Before I get into the main point, let me give you a backstory:
Our server was doing just fine, at launch it was medium pop and then later to full (unable to create characters there for a while). I think flagging it as full was the start of the downfall cause new players didn’t join as much as people leaving. Recruiting members became increasingly harder, finding people for Wars and PvE events too.
After the server transfer were fixed, people (no mass transfers) that couldn’t bear their faction being on the losing side transferred out. Can I blame them? I don’t think so.
Exploits happened. People were using hatchet exploit, life staff exploit, … to win wars (no war was won with these exploits, thankfully). This caused a huge cesspool of toxicity in the server and mass transfers happened. 2 of the biggest companies (one holding 3 zone) transferred.
Now? the server that once had queues and was full, is sitting at average 500 players online and even MORE people are transferring out.
The transfer were given out with good intentions, but the 2k cap, 200+ servers available killed it.
AGS has to do something. Cause a lot of people just transferred to this server and transferring out again is not an option, so they just quit the game.
Server merges are one of the possibilities and I think its time Amazon does something about it.
TL;DR : servers are dying, player base is reducing, we need less servers.
I understand them wanting to wait and give people time to figure out their transfers, but the reality is that too many servers are struggling population wise and that’s the more pressing priority. People are likely transferring to servers to try to get away from low pop servers, but the ones they go to might very well be at risk of tanking population shortly after they transfer. I’ve seen a few reddit posts detailing that exact situation happening to people already.
Healthy server populations helps player retention, when outpost rush queues are quick and there’s enough bodies to make for healthy 3-way territory control that helps keep players interested. Someone waiting hours in queue for a short outpost rush match is going to be frustrated and very soon look for another game to occupy their time.
I think Amazon is making a pretty big mistake delaying the mergers.
I agree, I don’t know why AGS did separate worlds.
I played good MMOs that had servers all over the world, but connects to 1 world, all players playing together…
This would be a nice thing to do too and a possibility aside merge. allow players to invite each other from other worlds in the same world set. Then you wouldn’t have the problem of “Which company should hold their zones if we merge”.
Separate trading posts and owners, but being able to invite each other from the same world set
Separate game worlds are pretty fundamental to their game design.
Imagine if all 50k-100k players in a region were online at the same time on the map.
Town ownership/wars would be a disaster. Basically no one would ever get to participate.
Resource nodes would always be empty. Mobs would be killed as soon as they respawn etc.
Agreed they didn’t fully think this through though. Personally I think the game needed to be designed with fewer, larger, higher pop (10k) servers to keep things healthy.
That would have meant more zones, more towns, more of everything, which would have meant more work, and given all the copy/paste content it’s pretty apparent they really struggled to get the game out as is.
I agree with the points you made. Having large number of players can be a hard thing, but as you mentioned they need to put in more work into making this work.
With the current state of the worlds, Medium servers will be rapidly leaking players while most either move to high pops or just quit.
Having more zones is one of the thing that requires more work and can help for sure. The server cap increase is what helps the servers for sure
Yea, I think needs to happen sooner rather than later. My server is basically dying more each day, outpost rush never pops and Ive been trying to find a server in the EU to move to thats friendly, has outpost rush action and some open world stuff, but Im hesitant to use the token, as even though Ive made a new char to visit other servers, its impossible to get a feel for them. Chat is just all trade chat and lfg spam.
If I knew mergers were coming it would help, but right now Im moving more and more toward leaving as Im really unsure whats gonna happen with servers. The token transfer feels like a crapshoot, but maybe I just need to bite the bullet, pick a server and take a chance.
Really feeling the population shrink now and now that the dupes and big exploits have been somewhat addressed, I feel this is the most important factor right now for the health of the game.
Its probably most poorly designed thing in the game. They even didnt widely think about concequences. They created more servers for save the day and gave players free transfers. This is really bad management and bad decision making.
And now population problem in the game is just worst thing. And i dont think its solvable without losing so many players. Even server merge is really hard for this game. It will affect everything in the game. Its not doable.
My server started with 1500 players, now its 500 at peak. No economy, no groups. most of the towns are just ghost towns. I feel like i am playing single player game.
Think about, you play one of the most populated mmorpg in world with 400 500k players. But you can play only with 500 of them. Even if you are in most popular server you can playwith only 2k players.
I think most important innovation with mmorpg is crossrealm thing. And for this game its impossible to implement that, because of the design of the game.
Because of these, the game is not mmorpg. Concurrent players of counter strike more than any games, but its not massive multiplayer game since i can play only 19 of them. So the game is not massive but multiplayer game. Even 2k is not massive but most people play with less players.
But i dont think they could solve the issue in near future.
I am just waiting for using my transfer. I will go 200 with my crafting skills, will grind available resource nodes and when i get ready i will transfer to high pop.
The 2k player cap is part of the issue as you mentioned. playing with 2k compared to (10-15k like some other MMOs) is a very very low amount. Especially for a game that revolves around 50v50 wars. MMO’s like WoW can easily implement cross-realm without so much consequence but its not doable in so many parts of the game for NW.
I think they should just merge the worlds or just force transfer some low pop worlds and reduce the overall number of servers and increase the cap. Thats one of the ways they can save this game in the long run.
Its true merge is only solution. But its really hard to do, so i dont think they will do that in near future. Also bugs and exploits are preventing the devs to focus more important design problems, content updates etc.
This is the same thing happening on my server. I see the occasional person transfer in only to realise the server is the same or worse than the one they left. I don’t usually see those people around for long because they are quitting in large numbers. I feel like the devs have already left it too late to save the game but I do hope I am wrong.
Doesn’t solve the problem, it’s still a game of musical chairs of people trying to find a healthy server. Playerbase dropped dramatically, servers need to be consolidated
At this point they just need to merge the servers. I understand wanting to wait til the dust settles and monitor server health, but with the way a lot of the low pop servers are hemorrhaging people, they are in a critical state. My fiance and I used our tokens to leave our dying server and join our friends. Within a week, the server we went to saw a mass exodus. There’s only 150 people online right now and it doesn’t get much better at peak time.
Now we are stuck there. I’m lvl 51. I’m not grinding that out again. I’ll stick around for now, but once it becomes impossible to find a group for anything, there’s a good chance I’ll shelf the game until server population is addressed. I can overlook bugs and exploits, but once there’s nobody left to do anything with, I may as well go play a single player game that’s designed to be played alone.