BamBam said: @Stellarmind I'm afraid that won't happen, but there will be big pvp servers that is for sure! I my self will play on pvp, my reson it the thrill of it and the enhanced challenge and game experiance. Im hoping for a good vs evil race server.
yea -_- i'd be a villian. good is the enemy of the natural chaos.
I don't think anyone can say what's too big or too small for Pantheon. We don't know how big the world is. We don't know how many exp spots per level there will be, how many raid bosses, the respawn times, how long you'll spend leveling at a certain range, how long it takes to hit max level.
All of these things matter when it comes to how big of a community should a server have. The obvious answer is big enough to allow people to complete their goals, but not so small they can't accomplish things. IMO the obvious answer is enough people that I can always find a group but not so many I spend hours LFG.
This question is a difficult one to answer without knowing the lay of the land, so ill answer as precisely and vague as possible.
High enough population to be able to group at will at a variety of level ranges, at various times of the day but small enough that it doesnt leave everything overly contested.
I tend to prefer less people, but if this game isnt necessarily solo friendly during downtime (which I am not 100% clear on, I saw an interview with Brad saying there will be areas where things are soloable and you will always have something to keep you occupied) you would want a high enough population to typically never be the only person in a zone.
I would say "community" size would be the capability to be able to have an /ooc zone conversation with multiple people in any zone.
Let me run around in game for a bit and i can give you a much clearer answer to that question =P.
Servers should be as large as possible.
Respawns can be adjusted as needed.
Too many people here think of a community as just their friends. Communities are much more than that. I should always see many people for the first time.
Servers need to be big enough for at least:
3 to 4 mega-guilds with several hundred members
10+ large guilds with over 100 members
Several small guilds with 50+ members
Many small friendship guilds with less than 50 members.
I will avoid small servers like the plague.
This is a complex question, as far as server population it would have to have an ample ratio of dungeons/encounters, mobs etc to sustain at least 1100 - 1500 people to make it a busy vibrant place, between guilds that raid, roleplayers. crafters, sellers and adventurers and other types. Some people will make alts and others will branch out to different parts of the continent etc. As an example for the eq release at one point hings got a litle overpopulated and later new areas became ghost towns, so maybe 800 -1000 per server to start then increase the avaiability of the population once other expantions or new content is added would be optimal. I am unsure of how servers perform these days with latency/stability and those things and how optimised the game world would be to account for those technical issues. Without the knoledge of how big the world will be and how muchcontent there will be it would be a bit tough to judge a sweet spot number, well at least for me it is. /baffle
I do not think I can answer that question. There are so many types and layers of communities. What are we talking about?
Communities within a server? Or are we talking about the whole Pantheon community?
I do not know what is the sweet numbers for a MMO server. Perhaps nobody actually have good data on this because most MMOs are failures. Personnaly, I do not want to play on an empty server, I want to be able to group easily, I want to play with skilled players and have strong guilds to compete with each others, have a good server economy, low ping... I would estimate an healthy server to have about 10K players but I am not sure this is accurate.
If a game is very popular, multiple communities will join, co-exist at the same time and eventually evolve. Some players will move on, leave, and others will stay forming the base of the long term community.
I would really like to know how many people were on Xegony the first 90 days of EverQuest. I felt like the pop was good. I heard it was around 3-4K per server. That could be way off.
However. I also have to agree with many others. it's tough to say for pantheon because we don't know how many lev 1-15 zones there will be. or how many lev 15-30 zones etc. I really hope you guys have a FULL world that is FULL of mobs (not all of them have to be KOS)
My fears arent so much the number of people, but how big the zones and world are. I don't know how big (sq. miles) that EQ was, but if Pantheon is 3X larger, it needs to have 3 times the zones and 3 times the players to balance back out.
As with all things, there needs to be a balance. In this case i would pick a balance between 3 factors, 1. Class availability, 2. Content availability and 3. amount of people.
The thing is with pantheon, you need a certain balance in each group, this need should be met and slightly over saturated to compensate for the population not being online 24/7 or wanting to do other things (crafting?).
The amount of people in total should only exceed the available content by so much, to prevent 5 groups fighting for the same mobs. This will ofcourse happen in more desired area's, so this should also be a factor but more for design of the content than it is a factor for the community. If you have all the community jump on 1 zone, instead of the 4 available zones, there is a lack of balance in whatever the players are after.
So if you want to put some numbers on it, ill put some percentages, as i cannot calculated actual / ideal numbers based on the information shared thus far.
For every zone / dungeon, you need 150% population. So if that zone could support 5 groups (average quality), you will need a population of 7,5 groups. This will vary during the day due to peak times depending on timezones. But if not making region specific servers, during peak you will have 200 - 250% and during off hours you will have 50 - 75%. This in turn would promote 'fair use' between the groups so that everyone gets something and build a community. 50% of the people online will probably either be doing some crafting, soloing, errands or simply do not have enough time to invest in a proper group.
