Wikipedia:
A community is a social unit that shares common values, or a group of interacting living organisms sharing an environment.
Tough one, I would say as long as every member of the community fits in there is no limit as everyone will get along just fine.
Then you have communities (or guilds) which have certain rules they go by (be it raid times, timezones, behavior, RP, non-RP, etc.) and that puts a natural limit or filter on top of those.
Personally I am no fan of "Zerg Guilds" (or communities) though, as it gets so crowded so quick that you lose the overview.
I mean it's pretty hard to be able to know let alone keep in touch with more than 50 people.
If you ever attended a classic EQ raid with 50+ people, could you truely claim you know everyone?
You maybe went to a dungeon with some once or twice, with some you maybe hang out a bit every day and some you may even know in RL.
How well do people even have to know each other to be called a community, just looking at how it's defined by Wikpedia the threashold for being part of a community is pretty low.
Does the same guild tag suffice or does it take more?
With that in mind, the anwser to the initial question for me would be highly individual depending on many things,
but first and foremost with how comfortable each person is with smaller or bigger communities or what they expect to gain by being part of one,
not everyone feels the same about this so putting a number on it is for me impossible.
As for this forum and the environment we share, one thing we all most likely have in common is that we look forward to Pantheons launch and I certainly want no limit on people being able to experience this. :)
Thinking about everything else possible becomes very quick very complex.
Perhaps in an MMO, I consider the community too big when I don't recognize the names around me. On my first EQ server I remember getting to recognize many of the 'couple thousand' names in the way I recognized people in high school. While I didn't really know most of them, I knew 'of them'. They were the people/guilds on my server. To contrast this familiarity, I think of WOW where I was constantly around names I didn't recognize.
While I can say that I know nothing about this subject, I feel that more than 3,000 could be too big.
Dunbar’s number hypothesizes that average humans can maintain about 150 social relationships at one time, even if you double it to 300 thats not that many. Groups larger than that will need to have rules, laws and enforcement to maintain social stability. Obviously a server size of 150 isn’t practical, and hopefully you have at least some relationships outside of the game . . .
We won’t even get into the fact that many people on the autism spectrum escape to MMOs because they don’t function well in open society.
Dunbar’s number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
I played on Test server. I started on it when there were only 200-300 on the server. It slowly grew up to around 1k + people playing at peak times (before the wipe).
I would have to say that I prefer "less" people than more. While test was often barren at times (this was release EQ, before kunark), there were still many people and a strong sense of community developed on Test that did not exist on the production servers.
I would say that if the game is around the size of EQ at release, that 800 or so at peak is what I would call a good balance of numbers. It is enough where there are always people to group with and the content isn't packed where you have no place to group in a dungeon. It is smaller, so reputation carries fast and punishment for poor social behavior is swift.
If you get too many people, you get numerous issues of crowding, fighting, and because there are so many people, some will find it as a means to escape poor behaviors because there are so many people, they will always be able to find a group, regardless of how many they burn.
Kilsin said:Community Debate - How big is too big when it comes to a community in an MMORPG, can you put a number to it or do you judge it based on other factors? #MMORPG #communitymatters
For me the best size of a guild (my direct community) is in line with the raid cap. In EQ1's raid cap at 72, it was easy to see guilds number 100 members because getting 72 online at any given time, for some guilds, was difficult. In EVE Online with the fleet cap at 256 you could see corporations with 300+ and alliance exceeding 10,000 (Goonswarm Federation now shows >20,000 members). You were really just a small cog in a huge machine in EVE so your direct community was only a part of your corporation in many instances.
If Pantheon is to have a raid cap at 24 (terrible idea, btw), guilds may very well be smaller and the relationships between guildmembers that much stronger.
in game? people that I know well enough or that I have played with and made mistakes with and have not been ashamed enough so that I can ask for help without feeling I am being intrusive. And likewise they to me. in reality, thats about 20? or so for personal community. but overall? I would like to see hundreds of people I can run into.
Kilsin said:Community Debate - How big is too big when it comes to a community in an MMORPG, can you put a number to it or do you judge it based on other factors? #MMORPG #communitymatters
I'm guessing you're asking this in relation to server size. Defining what you mean by community can be done in a few ways. There's the community of your group, out of guild (new) friends, guild, server and the game in general. Group size will be defined by VR, so that's set. Guild size, I'd say 75-100 max (and that's pushing it for me). Server size, somewhere in the 750 range, give or take 100 or so. Too few and it feels empty. Too many and you get lost in the masses, even if you stand out in your play. Plus, your reputation isn't as critical, as it's easier to just move on to the next group/guild of folks. Out of guild friends will be determined by server size. For me, that's historically been a couple dozen or so people in other guilds, not guilded, same class, etc. For the game in general, it can't be too big. The more you have, the easier it will be for people to find others of like mind and enjoy themselves.
