There has been a lot of talk about what servers you like to see and what their specifics need to be. But recently we see games trying to resurrect their overall playerpopulation by opening up new servers.
My own experience is that populations between excisting and new servers start shifting (mostly from old to new servers). They appear to give that new server (and possibly the overall playerpopulation) a "brief" population boost, but that curve flattens out after some time and it has a sharper decline in comparison to the old servers. Which actually impacts the old servers aswel, since their populations are starting to bleed out due to this migration.
Which brings me to my point. It seems that people that have played the game for years on old servers, have invested the most time in the game and on that server. This before shifting their attention to other servers or games. What can be noticed it those newly added servers that they do not contain such persistent player populations. There seems to be a different mindset in general.
One could argue that "back in the day" there was no new server popping up every couple of months and therefore the players were not able to show that serverhopping-behaviour. Then again, there was no need for it at the time, due to the new content or player gap being not as big.
Another train of thought would be that they would open up new servers and have the intended design to merge that new player population of that server with the population on those older servers. In a way you'ld be connecting the lower level population with the higher. If you see what I mean? This might be a constructive way to allow for that new - low level experience but still have a chance of joining communities that have been playing for years on that other server. Although I feel that such a design should be stated from the beginning so people know what they hop into.
You could set up a gradual integration of characters into level oriented servers. You play from 1-40 and get the option to get your level 40 toon to a server that goes up to 80 or stay on the current server capped. And from 80 to 120 etc. All the while every single server allows players to start from level 1. I'm losing track here but this might be an alternative option instead of opening up new servers where people stay seperated from excisting server populations.
What is your opinion on the matter? Do new servers obtain enough new or old loyal players to keep these servers alive for decades to come? Or has there never been the intention of keeping these servers alive for more than 6 months to a year? And if you open new servers, are you neglecting the loyal long time players by keeping away new contacts from them if they stick to the server they've invested in for years?
As long as VR honors the tenets thoughtfully and in good faith, I don't think server population numbers will an issue.
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/faq/what-are-pantheons-tenets/
P.S. speaking of the tenets, the main website should have more emphasis on that list.
My preference is for doing what we can to keep servers with a medium to high population. Feeling like an active, vibrant world and not having long delays in finding groups is my main concern.
I would like to see servers structured to be collapsible / expandable (sharing player name, guild name, etc databases) so that they can be better managed to keep a healthy population. This could even allow for a nightly merge in the off-peak hours. For example, say there are two RP servers. Servers reboot at noon (Pacific time zone). RP Server 1 and 2 are seperate. At midnight (Pacific), both servers merge and stay as one until the reboot at noon. The merge need not require a log-out, instead just give 10 minutes for everyone in the lower population version of each zone to switch to the higher. Servers could be built in matching pairs and there could even be some interesting lore reason created to explain this (perhaps themed off the two moons).
Early server mergers could come very fast if VR miscalculates and the inevitable departure of people that try the game and don't much like it leads to underpopulated servers. I hope not - and multiple versions of lower level zones may let them keep the number of servers limited enough that they will not need mergers.
Early server additions could come very fast if the flood of new players exceeds expectations. But I don't think this thread is focused on the early days when a successful launch could lead to 5 servers turing into 10 the second day.
Longer term I don't see either mergers or new servers as something that will occur very soon. New servers are good to give new enthusiasm to jaded players or to give an alternative to servers with busted and hyper-inflated economies. Or to go with a hyped expansion expected to bring in a lot of new people that may prefer starting at the same level as all their peers.
There does seem to be a certain inevitability to some long-term aspects of the game.
Inflated economies. Over-population. Burned out players. Dominant guilds.
All these things, though, VR have a chance to do better and I think they will. I don't expect for them to suffer in the same way other modern, or even classic, MMORPGs are in this regard any more than I expect the gameplay to be the same.
I think that there is a point where adding too many new servers becomes unhealthy. I can understand adding new servers to encourage new players to try a game because expansion bloat and top-heavy level bloat can act as barriers to entry as a game ages. However, I think these new servers eventually need to funnel players into existing servers. Maybe servers for new players are legacy servers, and when a player reaches max level there is an NPC they can talk to for a free character transfer to a live server.
This topic has been promoted for my CM content, please continue the discussion and have fun! :)
"Community Opinion - Does server loyalty link with game loyalty? How quickly would you up and leave a server you've spent years on for a higher population, different ruleset or for a number of other reasons? Let us know below #MMORPG #CommunityMatters #games"
Well, considering a pretty huge portion of what draws me to games like this is the social aspect, playing on a very low population server would certainly not be ideal. I guess it depends on how many of my friends were still left, and how low the population is. Assuming the population is so low that I can no longer find a pick up group on a regular basis I would probably be very likely to try to get my character moved....with that said, I've never actually done that. By the time that has happened in the past I'm normally also done with the game.
I have little care for server loyalty, only overall game loyalty (provided the game is deserving of loyalty). I much prefer low population servers as it means less competition for resources, for content and makes the world feel much larger and more dangerous.
With games like these now exclusively cloud hosted, the creation of new servers or merging of old servers should happen in a much more timely manner than the old days where the company ran, managed and maintained their own physical server farm.
