You want shards / realms to evenly distribute the server capacity but you have the option to move / join different shards / realms on the fly. Essentially you are still a part of the big picture but they limit the amount of players in that specific scenario.
If you had 1 server with 10,000 people on it and all decided to go to WW or any settlement ( not realistically to happen ) that server would implode with all that information being constantly written and read.
Sharding / Realms has been proven time and time again to get a GREAT solution. Yes technology has advanced greatly, but so has the need of all this information to get processed quickly.
The one thing i was gobsmackled was that the group finder isn’t a true Queuing platform. You need to open it up and apply. Sure you can get stingy or snooty on who you want. But i don’t enjoy hitting escape to go into the menu and accepting their request.
Queue for your role have a timer and just let it pop when full.
Lost my queue after an hour waiting on Seer because of a missing file issue. Had to reverify game integrity now I’m in a 2k queue because the richest company in the world has no sharding or layering tech and can’t let more than 400 players at a time into TWO different starting zones. How are we supposed to have epic PvP on a server that can’t handle more than 200 people in a small area? What even? Embarrassed for them, seriously.
2500 players is only low for events. The rest of the time it is typically under que. It’s too bad that there’s not a way to bridge the same server into “Districts” like Guild Wars did with its cities back in early 2000s when the population hits cap. So, you would be on say a different instance, “Eden District 2” if the Eden District 1 hit 2500 players. Allows you to at least be in game functioning until you get a space in the main district. But I guess that all ties into the server max capabilities anyhow, and I don’t network
so basically yet again…we are blocked from playing with friends. If you aren’t fortunate enough to not have any responsibilities…you are screwed from choosing where to game. This is a joke…and is just history repeating itself.
I can’t imagine what it would be like trying to break into invasions with 50 per side with even more players. At the same time; doesn’t feel like a big number of players for an MMO.
Hell no. Resource contention gets unbearable as soon as a server hits 50%. Raising the cap will only exacerbate this problem. Now, if they did some change to resources, such as instancing them, then maybe increasing server cap could work (though I’m sure there are lots of other in-game things that would need to be addressed, not to mention the technical limitations on the back end).
This problem has been solved by many games, many times. Instantiate the servers. Welcome to the two-decades-or-older solution that has been shown to work time and time again.
The way you guys manage servers is probably the biggest contributing factor to people quitting. Friends being split up… I would consider the game to be acceptable enough to at least increase the cap to 3000. Especially with a map size that is now larger with brimstone sands