happen if this does go live someday and advertise? Will they have to reopen a pvp2 ?

There will always be more European /russian players because there population is huge but with a possible influx of North and South American and asia pacific players looming then a US server will be pretty important again.

[Slamz]

Admin said on page two of this thread.

 

"Merging and transfer will happen after War & peace/rvr/port battles changes are approved by players and coded."

 

That sounds pretty "sure thing" to me, and any thoughts to the contrary seem to me to be wishful thinking.

 

Except that doesn't make sense. After war & peace and port battle changes, we know there's a map reset. That's not a "merging". That's just shutting down a server and having everyone restart on a particular one (saving only XP).

 

I wonder if what Admin means is that "merging and transfer, as concepts we will be able to start supporting, will be developed after these other things are done".

 

That is, PVP2 will not be merged into PVP1 anytime soon. The feature that will allow something like that to happen will be worked on later this year, after war, peace, land in battles and port battle changes.

[graphite]

Yes what will happen if this does go live someday and advertise? Will they have to reopen a pvp2 ?

There will always be more European /russian players because there population is huge but with a possible influx of North and South American and asia pacific players looming then a US server will be pretty important again.

 

Totally agree with your points MrDoomed 

 

But what concerns me more is the current user base. By the devs confirming a merge, it indicates as I have said earlier in this thread that they have conceded that no more than 5% of the current user base will return or continue to play, no matter what they do.  Or on the other hand, if that percentage improves are they content to have their user base queue up to play, keeping in mind that the servers cap at 3K players. 

 

*edit*

 

Some other data just to keep this discussion balanced:

 

Peak concurrent players yesterday: 2,811

 

Cheers all

Edited April 4, 2016 by graphite

[Mrdoomed]

Totally agree with your points MrDoomed

But what concerns me more is the current user base. By the devs confirming a merge, it indicates as I have said earlier in this thread that they have conceded that no more than 5% of the current user base will return or continue to play, no matter what they do. Or on the other hand, if that percentage improves are they content to have their user base queue up to play, keeping in mind that the servers cap at 3K players.

Cheers all

I surely hope they can either increase the cap or keep another server. I most definitely hope more than 5% return. Its hard for me to put stock in numbers untill its a full game and has some sort of advertising, even on you tube etc.

If your numbers will hold up then that is a scary thought because i think this game is already good and will be better but its gonna have to find a way to get the word out to niche players like us.

Edit..just seen your edit. So with those peak numbers there isnt even enough room for everyone from both servers. That will not go well to que up....i acually quit the last game i played and really like because i cant spend 5 or 10 minutes just to get in every day.

Edited April 4, 2016 by Mrdoomed

[Bert Beard]

The dev's need to get their server issues figured out because it's costing them lots of players........hundreds have quit playing for at least a little while because of several server issues.......mostly to do with PVP 2.

- server migration that's being encouraged from PVP 2 to PVP 1.

  ( most don't migrate.....they quit )

- unexpected & long server crashes ........like the 8 hour crash yesterday on PVP 2

  ( this alone cut PVP 2's population by nearly half from the day before.......how many of them quit ? )

- waiting cues to log into PVP 1.

- confusion on what's going to happen with the servers.

 

This Naval Action mmo needs to get it's act together if it wants to live up to even a fraction of it's potential.

 

To be honest, I think merging the two pvp servers is basically admitting failure on the dev's part.

Get the problems sorted out, do what needs to be done to reverse the population drops and get this game rolling.

 

And give the players a reason to choose between either PVP 2 or PVP 1

Edited April 4, 2016 by Bert Beard

[KrakkenSmacken]

The dev's need to get their server issues figured out 

- unexpected & long server crashes ........like the 8 hour crash yesterday on PVP 2

 

These issues scare the crap out of me more that anything else I've seen up to this point to be honest.  I do DB work for a living, and the days of needing a 1 hour daily "maintenance" should be long gone. The fact that this is the second unexpected "maintenance" I have seen on a low volume server (PvP2 last weekend had a 30-45 min outage)

 

Last time I saw that sort of thing was when I logged onto a BBS server over two decades ago.  I personally maintain very high volume systems that were written before 2000 that do not seem to be as finicky, the very worst only needing this type of "maintenance" once per quarter.

 

The fact they are using Mongo as seen in the API content, (a noSQL model) tells me they may be relying on Agile/RAD development models to get features out quick and have never looked at properly normalizing their database's.

 

That is fine in the very early stages of development (Alpha pre-release, etc), but I think the evidence speaks for itself (current outages and a previous several hour data loss) that some time really soon they need to either bring in outside DB talent, or give their in house DB guy the time necessary to patch the leaks.

