Updated this post since people have been keeping it alive. So I thought that I would transition the focus a bit to keep up the discussion. The servers have been up for a while now and we have seen a significant drop off of players, but but that was expected and normal player churn. They are still at a healthy server population but the question is, what happens next?
This is thinking into the future, perhaps 6 months from their release. What do we do with these servers? How do we manage transitioning the players on them (that want to) to the main servers. How do we limit fragmentation of the community so early on in the game’s development?
They could consider the following option.
Open FSS to main server transfers now. No reason to restrict them now if people want to play with their friends. Continue to restrict any transfer of players from the main servers to the FSS to avoid any impact on their economy.
After 6 months disable new player creation. After 6 months these no longer are fresh start servers and probably should not be advertised as such to incoming players who are looking for that kind of leveling experience. Instead they can wait for the next wave of FSS, as it is a really cool tool to get new players interested in the game without new players getting overwhelmed by a majority of max leveled players on the main servers (which is really what happens with any MMO population over time unfortunately).
Avoid any FSS merges either among themselves or with the main servers to prevent compromising their economies.
This gives the options to players on FSS to continue on their individual servers if they choose to do so without any interference from outside servers. At the same time this also allows players that used it as a fresh start leveling experience to transfer over to the main servers and continue their experience there.
This would also limit any significant fragmentation of the community and also remain consistent with the original promises AGS made with FSS.
Honestly have no idea how popular these are going to be, but I have a feeling we might be having some intense queues soon. This might be their current plan, but they might have some extra servers ready to go in the event of queues?
Yeah I think that’s my only concern, assumed it would be a temporary no-transfer order. I think they said before that it would be at least 6 months, but it looks like they decided on permanently based on the wording?
I do not like that there are fragmenting the community and wonder if cross server queues will then be separate between legacy and fresh start servers?
Glass half empty kind of person I see. I have read the global on the 2 servers I play on and there are tons of people looking forward to these servers. Many are not even playing the game as they will only come back once the FSS are launched.
I think it will be a big success but then again I like to think the best of most things.
Why would you have to have separate que’s between the servers? PvP and Instances are still just that and will never impact the server you are from. As it is only the PVP right now will even be cross server probably 2-3 months out before they do cross server pve stuff.
So if I want an English-speaking server I had better join a US server, and leave the EU servers to the French, German, and Rusian, speaking nations as per usual…
Well I’m assuming here though, but I assume that people that are drawn to fresh start servers wouldn’t want to be in the same OPR or arenas with legacy players because of the perceived discrepancy in wealth and gear? Maybe they wouldn’t want people impacting their PVE instances as well? Again I could be wrong there. I think most people are worried about territory management and all that, which will remain contained.
90% of these players LEFT because of exploits and bugs and dupping etc. (I was one of them)
They left for GOOD reasons and now get to come back and play the game they actually liked because it won’t have ANY other the players or item dupes that got these players ahead.
People leave BTW it is the MMO way of things, but many that left did so because of the duping, exploits etc and we should not have any of that this time thru.