Except it’s not. I’d prefer a game that’s actually playable, as opposed to one that’s not.
With instancing, it usually puts you in the same instance with preferred people, like your guild/company/friends, and if grouped. This lets you play with the people you care about. Most people don’t care WHO they’re killing in PvP, just that enemies exist. Instancing allows for all of this.
If you wish to change up the friends you’re playing with, you can… because they’re all still on the same “main server,” as opposed to this travesty with 2k server caps, horrible queues, and might be splintering communities and entirely preventing people from playing together.
Which when you think about that split 3 ways, is roughly 700 people per faction on a server. That’s laughably small and limiting, when people just want to be able to be with their friends/companies.
Instancing is a thing in BDO and you see how popular that game is when it comes to the PvP aspect. Instancing is perfectly fine as Dree stated, people don’t care as long as it is someone of the opposite faction in red
Think about it…
You’re in a server, with dynamic event based scenarios.
If you instance it, you end up with those being out of sync.
So when a fort in one instance is being attacked, and players in another instance rush over to it to defend it and find no one…
You’ve just broken the game.
You also can’t increase the server limit by a whole lot for the same reason. Too many players in one server leads to an incredibly volatile environment for those same events. Not to mention being on either extreme end of the having no quest mobs alive or the player-concentration based spawn rates allowing for an infintie xp farm.
The only real solution was to have far more servers available at launch than we had.
Granted, the peak playercount during the “stress test” open beta was 200k. The peak player count yesterday was 1.4M.
Even if they had anticipated there being 5x the amount of players joining on launch than what they saw in open beta, they would still be nearly half a million slots short. Granted, Amazon possesses the largest server farms on the planet and provides servers to everyone and their mother, so for servers to be the limiting factor of all things is pretty absurd. That said, there’s only so much you can plan for.
The issue is the lack of servers. They should have started out with more. Issue is they will have to do more transfers as people quit and some of these die off.
Designed correctly i don’t think it would be a terrible idea.
Guild Wars 2 does it quite successfully and it has way more “dynamic event based scenarios”. The thing that it doesn’t have is open world PvP but even if you had one instance for those flagged for PvP and one instance for those not flagged you’d probably have an improved situation over what we have now. (You might even incentivise more people to flag for PvP… i doubt that the PvP instance would be as full as the PvE instance)
Of course that needs to be built in at the architecture so it’s not happening any time soon (if ever). I’d also expect that there are subtle implementation issues involved that you’d only understand by being intimately aware of the software architecture of the game. But still it’s not, in principle, a terrible idea.
Let’s pretend there are 2 layers per server, effectively doubling the player cap.
On layer 1, Syndicate claims Everfall.
On layer 2, Marauders claim Everfall.
When the population of that server gets low enough to merge those two layers, which of the two take priority.
Here’s an alternate scenario.
On layer 1, Covenant declares war on the Syndicate company controlling everfall.
Server receives a spike in players, and half of that Covenant company gets merged to layer 2, where Mauraders now control Everfall. What happens to this group of players and the war they just declared?
Scenario 3:
On layer 2, The Marauder company sends out the signal that they’re being attacked, and rally their troops. Unfortunately, layer 2 is full and so whenever anyone from that company tries to log in, they are sent to layer 1, Where they don’t control the territory at all. How does the Marauder company hold their land?
It sort of could be, but you have to be more careful about it.
Conceptually, so long as you have a single PvP instance that every decision that affects PvP synchronises on, the territory capture mechanics can be maintained. From my understanding, the only real impact PvE has on PvP is via the town board. So long as that impact only gets applied on a known cycle (e.g. when missions get reset) then you could make it work.
That DOES mean that now PvE and PvP are sharded away from one another, which will come with it’s own positives and negatives, but the territory capturing mechanics would survive.
[edit] Bah, necro. I didn’t look at the age. My bad. [/edit].
Because that would make no sense with Settlement control.
Which instance did you buy a settlement in? All of them?
Which instance do you have to defend against PvP missions by other factions? All of them?
Short answer: It’s a game with territory capturing mechanics, it just can’t be instanced…it breaks the whole core mechanic.
No it doesn’t. Do what BDO does - faction control can only be influenced in “Channel 1” of a server.
I think it would be a good idea to have 2-3 channels per server.
I think that on my server, though (Orofena) it’s gonna largely not be an issue with a slight population bump (2250 would suffice) and free server transfers. So while I think the game would have been better served by launching with channels, and it may still not be a terrible idea, I’m starting to see it as slowly becoming unnecessary.