 

Other indicators are the weird cardinality behavior on sorts of products in the warehouse, and the fact that hitting that sort button is throttled.  Just try to sort a few times in quick succession, they throw up a warming message and stop you, which tells me they knew enough about the issue to try to slow it, but not enough to fix it.

 

Very concerning indeed.

Edited April 4, 2016 by KrakkenSmacken

[Justme]

Well at least the game didn't cost me anything, other than a few thousand rewards points.

[[MCC] Die Antwoord]

Hey Clegg,

Glad someone realises what I was alluding to. It has come down to the choice that the devs have made, between not supporting a low population server in favor of one that may become so overpopulated  you will have to queue up to get into it.

Regarding the owner base figures, they have changed since I last took a look and are subject to further change, but as they stand currently:

 

cheers all

Wow, I'm really amazed they actually sold that much. Is that including all the guys that bought before the steam release or not?

Things are much worse than I thought.

[Bert Beard]

I just logged into PVP 2.

 

PVP 2 is nearly empty, has 128 players online

 

PVP 1 is full with a waiting queue.

 

 

What a mess.

[Slamz]

 

PVP 2 is nearly empty, has 128 players online

 

PVP 1 is full with a waiting queue.

 

 

Well yeah, this is PVP2's off hour.

 

PVP1 actually has < 600 players during American prime time.

 

It actually is not a huge improvement to move unless you think that "a very active game world [during hours I am not online]" is a huge improvement. The only real point of interest is that Euros trolling Euros by setting 0200 - 0600 port timers actually put it into American prime time on accident.

 

Go check PVP1 tonight around 0200 - 0400 server time and see what the pop looks like. We took a port last night at about 0500 (1am our time) and I think population was right about 400 online.

 

 

For whatever reason, way more Euros have bought this game.

 

But what concerns me more is the current user base. By the devs confirming a merge, it indicates as I have said earlier in this thread that they have conceded that no more than 5% of the current user base will return or continue to play, no matter what they do.

 

This is why I think we may be misreading Admin's statement.

 

I think he's saying that merges and transfers, as feature options, will be worked on next. Not that they will happen next.

 

We do know that no matter how successful this game becomes, even if there's PVP1 - PVP10 all full, at some point mergers will need to happen, be it 3 years from now, so those features have to be thought about and implemented and be ready.

 

 

Right now they literally cannot merge servers because they don't have the tools to do it.

[Bert Beard]

Well yeah, this is PVP2's off hour.

 

PVP1 actually has < 600 players during American prime time.

 

It actually is not a huge improvement to move unless you think that "a very active game world [during hours I am not online]" is a huge improvement. The only real point of interest is that Euros trolling Euros by setting 0200 - 0600 port timers actually put it into American prime time on accident.

 

Go check PVP1 tonight around 0200 - 0400 server time and see what the pop looks like. We took a port last night at about 0500 (1am our time) and I think population was right about 400 online.

 

 

For whatever reason, way more Euros have bought this game.

 

 

Yes, it's pretty obvious servers have their slow times when most players are sleeping.

Only a very foolish developer would base their server demand when the demand is at it's lowest.

It would make sense to me to base your server demand when the load is at it's highest.......through the course of at least an entire month.

 

There are several times more North Americans on the EU server than on the NA server ........the campaign to make that happen was a success.

Edited April 4, 2016 by Bert Beard

[Sir Robert Calder]

I gave up on PvP2 when I logged into a primetime weekend with just 250 players.

 

When there are a much greater amount of players, the game opens up a lot of options for players. No longer are your only options camping capitals or forcing port battles to see a soul or two from the more populated factions. All of a sudden ports way out in the Yucatan or even the Gulf become populated with players. People interested in pirating or privateering suddenly have many more opportunities to hunt lone traders actually run by players who are busy carting goods back and forth from their production factories for their clans. Ports become much more crucial when your enemy manages to a snake a port in the middle of your production chain, and then harasses your supply lines. Players who focus solely on crafting in areas that are already hotly competitive for resources suddenly start asking for anti-pirate forces and escorts. 1st Rates suddenly need escorts too when gank squads of Essex/Trincs aren't uncommon during primetime.

 

I do not deny that a lower playerbase appeals to some people, but I believe this game becomes dynamically more fun with an increased amount of players.

[Bert Beard]

So, what your saying for PVP 1 to be exciting and dynamic it has to be so full that there's sometimes even a waiting list to log in.

 

While PVP 2 sits almost empty most of the time.

 

I'm not buying that.......you can find all the pvp and rvr you want with a server population of around 1,000 - 1,500 during it's busy time.