In other games I gravitate to servers with lower populations. I do not like spending hours looking for resources and only occasionally getting some because they are too heavily farmed. Even less do I like having a quick easy quest take 2 hours because everyone and her sister is killing the same mobs and it takes *forever* just to get credit for 10 kills.
Pantheon may be worse than other games in this regard - the announced plan is to have far fewer resource nodes than most MMOs so they will be harder to get and very competitive. While the system for awarding credit for killing a mob has not been announced it may very well not involve credit to multiple players/groups. Thus, in LOTRO or many other games all I need is to get to a mob in time to hurt it. In Pantheon I may need to be the first to attack it - or perhaps the character doing the most damage. This will make many "kill x mobs" quests potential nightmares.
These considerations will make me consider the smallest community I can find if community means the players on a server. But the countervailing consideration will be the need to group - more than other MMOs - and it is hard to group if not many are on.
On the third hand (some science fiction and fantasy books do have races with more than two hands) finding a group won't do me much good if there are no instances in the game and the landscape is so hyper-competitive that the group gets to kill 5 mobs per hour and a minor boss every 24 hours of gametime.
A lot of it will depend on the size of the world, respawn times, and population spread.
It should be enough people that the world feels alive, and people can interact, but not so many that you feel as just a number.
For reputations to matter, people need to be individuals and be known by a decent sized segment of the population.
Neyos said:I think I would lean on the side of larger rather than smaller. I'd prefer to have more people to play with than not enough. What that actual number is, I have no idea. :)
having played on both, it really is a trade off.
On one hand, less people so there is not a massive group availability. Depending on numbers, it is still there, but not to the level of throwing a rock in any direction and hitting 50 people wanting to group.
On the other hand, less people means more content availability. One of the things I loved about being on Test was that you got to experience the dungeons as they were intended. That is, on the production servers the dungeons would be so packed at times that you could walk deep into the dungeon without fear of mobs. The groups were so thick that you had people fighting trash mobs in the halls hoping for one of the rare camp groups to move on so they could move in and take over the camp. This would often give a very... "gimmicky" feel to the dungeon and it is something I really disliked. It is why my friends and I would always head out to the farthest reaches of the game where nobody was just so we could have that "dugeon crawl" type feel (another reason why difficulty and length of time in travel was important).
The trick of having a smaller population is seeking out friends and then coordinating play times. Even on small pop servers, there were still groups, just not groups at every area you wanted to camp. Then again, if you wanted that, it wasn't hard to round up some people on the server and head somewhere. One thing about grouping in EQ is that if you had the social ability or dedication to look and form your own groups, you never had issues of not being able to find a group. Granted you had to be able to compromise on group setup (you can't always have the perfect group) and if you were willing to do that, there was never a time you were without a group.
Two answers. The first is somewhere between 1000 to 3000 paying customers per server, concurrent, as a social max.
Second is, however many max tier zones have however many max tier creatures to satisfy however many groups at whatever TTK is appropriate for the design goals. :)
For example, If there are two max tier zones per continent, and three continents at launch, until the first expansion, there will be 6 zones level 41-50 characters will desire to gain resources in.
6 zones for half the population of the server means all max-tier zones could have between 500-1500 players in them. (using the 1k-3k numbers per server, above)
With a 1 minute TTK, and a 10 minute respawn, that means you need 10 mobs per group, minimum.
500 players means 83 groups, 1500 players is 250 groups. Each group needs 10 mobs, that's 830 mobs or 2500 mobs. Over 6 zones, means 138 mobs per zone, or 416 mobs per zone, minimum.
Depending on how mob scripts and pathing are handled (#'s per process, thread, or more refined/elegant means) deferred procedure calls and context switches can start to cause serious problems with even 100 autonomous elements in a 3d space. Interprocess communications, API overhead, even signals all have their respective costs.
As these are core design decisions, I suspect Visionary Realms will never share their actual design goals in this space, but it works out, logically. I'm not sure the technology currently exists to have 416+ mobs per zone along with 40+ players per zone, concurrently, while maintaining <=1ms total server side processing latency (with infinite leash length pathing), per packet. I guess we'll see in whatever phase they test that. Or the zones will simply be smaller, or server-side lag will still be a noticeable and customer-controllable thing.
