What is the general consensus on server emptyness?
By
3dent,
Posted on: 2010-07-09 07:05 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
I think if they just flipped the load order from highest to lowest that would naturally help the several hundred to a few thousand new players that will be showing up soon lean toward a more "player rich" experience. As much as that is possible any way.
Aside from that I prefer to view the non freedom/virtue servers as 2% full rather than 98% empty. Just perspective.
those servers aren't empty...i filled them up with plenty of toons i no longer play during the last free server transfer! 
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this is as far as i got. anything you say after is useless when you decide you know me better than i do.|
Originally Posted by Redd35
Some people make statements like "But we like our servers less populated" which is usually followed by paraphrasing a 15 year old spamming in a popular zone. I'm sorry, but I don't believe that you actually like being one of the only 14 heroes/villians on your server at that time. I can understand these people that make these statements are defending the game and reassuring themselves, so I do not hold anything against them.
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i love the "smaller" servers. i have ONE character on freedom, simply because i wanted to see the home for the "rude tells" thread. if i wasn't happy on my other servers, i would have made many more on freedom and virtue
you sir/madam, fail
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lolwut? I've never seen it that low.
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Originally Posted by Redd35
Some people make statements like "But we like our servers less populated" which is usually followed by paraphrasing a 15 year old spamming in a popular zone. I'm sorry, but I don't believe that you actually like being one of the only 14 heroes/villians on your server
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Ehhh... Gotta disagree with you.|
Originally Posted by Bronze Knight
Eve Online did it right. Single Server for every one that plays the game. This gives you the best sense of cohesion and community. It also solves a number of problems inherent in MMO's. For examtople playing with your friends is easier if theirs only one server its. Its also better for the devs so they can do big events. Unfortunately at this point all our servers are too well-established to effect a server merge, people would scream bloody murder.
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Different Servers allow the game to have different Personalities. If you go to Virtue (the unofficial RP server) you'll have a different experience than Freedom (Freedumb) It's a good thing. It means the game can be kept fresh by swapping between different servers.
The problem, in my not so humble opinion, was the Devs didn't try to fragment their playerbase. Wait, what? Why would I say something like that?!
Well. If you've got just 5 servers you can fragment the playerbase into cohesive communities. A Casual, a Hardcore, a PVP, an RP, and an RP-PvP server breaks the community down by what people like to do and hwo they like to surround themselves with. Sure there will be RPers on the PvP server, and Casual Gamers on the Hardcore server, but the people would gravitate toward the style of gameplay they enjoy, without too many pickles landing in the peanut butter.
No. I'm not advocating a server-merge. I'm not advocating different rulesets for each server. Just a designation which leads people toward what they want to do. PvP on the PvP server would still be in the Arena or Zones, just like other servers. The same applies would apply to the other servers.
The single-server model's greatest flaw in the City of Heroes/Superhero mindset is the finite number of "Obvious" names that many players absolutely want to have for their character. Add to that the design of the game leading towards altitis and 36 characters per account? The Single Server setup crumbles fairly fast, unless you intend to design the game around name sharing issues.
-Rachel-
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I certainly agree that single server is in general a better model. It has some drawbacks too. Most Eve-O players know about how bad the lag in Jita is. Its pretty bad to go to any of the market hubs on the weekends. Then you have the systems where mission "farmers" cause immense lag in such as Motsu, Dodixie and Sivala. |
Originally Posted by Bronze Knight
Eve Online did it right. Single Server for every one that plays the game. This gives you the best sense of cohesion and community. It also solves a number of problems inherent in MMO's. For examtople playing with your friends is easier if theirs only one server its. Its also better for the devs so they can do big events. Unfortunately at this point all our servers are too well-established to effect a server merge, people would scream bloody murder.
Also asking for a general consensus on a forum for voicing your personal opinion is.... a bit redundant. |
What would happen if CoX were to go single server? Well AP, Cap, Grandville and PI would be worse lag fests with even more broadcasts of AE and Farm spam.
I don't know about single server for CoX but we probably should cut things down to 4 (US) and 1 (EU). Oh yeah, those 5 servers should be accessable to both US and EU players. I see no reason to keep the players divided.
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Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
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General? Probably "meh". Although individual consensuses can vary (see previous posts in this thread).| What is the general consensus on server emptyness? |
All in all, weekly server maintenance, auto database grooming, log file shipping, and temp file management probably leave the servers with all the space they need.
--NT
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City of Heroes instances outdoor zones when they become too full to avoid precisely this problem.
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Originally Posted by newchemicals
What would happen if CoX were to go single server? Well AP, Cap, Grandville and PI would be worse lag fests with even more broadcasts of AE and Farm spam.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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This is what will most likely happen if there is a merge or if GR fails to meet its expectations. |
Originally Posted by newchemicals
I don't know about single server for CoX but we probably should cut things down to 4 (US) and 1 (EU). Oh yeah, those 5 servers should be accessable to both US and EU players. I see no reason to keep the players divided.