If these are ideal numbers? i cannot determin, but to me thats the only logical approach i can think off in regards to this question.
If the game world is about vanilla EQ size, I'd say that a population cap of about 1-1.5k individual accounts logged in simultaneously per server seems healthy.
Going lower brings a greater risk of servers being dead during off-hours and causes natural hubs like towns to feel somewhat deserted, while going higher will allow individuals to stand out a lot less (server reputation etc).
Actually my ideal setup would be 100-200 player server caps with constant GM activities and server-specific plot lines, but we'd all be paying 50 bucks subscription fees to keep that running so it's not entirely realistic :p
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
Since a community can be either close knit or loosely affiliated this question is impossible for me to answer, it is too vague! All I can say is a community such as the "gaming community" consists of millions of people. There are huge disagreements between various gamers, but I would still consider us a community since we are all playing videogames. Now if you narrow that down a bit...or give some criteria then I can give you a better answer!
Simple answer is it should be big enough to foster adaquate grouping opportunities and player communication, but no so big as to cause major imbalance the economy and mob competition.
I would say that there are major factors that come into play when deciding how big is to big and these are as follow
1. World size/ Zone size
2. Zone layout in terms of horizontal/ vertical alignment as well as geological locaton. (Think the barrens in classic WoW wich was located between two horde starting zones and eventually developed its own unique chat channel identity as a result. I wont say it was good or bad design but the "Barrens" had its own unique community the developed as a result.)
3. The servers ability to handle population strain
4. Cross server/ cross sharding systems need to be factored in if they are being planned for. (PLEASE DON'T DO THIS THOUGH! This comes with its own set isues invloving guild formation,which servers can and can't be included in raid groups, faction imbalances. I had to deal with it in WoW as a guild recruiter and it was a major headache. I see this as a sign that the population of a game is declining not as a way to increase community. Server merges on the other hand are fine though.)
6. Mob density and respwan rates should also be factored in. You don't want a community that is so big to the point where basic mobs are being fought over. This issue can be adressed within how mobs are handled.
7. Professions/ the economy also need to be factored in. Compitition is good, but you don't want a community so huge where endgame gear is going for pennies. This issues can be adressed in the way professions, and resources are handled though.
*** Personally I'm all for a huge mega servers that can hold alot of people at one time as long as other systems are designed around that huge community. It's the point where huge community starts impacting other aspects of the game negativly, that it becomes to big.
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 am going to assume you mean on a per server basis. In the older MMOs I've played the server population (the community) was based on what the server could handle. Even vibrant and fresh and fully populated servers had "off-peak" times that felt .... sparse. I do not think I have seen a suitably populated server in any game yet with that in mind IMO. If the world can handle it, maybe 7,500 server population spread over 2-3 continents may be the max community capacity before things start to feel like NYC.
I tend to prefer medium population servers - not so small that it feels like a ghost town, not too large that it's practically overflowing. I don't really know what actual numbers that comes to, though.
As for sub-communities like guilds... Much more than 25-30 people and it starts to feel way too large for my tastes. I prefer building a few, very strong relationships.
Since Pantheon will not be the same MMO as most current MMO's, the identity of Pantheon needs to be taken in consideration.
The dev's know most of what that might be.
I'm thinking about the design of resource spread (nodes) and the slower combat pace that will be a signature for Pantheon.
With at least those things in mind, I'ld think the servers will (need to?) be smaller then most MMO's.
As a result the community that is formed within each server might not develop itself in similar way most of us would have experienced in other mmo's.
A smaller community per server could mean that there will be closer contact between guilds and perhaps could have a more efficient influence when thinking of 'community policing'. Something that many hope to be able to in Pantheon.
When a community is too big, the impact of this self regulating structure will be smaller or meaningless even.
This could be important, meanly because the specific design of Pantheon is allowing for this kind of regulation to develop itself within the community.
For these reasons, amongst others, I expect to see and experience smaller population sizes then you see in other games. And to my thinking, it should be designed so that players will notice and experience the smaller population size. Knowing this, players will have to take social policing in consideration when playing this game.
Stress testing will tell a lot more concerning respawns and general populations of mobs and resources. Competition is key, at the rate the dev's want us to experience their game. So it will need to balance itself out between being overrun and alone in the desert. Personally, I feel that you don't have to compete for every inch on the map, but 3/5 situations perhaps one should encounter players that have similar goals.
I always admired that EQ had separate PvP and PvE servers.
Firstly, when the class balance wars begin (they always do in PvP), changes affecting PvP can be made that do not necessarily affect PvE.
Secondly, time is the personal commodity that we choose to spend in life. Giving someone else the power to use up my time in an activity because they assume I’m nothing more than prey, now that is intolerable.
So I am thrilled that PvPers have a special place all their own.
This is what creates communities, those who agree to play by the same rules.