Slashman

You realize that that's irrelevant right? We're not talking about how hard it is to get teams on one of the 2 fullest servers in the game. It's the other 9 that we were discussing which may be problematic.

Careful! That's akin to blasphemy around these parts...

That's what I've been trying to say. Thanks for summarizing that.

I think those are some good suggestions. I hope the devs are working on them in some form or other.

So this was a planned event. And you expect surprise that you got people involved in it? I've said earlier in this thread that I personally can team when I want. Any 4+ year veteran should be able to form a team through their own contacts, SG/VG and an in depth knowledge of using the team tools.


This, right here, has been my issue with arguments from the camp of 'nothing is wrong'. Just because we both got on teams last night or the night before does not make the servers seem less empty to the uneducated. A new player jumps on the game and sees nothing but empty streets and maybe 1 or 2 other players over the course of 30 minutes. What kind of impression do you imagine that makes?

I thought that this discussion had moved past this point. I'm more looking at a population distribution issue than a 'game is dying' issue. Because I think that the distribution issue can have a negative effect on the perception of the game. I believe it already does have one.

Now yes, I know a lot of you don't care about that because you're fine as long as you can keep getting teams. I just don't happen to think that because veterans and lifers can get teams, that it means that all is well in terms of server populations.

I believe that we have too many people occupying 2 servers out of 11 and are underutilizing the other 9 servers.

How rude...

I used all small. My first attempt, I lost my 3 mid level reds because he got me with the drain. My second time I only had small ones. He was a +2 EB to me when I beat him(purple).

YOU TROLL!!!!

Sure that's possible, but we can't be sure because NCSoft never does decent marketing in the first place.

This is pretty much where I stand on this topic. I wish NCSoft took this a bit more seriously. They are spending a gajillion dollars on GR. It seems ludicrous that they would let marketing for the game sink to this level.

Server merges may or may not be the ideal solution(it of course seems the most obvious to people who are a bit more emotional), but doing nothing is a bad thing too.

I'll reserve final judgment til a few months after GR goes live on how much worry was misplaced over this, but simply banking on returning players to make up your numbers seems like a pretty crazy thing to do for an expansion of this size and scope. Maybe I'm not the type to see this from a corporate POV so I'll leave it at that for now.

I don't have a problem finding a team if I feel so inclined(I am rarely inclined...but still). There is almost always someone in my global list or SG that I can team with if I feel like it. I just jump to the server they are on or they come over. That doesn't mean that the server I'm on doesn't visibly look empty. That doesn't mean that finding a team via broadcast or other standard methods that a new player would try isn't more difficult.

As an Issue 1 veteran, I would be pretty pathetic if I couldn't find at least some folks to team with. The difference is, of course, how much easier it is to get a team on Virtue or Freedom. You basically can just stand there and get random invites. I was on for 35 minutes last night and got about 4 invites on Virtue. I can tell you that hasn't happened to me on Infinity or Victory in a good long while.

And I think it is good that you educate new players on how to get a team more effectively on lower pop servers, but are you managing to catch every new player that joins the game? Are you managing to catch every new player before they build up a high degree of frustration and maybe think that it isn't worthwhile anymore?

For the most part, in most MMOs, people use general broadcast to look for teams. That's not something alien, and it used to work pretty well in this game up til a while ago. If that dynamic has changed, then it means something more needs to be done to make it easier for new players to get a feel for that. Whether it is an improved tutorial or whatever.

If people are having trouble running into players in the street, then where exactly are they going to keep hooking up with veterans to guide them to the right place for the experience they are looking for?

In my mind it's not right that it should be this way in the first place, we are not any more heavily instanced than we were 3 years ago, but the streets are emptier(save for 2 servers out of 11).

Again, it is easy to sit in a comfortable bubble and say: 'I'm fine so there's nothing to worry about'. But there are also people external to the game who spread all sorts of crap about COX and jump on stuff like this. And there is no one telling people any different. NCSoft certainly isn't.

Mine too if it's any consolation.

I'm not saying all servers should have the same 'feel' to them. I distinctly remember back in the day when I could almost tell what server I was on just from the differing vibe each of them had.