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Also they fixed the lag in Jita and the other trade hubs its not even that bad on the weekends.
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"Hypocrisy, the human inherent." "Let not this work be wasted, apply yourself always."
I have to agree with those that feel like too many of the smaller servers are too empty. I know I moved my two mains from Liberty, a moderatley populated server, because even then I felt like there wasn't enough going on. Sure, I could use LB or other global channels for Liberty to find teams, but honestly, I feel like one shouldn't have to entirley rely on global channels to find a team.
I probably would have left CoH if I hadn't moved my characters to Freedom. Despite its reputation and getting the nickname 'Freedumb' I still find it heaps more enjoyable than struggling to get a TF going on Liberty.
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Originally Posted by Scythus
lolwut? I've never seen it that low.
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You've obviously never played on the EU servers then.
Well whether servers are merged or not I feel the devs should swap the way servers are displayed around. When you login it list based on load from least to most. New players maybe looking at the listing and assuming the top listed server is the one with the most people. If you assume the top server is the one with the most players and you login to that server you are going to get a very very erroneous impression of how many people play this game.
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Your narrow-mindedness suggests you really aren't looking for opinions from other people. Are you really saying you can't even entertain the notion that some people like things different from the way you like them? Since you like a crowded server, anyone who claims otherwise is either deluding themselves or deliberately lying???
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Originally Posted by Redd35
Some people make statements like "But we like our servers less populated" which is usually followed by paraphrasing a 15 year old spamming in a popular zone. I'm sorry, but I don't believe that you actually like being one of the only 14 heroes/villians on your server at that time.
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Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
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Originally Posted by Bull Throttle
You've obviously never played on the EU servers then.
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Was just about to say that
@Damz Find me on the global channel Union Chat. One of the best "chat channels" ingame!
If this has been said, I am sorry.
A low population may mean very little. Just because they are not in the game at that time does not mean they are not subscribing.
In the end, the subscibers mean more than server population.
As to the reason why, I attribute it to game update blues. People are waiting for something new, and the delays for GR may have kept them away for a bit longer.
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I hate Hate HATE single server games!!|
Originally Posted by Bronze Knight
Eve Online did it right. Single Server for every one that plays the game. This gives you the best sense of cohesion and community. It also solves a number of problems inherent in MMO's. For examtople playing with your friends is easier if theirs only one server its. Its also better for the devs so they can do big events. Unfortunately at this point all our servers are too well-established to effect a server merge, people would scream bloody murder.
Also asking for a general consensus on a forum for voicing your personal opinion is.... a bit redundant. |
Laggy as all heck and you can't hide from the pests. Never mind that you have your global showing at all times. Ugh.
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I'm not clear what the "problem" might be of relying on global channels to get teams going?|
Originally Posted by Street_Wolf
I have to agree with those that feel like too many of the smaller servers are too empty. I know I moved my two mains from Liberty, a moderatley populated server, because even then I felt like there wasn't enough going on. Sure, I could use LB or other global channels for Liberty to find teams, but honestly, I feel like one shouldn't have to entirley rely on global channels to find a team.
I probably would have left CoH if I hadn't moved my characters to Freedom. Despite its reputation and getting the nickname 'Freedumb' I still find it heaps more enjoyable than struggling to get a TF going on Liberty. |
What other methods would you rely on instead?
Broadcast "lft"? But you can do that on the global and your message hits all zones/both factions. To me, using the global to hit all the zones in the game, including inside instances at once, is actually the easier way to broadcast.
Send /tells? That skips the whole broadcast step, but you can do that now whether or not you have the globals activated.
The only team recruitment method I can see as different between a busy server and having to "rely" on globals on one of the lower pop servers isthat on Freedom or Virtue, you can possibly run up to total strangers standing around under Atlas or in the marketplace or Pocket D or wherever players are gathering and ask them face-to-face in Local.
And I have to say my experiences on Liberty don't match yours. I have never seen a TF take more than 5-10 minutes to recruit a team (granted that's using one of the global channels you decry having to use).
There's a triple whammy going on here right now on the Live servers. It's right before a major release, so some folks are taking a break waiting for the release. It's summertime - many people go on vacation and not surprisingly don't take their computers along to play their MMO. Afinally, as some others have said, we know that a Closed Beta (for that upcoming major release) is going on right now. I imagine that many of the people who would otherwise be playing on the Live servers are caught up in that CB.
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Originally Posted by SpyralPegacyon
"You gave us a world where we could fly. I can't thank you enough for that."
I originally played on Protector. When I came back to the game after a hiatus a year ago January, Protector was dead. All the SGs I knew: gone. Streets: Empty. Pocket D: Vacant 99% of the time.
I moved to Virtue, and things were much better. Recently, a player we knew from the old days logged back in after a couple years break and said Protector was so dead, so he moved to Virtue too.
