What if all server pops were combined?

General Discussion General Discussion
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What do you all think about combining all servers into one community with players split up into channels? Other games have done it, performance would still be managed, and any player could change channel at any time in order to group with others.

  • Each channel could have its own map with capturable territories. This will make it possible for any company wanting to war for a territory to have the option to capture a territory on any channel.
  • Hardcore PvPers can focus on specific channels to experience better competition, like owning territory on channel 1 or 2 could be seen as especially impressive.
  • People needing a non-English experience would be able to easily coordinate to gather on certain channel numbers, and new players will have no difficulty joining those groups at any time.
  • Company players split up with transfers and locked servers have a chance to reconnect.
  • Travel is already cheap and inventory management from storage in different-factioned territories is about to be free, so changing channels for other maps would not exploit anything.
  • OPR queues can pull across all channels. If there are 40 people wanting to play, make an instance and let them do it.
  • It’ll make adding any other PvP instances (1v1, 3v3, 5v5, etc.) easier because the pool of players will be larger and queues will fill.
  • Global dungeon-finder queues can also be used. This type of feature has already been discussed with the data mining. The war boards are going to be showing more character info like GS, so use the same info system to let people build their expedition groups.
  • The trading post inventories would be merged to make one universal economy. It’ll fix issues on low-pop servers without much economy and should also make it harder for any one rich company to manipulate.
  • Territory tax income could also be averaged out somehow to make it work across channels. It would be an opportunity to fix gold imbalance issues too.
  • Farming resources and avoiding bots would be relatively easy with a channel change.
  • A short cool-down on the channel change could be implemented to prevent exploiting of the feature (like farming one node in different channels without moving).
  • Channels that get full would just temp-lock (or queue), but that wouldn’t stop friends from jumping to any other non-full channel to group up.

I acknowledge that this would be a big technical change, but many of the recent game changes would support a channel system already. Server transfers already work pretty seamlessly and instantly, with just trading posts needing to be cleared and companies disbanded. So make them (and friends lists) independent. It’d still be a big change, but the mergers/transfers/locked servers model being used right now just isn’t working.

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Games that do this have fundamental underlying structure to allow it. Often from day 1. It took wow years to implement that. Someday but not today. Lets fix everthing else first.

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Yeah WoW has CRZ which in almost all zones you see people from other servers. The problem is there is no point right now to do that because you first need to enable cross server grouping, expeditions, OPR’s, etc. Otherwise, it won’t work because you can’t just have randos running around from different servers when you can’t do anything with them because Cross Server isn’t available.

Also, you run into phasing issues that can be a problem. You see some ore you want to mine. You get 3 steps from it, it disappears because you are phasing.

There is a lot that goes into this and it isn’t some simple switch. Like I mentioned about Phasing.

Like Sonickat said though. It takes time and right now isn’t that time as there is a lot more issues among more content needed first. I personally think they should still keep merging servers for now.

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There are drawbacks to it. For instance you will lose that community feel where a lot of players know most of the people on the server. It also can make it difficult to do things like defending a territory from being flipped when people can be on 20 different nodes of the same area.

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Seems like it’s more of a management+time issue. It’s a separate system that wouldn’t overlap with new content or balance or general bug issues. Changing server infrastructure and dev/testing of other network components would be sandboxed and independent of ongoing development/PTR/etc. Additional people could even be hired to work on that who would not need extensive knowledge of the current game at all. If they wanted to do it, it could be done. And NW’s made enough already (over a billion dollars) to support that, again if they wanted to do it.

And the real problem is, if they “fix everything else first” there’s a fair chance there won’t be much if any real playerbase left to benefit from it. I don’t believe the doom-n-gloom estimates with loses killing the game by next month, but I don’t think they have months to wait either.

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Exactly. We already know the devs were working on a dungeon-finder queue system. OPRs need it too, and once they have that in place it wouldn’t be difficult to make it cross-server. the problem is that instances in the game are not instances. Players are still in-world and just off the map. That’s also likely why OPRs are limited to just a few running at a time too. They need to fix that bad design with all instanced content off-server, make no limit to the number of instances when enough people want to start one, and then cross-server wouldn’t be difficult to expand after that.