In terms of an individual server, it really is more about available space than a number.
At some point, if you keep crowding players in, things start to break down. I'm not just talking about content here, although insuring availability of content is a key component. But you have to watch for economic breakdowns, where you have too many people trying to buy/sell and they begin to overwhelm the tools the game provides them, or even just overwhelm each other to the point where the experience is degraded. Socially as well. The flipside of wanting a game where reputation matters and players behave nicely towards each other, is that people and groups can't simply be a dime a dozen, to the point where no one actually cares because it's unlikely they'll ever see that person again. And then finally there's technical considerations. If Shadowfire does a server event in some zone somewhere, and attracts say 10-15% of the online population on the server, we can't really have it crashing the zone.
So, all those things matter when determining the right number. What's the right number? I have no idea. A lot, hopefully.
vjek said:Two answers. The first is somewhere between 1000 to 3000 paying customers per server, concurrent, as a social max.
Second is, however many max tier zones have however many max tier creatures to satisfy however many groups at whatever TTK is appropriate for the design goals. :)
For example, If there are two max tier zones per continent, and three continents at launch, until the first expansion, there will be 6 zones level 41-50 characters will desire to gain resources in.
6 zones for half the population of the server means all max-tier zones could have between 500-1500 players in them. (using the 1k-3k numbers per server, above)
With a 1 minute TTK, and a 10 minute respawn, that means you need 10 mobs per group, minimum.
500 players means 83 groups, 1500 players is 250 groups. Each group needs 10 mobs, that's 830 mobs or 2500 mobs. Over 6 zones, means 138 mobs per zone, or 416 mobs per zone, minimum.
Depending on how mob scripts and pathing are handled (#'s per process, thread, or more refined/elegant means) deferred procedure calls and context switches can start to cause serious problems with even 100 autonomous elements in a 3d space. Interprocess communications, API overhead, even signals all have their respective costs.
As these are core design decisions, I suspect Visionary Realms will never share their actual design goals in this space, but it works out, logically. I'm not sure the technology currently exists to have 416+ mobs per zone along with 40+ players per zone, concurrently, while maintaining <=1ms total server side processing latency (with infinite leash length pathing), per packet. I guess we'll see in whatever phase they test that. Or the zones will simply be smaller, or server-side lag will still be a noticeable and customer-controllable thing.
I was in a 130 people guild in EQ 1 and it didn't feel too big.
(A few of them were kids of full-time members, kept in the guild so their parents could keep tabs on their activities... but most of them were regular guild members)
Keep in mind that you will never be a good friend with >> everyone <<. So, if the guild is big enough, you will be able to find some people that you can be friend with; if it's too small, you risk not going along well with anyone... and that doesn't work.
Also, the guild needs some overlap - sometimes someone cannot come to a raid, or sometimes one has a bad day for this or that reason, and needs a... more relaxed play, so you can't put him in one of critical roles. You need enough people to always be able to put together a decent raid.
On the other hand, keeping them all geared and keyed (yeah... PoP zone access was a pain) is a drain on time and resources, so you tend to keep it to some optimal size.
I'd say that the optimal guild size is max raid size + 15% for a hardcore raid guild, and max raid size + 50% for a more relaxed raid guild.
Or somewhere in between these two numbers.
More than that, and you start spending way too much everyone's time to keep everyone on a raid-capable level in regard to items, access, etc etc.
But how many people is too many? Because that's what the OP's question was about.
When I was in the army, at the company level it wasn't that bad - you pretty much knew everyone who mattered to you in any way. On a battalion level, it gets more impersonal - you don't know everyone, just the key people that you need to interact with. Workable? Yes. Enjoyable, as in what a game should be? Probably not.
So I'd say, since this isn't supposed to be a job, the limit where it stops being an enjoyable activity is somewhere around the same numbers... 100-150 people is the upper limit for me. I would rather have 80ish people, actually.
BamBam said: The game will most likely be a major succes, and have hundreds of thousands players world wide. I'd rather have fewer big servers than a hundreds of small servers. With bigger servers, It need to feel like a world and you just a small piece of it. Witch will bring immersion to the players.
yes we should let pvpers run wild with the pvers ^.^ make it so! too bad my hopes and dreams have been shattered already, but yes i would prefer it if we weren't segregated into small cells. so much for tolerance XD