In your opinion, how big does a community base need to be in order to help create and sustain a successful MMORPG by today's standards?
Surprisingly enough, EQ and VG had healthy populations per server when they were around the 1500-2500 mark and VG even in the later years had 500-750 during US peak, which felt a bit empty in places and made it a bit tougher to get groups but the 1500-2500 felt really lived in and populated, I am not sure if 8k-10k would work, it may be way too over populated mate.
Enough to bring the company enough money to sustain current content and develop future content at a profit to themselves.
Bigger is not always better! To a certain extent it depends on how the content is developed whether you see people or not, and not based on how many people are actually playing the game.
Wow, kind of a loaded question. So many factors and possible models to be "successful".
First off, as Phantomghost points out, there needs to be a sizable population of logged in players pretty much 7x24x365. Just how big that number is would largely depend on the size of the world and how people get distributed during their adventuring. If there's only a small number of hot areas that everyone's piling into, then the numbers can be much lower. Also if Pantheon is going to be mostly a group focused game, then we'll need to see lots of people LFG all the time. New groups should be spinning up around the clock and heading off to adventure.
Whether the size of the actual community is ten thousand or ten million very much depends on how VRI plans to sustain the game over time. A huge development team is going mean high operating expenses in terms of salaries. Investing in high end voice talent for new content means a big investment that needs to be recovered, presumably in a reasonable time from a large subscription base. (As a side note, voice talent is one of those areas that in my opinion you either go all out on or don't do at all. Nothing is more annoying in a game than bad or overly repetitive voice acting.)
Also I guess it depends on how you define community. If you look to highly successful Open Source projects they have a massive install base and a very large number of contributors. SOE was on to something with Landmark and getting the player base engaged with creating content for EQN. The EQN/Landmark model was somewhere between a traditional MMORPG and an Open Source project. There is probably room for other gaming companies to explore this landscape further, creating a healthy community of players, content contributors and paid employees who are controlling the intellectual property. As another aside, that's about the ONLY aspect of EQN that I found interesting.
A game with a small dedicated team of devs could be far more successful with a small equally dedicated community than many of the short-lived games that we've seen in the past couple of years with their massive budgets and literally flash-in-the-pan presence on the MMO scene.
The world "investor" is a double edged sword. The typical financial investor is looking for pay out. If you're fortunate, you get an angel investor who is willing to stay hands off and let the experts do their job. More often, you get a company involved who wants to change the direction of the game, ripping the heart out of it in one way or another in order to get a faster return on investment. The game community could be massive, but would probably be short lived. I wouldn't call this a successful game, even if it was a good investment financially.
What tends to be forgotten is that the player community is actually the biggest investor in a game. We invest thousands of hours of our lives, giving our heart and soul to these games, often at significant personal expense: spouse agro amongst the largest of those as I'm sure many here will attest. Beyond the investment of our time and our pledge of loyalty to a game, we're investing financially through monthly subscriptions and for many modern games, investing in the development of the game through alpha access programs. I'm sure you've had $250 pledges from people who could scarcely afford to make this contribution. They've made a much larger commitment than the guy with the nice stock portfolio. If we as players weren't the biggest investors in a game, then those financial investors wouldn't be getting their paybacks. Yes, they're providing a large amount of capital up front, but it's the players who sustain it with the lion's share of capital over time.
So "how big does the community need to be" is more about making everything "right sized" so that you can sustain the game over time without making significant concessions or compromises in the name of profit.
You both make very good points, I intentionally loaded the question, though, as I am sure you knew, to get a bigger reach and more interaction but mainly because I wanted to get everyone's raw input and see what their honest opinions were as this is quite a debatable topic ;)
Revenue and investors are our concern as a company, I was more after what you guys thought felt like a nice lived in/populated number for servers and manageable number for maintaining a mature community of regular loyal players.
I know it is almost impossible to put an exact number on it, but ballpark numbers based on personal experience or feeling is what I was really chasing after, as per my example above in reply to Phantomghost using EQ and VG as a starting point.
Well from a logged in server population perspective, I think P99 seems to do well with around 1500 logged in most evenings. Off times that population is down around 500 and finding groups can be slim pickin's.
Obviously this is way down at the low end but I think most would agree that P99 has been successful from a sustainability perspective and has quite a healthy and engaged community of players.