Ore, like territory ownership, mobs, etc., would be channel-specific, no phasing. When you’re on a channel you get what’s there, including its ore timers for recently harvested items.

Merging, transfers, and locking servers split up my company. We were tight enough we still chat over discord and are playing a waiting game to hopefully play together again. There’s been talk to just moving to another game entirely. Why make it harder for people to play together, and why continue a system that’s just been pushing people apart. I’ve been through multiple transfers and mergers already and every new server just dies like the last one. My current server was #1, that’s why it got locked, is still locked, and it’s now about to drop out of the top-10 list. The current server setup has never worked.

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I agree with that 100%. But after having to move servers multiple times now, I keep having to meet and get to know all new people anyhow, so that’s become a moot point for me.

That’s not what I’m suggesting. Every channel would have its own map. There would need to be ways to make global calls for people, for pick-up groups and openworld PvP. So when a territory is being pushed, the defending faction can put a call out for people to defend it, and faction members from ALL channels have the option to jump to that channel to participate. It should work because the pool of players will be so much larger. And in any case it’s a hell of a lot better than current server pops where you’re very lucky to get 10v10 open world conflicts and most of the time one side pushes without opposition at all. My way the open world PvP would be more like launch with dozens of people fighting together on each side.

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i just want someone 300 pounds to smother me in their salty gummy neck rolls.

but solid ideas

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500 million annually was spent on development according to pre launch posts.

Even if nw sold 5 million copies @40$ each thats only 100 million dollars.

NW was in developement for years.

I doubt they will pull the plug this year. I can see where someone in management might see this as paid beta testing and market research too.

I could also see that tech being an investment into lumber yard but, its unlikely we see it even if they are working on it, before an expansion.

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The servers barely handle the people they have. If they were to make channels then they would only support so many players. One faction could just make sure they own the channel. Also different people owning the same territory, just on a different channel would become a confusing nightmare IMO.

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5 million copies at $40 each is $200 million, but it was announced that NW passed 25 million sales back in November. At $40 each that is $1 billion. That doesn’t count sales since then, the difference for anyone buying the $60 edition, or whatever they actually make on the in-game shop.

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weird we never had a peak above 1.2

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I hate channels myself, inspite of their benefits here. One thing I really like about New World, that I haven’t found in a MMO since original WOW is focus on immersion. It’s small, but hitting 3 loading screens passing through a town on FF14 drives me nuts. I love being able to run from the wilds into town without a load. Similarly, I really enjoy New World (even on my low pop server) in that there are no channels. There’s just one world. I like seeing the safe faces at the trading post, out in the world in opr, in dungeons. Stuff like channels and cross server OPR turned WoW into a community game where I made friends because I kept bumping into the same people (like I do now in new world), to just some quiet game where I queue for dungeons, the finder popped, everyone ran the dungeon, no words were spoken.

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That’s a choice. All hardware is scalable and all software can be written to manage loads. It’s not like AGS is in the woods working independent of civilization. For all their separation of departments AGS has access to AWS. If management in AGS wants to invest in more/better infrastructure, they have the means and opportunity to get it done.

You are 100% correct there. But with all the changes to the game in recent weeks, that won’t matter. In fact switching to a channel system would solve that problem on smaller servers where one faction dominates and takes all the territories with no chance of defeating them. Travel and storage costs (after the PTR patch) are basically irrelevant now, so the only drawback to one faction owning all territories is the lack of viable war opportunities for other factions/smaller companies. With channels, they can gain influence and declare for war in ANY channel, so instead of 11 possible territory options, they would have hundreds to pick from.

I agree, but the way the game is set up now, territory ownership is meaningless. Wars are a lot of work to set up and run, so much so most companies don’t bother. Unless AGS is makes major changes to how territories work (and that’s harder than implementing server channels) the maps are going to get pretty static/boring with most players just doing just OPR and PvE, like they already are now.