 

PVP 1 doesn't have to have all the players to make this game fun........like it's some kind of contest.

 

 

Most of you have no idea how much this hurts the game and the overall number of players playing Naval Action.

Edited April 4, 2016 by Bert Beard

[Slamz]

There are several times more North Americans on the EU server than on the NA server ........the campaign to make that happen was a success.

 

If by "success" you mean "caused a lot of people to quit the game and did nothing of real benefit to PVP1 (and arguably made PVP1 even worse by inviting even more 'off hour trolling' and by piling up the weekend queue when both NA and Euro are online at the same time) then sure. Great success.

 

 

I would have used the term "moronic disaster" though.

[graphite]

Firstly, respect to all of you for continuing this discussion in a civilised manner.

 

I surely hope they can either increase the cap or keep another server. I most definitely hope more than 5% return. Its hard for me to put stock in numbers untill its a full game and has some sort of advertising, even on you tube etc.

If your numbers will hold up then that is a scary thought because i think this game is already good and will be better but its gonna have to find a way to get the word out to niche players like us.

Edit..just seen your edit. So with those peak numbers there isnt even enough room for everyone from both servers. That will not go well to que up....i acually quit the last game i played and really like because i cant spend 5 or 10 minutes just to get in every day.

 

Sorry MrDoomed, Devs have stated that 3k players is the maximum cap per server, and you’re right about room for everyone … reading the posts after yours its apparent that PVP1 is already suffering from this very issue. Also keep in mind the issues that arise with having maxed out servers and queues, i.e. server de-synchronization, lag etc. and I will try and keep everyone informed with the user numbers as data becomes available.

 

 

I just logged into PVP 2.

 

PVP 2 is nearly empty, has 128 players online

 

PVP 1 is full with a waiting queue.

 

 

What a mess.

 

This is exactly what I was fearful of with my original post Bert beard

 

This is why I think we may be misreading Admin's statement.

 

Hard to comment on slamz, as it’s ambiguous at best.

 

Wow, I'm really amazed they actually sold that much. Is that including all the guys that bought before the steam release or not?

Things are much worse than I thought.

 

Hi clegg,

 

Upon NA going early access I did look at some data {the exact figures were hard to determine} that GL had allowed maybe 6-8k in for early testing, and yes they are included in the graph.

 

On the topic of those early adopters/numbers; just prior to the sea trials server being turned off 15 online at best, normally 6 or 7.

 

After sea trials completed, we started testing OW, followed by map implementation, then economy/trade along with port battles. The week prior to EA there were only around 150 of us left. Disappointing numbers if you were to consider that this first influx of players were your hard-core/niche player base, but that’s how early alphas roll … apparently.

 

Red flags should have been obvious to the devs at this point. To further compound the issue, I think the decisions to remove double shot, to be reworked after nearly two years of combat testing, and to also decrease XP earned just prior to EA was not in the best interest of player experience or the game.  I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to why those decisions were made.

 

What I find most disconcerting post EA is that same pattern continues. Since its release NA has bled players akin to a virtual haemophiliac, with 90-95% of its user base having moved on.

 

I’ve had discussions with players, clans, and ex-streamers to try and analyse from their opinions why it’s gone this way, but that is a discussion for other time.

 

In conclusion, I sincerely hope that GL have a clear and concise roadmap for the future, with the priority being a means for player retention and not continually confusing the issues with statements like “economy may not be in the final release”

 

 

 

 

 

Peak concurrent players yesterday: 2,811

 

 

Cheers all

[Bert Beard]

 

 

In conclusion, I sincerely hope that GL have a clear and concise roadmap for the future, with the priority being a means for player retention and not continually confusing the issues with statements like “economy may not be in the final release”

 

 

 

I was quite focused on discussing the economy and crafting until the server issues forced me to forget about the economy.

 

I can't imagine the dev's being serious about dumping the crafting and econ in the final release.

Naval Action would be targeting a very narrow niche market indeed if they did that.

 

But just the fact that rumor is out there and the dev's won't kill it is bleeding players as well.

Edited April 4, 2016 by Bert Beard

[Mrdoomed]

Ive noticed since the great hype flight of worried players to pvp1 our population has stabilized and is starting to creep back up. The last couple times i played it was close to 300 before primetime.

I think our population dispersion is pretty even now between the primary factions. I see a good number of French ,British, and US players with a decent mix of pirates starting to spread out. Ive even done some paid privateer work for someone.

Keep up the fight Bert.

[Sir Ballard / oo7]

GoGo Server Merge! looking forward to it!

[Cpt Blackthorne]

Wow...talks of leaving the PvP2 server began back in March? Well, to that I will just leave this....