I understand having loyalty to your chosen server to a degree, I do, but honestly, many of the servers are seriously underpopulated these days, especially compared to how they used to be. To pretend the populations haven't been steadily shrinking because you have "no problems" finding a team is sticking your head in the sand.
Sooner or later, the devs are going to need to cope with the fact that some servers have populations that are drying up. As someone pointed out, it's not good for the game for a new player to log in the first time, select a server at random, and see no one else around. Eventually, something will need to be done: a server merge, a single-server solution, something.
You can stick your fingers in your ears all you want but there is a reality that while you might enjoy playing on a server where you can usually pretend successfully that it's a single player game, this is not good for a business, and a business decision is likely to be made at some point that is probably going to make you very unhappy.
It'd be alot more productive to talk about real solutions to dwindling populations on some servers and thus have at least some voice in shaping that eventual solution than to keep asserting that everything is fine and nothing needs to change, ever. Because like it or not, that's probably not true.
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Originally Posted by eltonio
This is over the top mental slavery.
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I'm a living example of that. Especially due to the recent sale on Steam, I've got a bunch of other games I'm fooling around with at the moment. But my subscription is still active, I prepurchased GR, and when GR goes live I'll be all over it.|
Originally Posted by Rodion
Server population is going to be at its lowest now. Before a big release many long-term players take a break.
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I thiunk that GR will help with low population problems, such as there are by allowing more characters to participate in events; one of the few actual problems I see in lower-pop servers is getting a large enough team together for non co-op game events, especially villainside. Villains plus rogues plus vigilantes is likely to be a larger number than villains alone.
Personally, I'd like to see some sort of pseudo-serverless system. You'd still have servers, to preserve the existence of distinct server cultures and so on. But you could enter a gate to visit an "alternate universe" aka another server, and you'd get a temporary name like "Red Shredder of Protector" to avoid conflict with any "Red Shredder" on the server you are visiting. This would allow people to make characters on low-pop servers and still play with their friends and see the crowds on the hi-pop servers.
Arc #40529 : The Furies of the Earth
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In my case, I felt that the forums were starting to impact my enjoyment of the game, since I invariably start reading with a smile and stop reading with an irritated frown at many of the posts I see.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Recently, I was getting worried that the forums were basically dead and that it felt like people were just gone. Then I remembered that a heck of a lot people were most likely in Beta right now.
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Current main:
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Of course not. I live in America.
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Originally Posted by Bull Throttle
You've obviously never played on the EU servers then.
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Funny how all the experts on how terrible it is to be on a low population server never actually play on the low population servers, isn't it.
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Originally Posted by Smurch
I originally played on Protector. When I came back to the game after a hiatus a year ago January, Protector was dead. All the SGs I knew: gone. Streets: Empty. Pocket D: Vacant 99% of the time.
I moved to Virtue, and things were much better. Recently, a player we knew from the old days logged back in after a couple years break and said Protector was so dead, so he moved to Virtue too. I understand having loyalty to your chosen server to a degree, I do, but honestly, many of the servers are seriously underpopulated these days, especially compared to how they used to be. To pretend the populations haven't been steadily shrinking because you have "no problems" finding a team is sticking your head in the sand. Sooner or later, the devs are going to need to cope with the fact that some servers have populations that are drying up. As someone pointed out, it's not good for the game for a new player to log in the first time, select a server at random, and see no one else around. Eventually, something will need to be done: a server merge, a single-server solution, something. You can stick your fingers in your ears all you want but there is a reality that while you might enjoy playing on a server where you can usually pretend successfully that it's a single player game, this is not good for a business, and a business decision is likely to be made at some point that is probably going to make you very unhappy. It'd be alot more productive to talk about real solutions to dwindling populations on some servers and thus have at least some voice in shaping that eventual solution than to keep asserting that everything is fine and nothing needs to change, ever. Because like it or not, that's probably not true. |
I dunno about the servers being empty per say, I will say I play on Justice and at time I do find it difficult finding teams for the things I want to do, or at times it does seem like no one is on though that is typicly late at night very early morning.
I would say city of heroes is less populated then it once was and less populated then some other MMOs I have played over the last year (including Aion),but all in all not to bad as far as population.
Adressing if going rogue will make that worse I don't think it will, simply for the reason of unlike CoV where the content was overwhelmingly heavy on the Villain end of things (and it made sense why it was) GR is giving Vets 2 new experiances to try, that being the preatorian bit and of course the ability to switch from good to evil or vise versa and back again and of course lets not for get the long awaited return of the Trial of Pain. For new players I believe with GR it will offer something most MMOs only touch on and that is conisquence for moral choice.
The summer months tend to be slower in any mmo as people take holidays, go outside more, and have non mmo related fun.
I'm sure given what is happening in Aion at the minute if NCsoft decide there needs to be a merge there would be one.
The only way to avoid it, is never to reach launch day.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.