Different SGs/VGs did all sorts of things and had their own feel to them. Whether it was recruiting or contests or whatever. I liked that. I may have gotten annoyed by broadcast sometimes, but there was a 'pulse' to every server...a personality even. Now it feels like only Freedom and Virtue have any personality of their own.

I'm not crying doom or advocating server merges, but I honestly do not think we have the healthiest population distribution currently. And I think that it can, and probably is, affecting perceptions of this game.

Compounding all that is NCSoft's 'lay back and chill' approach to marketing and generally, potential new players are going to be educated by the vocal fools on the internet with a grudge against COX. And there are a surprising number of them out there.

Not a comic book fan I would guess?

I never got the impression that tip missions are akin to defeat x number of y missions. I'm assuming that the developers know that kind of thing isn't very fun for most folks. So I guess you're making the assumption that people won't like something that hasn't gone live yet either.

Probably the same place you're getting the idea that new players are all well-informed, experienced gamers with established friends in the game who can guide them and tell them exactly where to get what they are looking for.

Different people have different experiences. If someone meets some new players that behave a certain way, and you came across new players who behaved differently, it doesn't make your perception of the average new player any more valid.

That's interesting. I've played EVE for over 2 years and never had that happen to me even in the most crowded systems. All bets are off in low sec space of course...but there usually aren't large gatherings of folks loitering in low sec unless they mean business and people are informed of the dangers from the get go...but that's an aside.

And in contrast I have met many new people who wanted to learn alongside other people. You can't just play the 'new people I know do this so the majority are like this' card and assume that yours is the only valid example to draw on.

So they should be discarded as valuable customers to NCSoft because they have an attitude that you think makes them a detriment to the community?

If MMOs pointedly went around weeding out and removing every player with an attitude problem, they'd all shut down.

Empty outdoor areas is one of the things that people equate to server emptiness, yes. Still, we have always been a heavily instanced game. And even after street sweeping was effectively killed by tank changes and XP alterations, there still seemed to be more folks running around outside.

Heavily instanced or not, you have to transport yourself from one mission to the next don't you? There should still be a decent degree of player movement throughout a given zone.

Of course, you have to get that out there to the players. What's the best way to do that though?

That's exactly the point. It is rarely yellow. There are no longer population stats given next to servers. But even green can still mean that Virtue is bursting with players as compared to Victory or Justice.

As to how a new player may know to join Virtue as opposed to say, Infinty? There are external sources of info about this game outside of the forums. There are, in fact, some very vocal people who have strong opinions about COX and spread them on other gaming sites. So you might be surprised to hear someone comment on an article on Bluesnews that Virtue is the only server worth joining if you are going to play COX and don't want to play in a ghost town.

I agree they would lose subs. Of course, one could argue that not doing anything will also lose them subs in the end as well.

Ideally, a merge would be an attempt to do this as well. Also, I have heard a lot of talk about the back end costs of merging servers, but I don't know how much of a cost that would really equate to.

Would they actually save some money from it as well by needing less personnel for maintenance over time? Would they save in terms of reducing overall bandwidth costs? I can't say.

Not necessarily. In my experience, I have found that Virtue almost always lags and has sticky movement in areas like Steel Canyon, Talos, Atlas and King's Row. I actually queried this in broadcast a few times and was told that this is business as usual by quite a few players(they may have been lying...who knows).

As an experiment, I logged off then and there and logged onto Victory, Justice and Infinity(my usual home servers) and found that I had a very smooth play experience in comparison. I have repeated this a number of times with similar results. Now Virtue is sometimes less laggy and sometimes more laggy, but I have rarely had a play session that did not have some annoying lag spikes in the more popular zones. You may be lucky to live an an area with a better route to the servers.

Spreading the player population more evenly across servers may very well bring performance to an acceptable level across all servers rather than keeping it intolerably bad(for a number of folks) on the two most populated ones.

That usually seems to be the conclusion I reach when I consider server merges for this game. Of course, then I have to consider that NCSoft doesn't seem the least bit interested in correcting these things either.

It's something I find very strange. I have no idea how much it costs to hire nearly 50 new staff members and finance an expansion of the scope of GR. But I cannot imagine that you'd then leave player retention and attraction to chance and a minimal marketing effort.