The one benefit to territory ownership is gold income, and there are already hundreds of posts here and on Reddit complaining about how unfair and broken it is, how companies exploit the gold, control trading posts, and ruin servers’ economies. That needs to be fixed regardless of server channels, but if the devs are going to distribute the wealth like what was described earlier, then that just fits in better with the channel system. Split up all the income and be done with it. Then there’s no extra benefit to certain territories or what channel they’re in. Channel relevance becomes something the community creates, like hardcore PvPers fighting over channel 1 or Spanish-speaking companies gathering on channel 5 so they fight for control of that channel specifically, etc.

I agree dealing with 200+ channel maps is probably too much, but it could just as easily be 20 maps, with channels 1-10 all sharing the same territory owners, 21-30 the same, etc. With war mechanics being so bad right now, there currently aren’t a lot of companies wanting to war, but even 20 maps means 220 territories to pick from, and it would be very easy to browse through 20 maps to see what’s available.

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Playing on a channel would not have to be different than one-server play is now, so it wouldn’t affect your immersion at all. The single drawback to me is that yes, you might not see the same names in town every night, or fight with/against people you know in OPRs. The game could return people to the last channel they were on, making it easy language-specific channels to support their pop. And in that case if you stick to channel 12 for example, you’d see mostly the same channel 12 people over and over. But I agree it won’t be the same community aspect as a solid server with a consistent population.

The problem though is that I don’t know any server with a consistent population anymore. Every time there are mergers and transfers whatever “community” I know vanishes. Yeah sometimes companies I know transfer to the same server, but most of the people go elsewhere. This last more really screwed over my company because some people weren’t able to make it before the locks happened, and they got stuck on another server. The game needs systems that make it easy for people to play with one another, so it stops hemorrhaging players. If it doesn’t those names you recognize are going to be gone anyhow.

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The problem for me with channels it still splits immersion for me.

“Hey, where are you?”
“I’m by the trading post”
“Where, I don’t see you”
“Right under the sign”
“I’m there.”
“Oh wait, channel 3”

It’s seemingly not a huge deal, same with in town load screens, but for me what I really liked about new world was the immersive quality of the community (especially on my low pop server where you know everyone), for this this really gets fractured by channels, load screens, and cross server pollination for stuff like OPR. For me, one of the big draws of New World is the immersive quality of the very contained server.

this is obviously person preference but I’d still take my low pop contained server over cross pollination, hard as it is to get mutated dungeon runs going - when I do get a group going it’s typically people I already know from other adventures, which is kinda cool to me.

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x-server OPR/BGs and x-server expedition runs, should be it at some point. Game is not designed for channels. I can already see the massive duping it would cause… haha.

Servers should be able to handle more than 2k, they can’t and no idea why not. Plus limited # OPRs… baffling.

Step 1 is to allow players to play. AGS seems determined to limit everything… until NW is dead.

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How is that different from current conversations where people are in different towns and you’re literally teleporting over to do a trade? If the channels were implemented to be sticky, so you rejoin the one you left they will act like today’s servers/communities for most people. The one difference is unlimited, instant “transfers” between them to insure no players are ever left behind or lack others to play with. Channels implemented as I’ve described do not have the drawbacks you’re describing.

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If there’s a glitch capable of causing duping it’s going to happen regardless of channel systems, like the dozen times it’s already happened. If you’re going to try to strawman at least pick something relevant to the discussion.

The more technical analyses I’ve read suggest the big limit is quantity of players/activity in a small space. The code doesn’t perform well. Performance can be improved and hardware can be increased, but those changes are really no different than implementing channels or some other universal instanced system. That’s exactly my point. The devs need to make changes and improvements to fix the pop issues, and making the community universal solves a long list of outstanding problems that have cropped up since launch.

It’s not a mystery. OPRs are not real instances. Players stay in-world and get ported off-map to run OPR. Each world has a limited number of fame instances, so each world is limited in the number of OPRs it can run at a time. It’s shitty design that needs to be fixed. Best way is to move OPR/wars/invasions to real instances separate form the servers. That’ll reduce lag and make it possible to queue together with other servers so no one is ever waiting for another OPR to pop. That’s also what I’ve already suggested above.

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Look I know it sounds stupid, and this may be personal preference, but I really disliked every mmo I’ve played with channels. It’s big for immersion killing for me. New World not having any was a big relief to me.