Server Population

Server Population

How are you going to control servers that die when the new of the game feeling is wore out or people decide not to play anymore. IE SWTOR had millions sub at release but now they are hurting on servers cause people downed the first content in a month or two. now servers are bare and hard to play on, same thing happen to Rift. ( I played both.) Just curious i think this game will be awesome and i can not wait to play. Very well thought out game design as i have seen so far. That is all i am worried about.

Its not going to be a problem. TSW will be so good, the population will just go up.

I'm wondering the same thing. To be honest I can't think of a single game to come out in the last few years that didn't boom and bust from release onward, although I haven't exactly gone and researched MMORPG release numbers verse current numbers. I don't think it's far-fetched to say that TSW will go down in population from release. That doesn't mean it'll necessarily cause any major problems though. Best cause scenario if it does become a problem is that Funcom implements server transfers or, if absolutely necessary, merges servers.

Well considering all the servers for TSW are virtual and a name is taken across all servers I'd say TSW would suffer the least from "merges" if they are ever needed.

Besides WoW (hate to say it), LOTRO (after f2p), DoD (after f2p), and Eve..

I dont think there is a single game that after release actually went up in numbers and not down a month or 2 after release.

DoD/Lotro took a f2p conversion to bring numbers way up. And WoW and Eve are the 2 mmorpg's that come to mind that actually went up (Eve took awhile but it did.. while WoW needs no mention).

So I think its fair to say that numbers will go down. Will subscriptions go down a lot hard to say but players on at peak times will go down for sure imo.

This. Funcom's last MMO, Age of Conan, used multiple server mergers and it worked nicely. Like someone else said, your name is reserved over all servers, so the system is already in place.

Ultima online, Everquest, Star wars galaxies they all went up and stayed at a good population for a long time.

Ultima as I recall has been dieing a slow death for years now.
Everquest didn't that recently go f2p so I wont be surprised there.
and SWG as I recall took a huge plummet it never recovered from after the infamous patch (it shall not be named).

Not saying they didn't go up but just saying no game really keeps going up after the initial release but goes down unless a p2p game goes f2p is the only exception. And really surprised not more p2p games try converting to f2p and so many actually just get shut down.

Whats the time limit ?

since UO has been around since 97 its not fair to see how the last couple of years have done you said couple of months.

SWG has also been around for ages.

WoW is also slowly dying now.

Why do we have to have multiple servers in the first place?
Look at games like Eve online and world of tanks. They have one server, that creates an instance of itself once the population reaches a certain number.
Heck, even DC Universe did this. They originally had about 10 servers, 5 pve and 5 pvp. When most servers started to become ghost towns, SOE merged them all into one sever. This one server has 2 shards. One for pvp and one for pve. If you want to switch between shards just switch at the teleporter.
In this day and age of technology, we do not need 100s of servers. All this does is split up the community, create ghost towns or at least, minimize the player base that we can play with.

I just want to also add that back in 2010 it was reported that Eve online had 60,000 concurrent players while world of tanks had 74,000. How awesome would that be to always have someone to play with in your time zone? How much of a relief would it be to always see people out and about that you could socialise or group with? How much of a relief would it be for you knowing that your not gonna have to spend money in the future changing servers because the server you started with died?