A few years ago a MMORPG called Tibia decided to release new servers to “revive” the game and the community itself, after doing a major release to deal with BOTs. They were going to release something similar to what Fresh Start servers are going to be for us (new economy/returning players/veterans who would like to experience something fresh) and their mechanic to control world population is very decent I’d say. Here it is:
They’ve categorized the worlds in 2 different types: Green and Yellow worlds.
Green Worlds were the “Fresh Start” ones, the rules for these worlds is that they are blocked to transfer to for an X period of time (defined by the company, based on population). You can always transfer from a Green World to any other world (green or yellow), as long as they are not locked (still waiting for the company to allow transfers to it).
Yellow Worlds were the old worlds, where people were already past the end-game and economy was already super advanced (rare items were not that rare anymore and prices were stable). The rules for Yellow Worlds are that you can always transfer from a Yellow world to a Yellow world but you cannot transfer from a Yellow World to a Green World, only from a Green World to a Yellow.
These system avoided very important things:
- Old players that abused bugs/exploits or cheated to go to worlds that were fully protected and released after the implementation of a new anti-cheat system.
- Bringing rare items to a brand new world, adding value even to the non-bis items on a short to medium run. Building economy was necessary for atleast 6 months to keep progressing.
- The most important one, in my opinion, blocked “mega guilds/companies” to completely dominate valuable resources super fast. Everyone starting from 0 brings a new dynamic to politics and stuff.
That’s not counting on avoiding people multi-boxing to transfer items from one server to another. To this day, 5 years after implementing Green/Yellow world mechanics there are items that you can only found in Yellow Worlds. Of course, in New World this is not possible, because you can always drop/craft “BIS” items. This is just an example.
What you guys think?