My biggest concern in all this is that we'll never get anything in the order of magnitude of GR again if this expansion doesn't do very well. And then server merges will start to look very attractive to the NCSoft higher ups.

If so, then I apologize to Claws

That's probably a bit more drastic than I would have gone with but ok...

This was the problem I had with his post(unless I misunderstood it). To say some number of people would quit doesn't quantify how many that would actually be. It may very well not be a significant enough number to make a financial dent.

Ok...I'm with you here.

Perhaps, but there is still a whole lot of 'if' in there. Too much for me to say x or y would definitely be the result.

A few reasons I can think of.

First: Lag. Freedom and Virtue are almost always laggy even when the rest of the servers are butter smooth.

Second: Due to there being no true number indicator anymore to say how populous a server is at any given time, a new player logs in and sees all green and simply chooses the server with the name he/she likes best. He/she doesn't know it will have an affect on his ability to quickly get a team and also how many other players they see in the game.

I covered that above so I won't get into it again. In terms of why we don't bring in more new players though? I have several theories on that myself.

1) We do little to no real marketing for this game. Even with GR so close, coverage has been sparse, to say the least. The people who are getting info on the game are the people who are already playing it.

2) The relative failure of MA to become the driving force the devs thought it would be. And that is compounded by the rampant exploiting that releasing it in a broken form encouraged. When you read forums on other gaming websites, there is a notable lack of respect for COX after what happened with MA. It got the reputation of being a 1 - MAX level game in a couple hours even after the bugs in MA were fixed.

3) It has taken rather too long to get the stuff that people want in the game implemented. That leads to a bleed off in players who want something new. We have waited a long time for GR to come in order to get some solid content. I can only hope that it performs above expectations and truly reinvigorates the game. Not just for long time players, but for people who want to try it for the first time.

As evidenced by...? You threatening to quit?

I'm not completely sold on server merges myself...but to make a statement like that implies that you absolutely know what a majority of subscribers will do in any given situation. As even the developers have demonstrated on several occasions, even they have a hard time determining what actions a majority of players will take in response to a change.

Also, if, as you said, it resulted in more populous servers across the board, then might that not mean that the game would be come more attractive to new players and thus increase our numbers in the long run?

If you're going to play the 'I know what will happen' game, then play it right out to the end.

You don't have to say it every time. No one died and made you arbiter of all things relating to low population servers(unless that happened when my back was turned).

Even assuming that this is true, what consolation is that to a new player who doesn't have a long list of global friends to draw on for a team when they want to play?

So then you'll stop posting in them and reading them?

So it is better to let new players be discouraged by thinking that no one is playing the game, rather than by having people who may or may not ever play maybe read a thread like this on the forums?

At the very least, a thread like this would actually let someone reading it know that people are playing and that there may be a reason for them not seeing a highly populated server if they did play the game.

I'm terribly sorry, Oh Master of the Forums. I'm sure we will all try our hardest never to anger you again in our lifetimes on pain of death.

Snarky comments aside, I do have to wonder at the nature of the emptiness as perceived on the other servers.

Even as someone who doesn't team on a regular basis, that doesn't mean that I don't like seeing people in the game. I like to look at different costumes and read bios(where present).

True story:

The other day I was on Infinity about to zone from Port Oakes to Cap when I heard another player pleading for people to team with. He was actually saying that he thought he was alone in the game. I did tell him that he wasn't, but I was kind of pressed for time and about to log off so I couldn't really talk to him at length.

That's not the first time I've seen that kind of thing. And as fine as we all may think the player population is, perception to newer players is a big thing.

This game has always been heavily instanced. And even when the tanker changes and other things went live that made street sweeping less rewarding, it still seemed like there were more folks going about their business in general around the city.

And as pointed out before, no one should have to come to the forums to find out that there are people out there to play with. Global channels etc. should not be a requirement for finding others to play with. And if they are, then that is the sort of info that should be presented to players at the start of their play experience.

I'm hoping that tip missions help to make street battles a bit more common place and this helps to put more players out in the open. I guess we'll see when Issue 18 goes live.

A warning to the people,

The good and the evil.

This. Is. War.