Kilsin said:
You both make very good points, I intentionally loaded the question, though, as I am sure you knew, to get a bigger reach and more interaction but mainly because I wanted to get everyone's raw input and see what their honest opinions were as this is quite a debatable topic ;)
Revenue and investors are our concern as a company, I was more after what you guys thought felt like a nice lived in/populated number for servers and manageable number for maintaining a mature community of regular loyal players.
I know it is almost impossible to put an exact number on it, but ballpark numbers based on personal experience or feeling is what I was really chasing after, as per my example above in reply to Phantomghost using EQ and VG as a starting point.
As I briefly mentioned, a lot of the feel of how many players in the world is not based on pure numbers of who is on the server, but how the world is generated to promote interaction. If you have a very large world and everyone is spread out, you will not see them. A good developer makes social hubs to bring people together (ie cities, even being on a boat) If you have all your players in an instanced house/dungeon/etc you will not see them. When Eq2 introduced housing it was amazing (I love their housing / guild hall system) but people loved their housing/guild halls so much that the cities became empty even with the same number of people on a server. Developing content so that people see each other means more than the actual number playing.
I tend to like smaller population servers because you get to know the people who you play with more readily, however larger servers are less risky when populations decline. Your 1500-2500 would be the smallest I would like to see, I like the upper range better than the lower range. again this number is vastly influenced by the game itself so it is very difficult to come up with a number until I see the world. Now if you want I can come in and help judge it for you, I wouldn't mind a bit ;)
As Zarriya said, the most important point is sustainability to be able to support the team and development. After that, it depends again really. If Pantheon can be sustained by only having 1 server, then the population can be much smaller - maybe 1500-2,000 people. And, then, depending on the size (content) of Pantheon would determine how much population a server could handle and sustain a game that is fun and worth playing - especially without instancing. Example being - VG launch's content could support a larger server population than EQ launch.
So, at this point, the 10k+ followers on Facebook would be a good starting goal to shoot for. 5 servers at around 1500-1750 people each (with some wiggle room for growth). And, if Pantheon's launch numbers exceed 10k (which if Pantheon delivers on its tenets I think it will) - I'd release a new server at every 2k or so subscribers
Ahh and not to be a Negative Nancy, but I am sure that VRI needs to strongly take into account what may happen at launch versus the rest of the life of the game.
For the past couple of years servers at launch swell with people trying out the game for the first time, and then the population takes a nosedive when they dont like it or finish all the content. The hopes with a game like this is that we will see the population increase over time because the game is so frickin' amazing :) however we need to be mindful of all outcomes.
Part of this is directly influenced by appropriately marketing the game to the right type of player (which VRI has been doing and not over hyping thank god).
Other is server management:
Some games open up more servers to with the idea that they will merge servers later. A problem with this is you need to accurately gauge how many are going to play at a launch. You need enough servers initially, not open as you judge that day (a lot of games do this) You do not want to have half your guild join one server, find out it is closed and then everyone has to re-roll on another server. SWTOR did a great and a bad job of this: guilds were registered with Bioware so on launch day you were placed on a server with your whole guild- no one was left out! However they later on had too many servers because people were whining about queue times and had to do an excessive amount of server mergers. Not the worse thing in the world though. It is a decent option. If people whine about launch queue times - let them - it means they aren't patient enough for this type of game.
Now FFXIV did a horrible and confusing way of opening servers on launch day. The same servers were opened and closed repeatedly throughout the launch days. Half your guild would go to one server, the other half would be locked out of it. It would open again, close again. There were lots of tears. We must have moved 3x to try to keep the guild together. If you werent in a guild or larger group of friends, this didnt really affect you. Do not do this :) please do not open and close a server intermittently throughout the day.
Some games manage this by temporarily creating instances/channels of the same server (which yes we all hate instances but it helps for the first month or two). The good games that choose this option (Aion for example) allow you to change channels to meet up with your friends. Again it is a temporary option until the server stabilizes. You can still be on the same server at launch with your guildmates (to me this is very important when you launch with 100+ guildmates in tow you need to get them all on the same server) The channels are removed in a few weeks when the population normalizes. The really important downside to this system is if it is not implemented correctly it is a nightmare. Channels can also be abused by hoping channels to find mobs/items.
Above my main concern was keeping a guild together on one server, but a lot of people aren't concerned with that. So the most important thing that should be considered is to do what keeps the servers stable and running smoothly. You only get one launch and you want a good first impression.
This is a two fold question. community should be looked at as two separate entities yet still being one if that makes sense. The first being game subscribers. We need to have a player base that is big enough to keep the lights on and keep dev's working to further a game. That is why I am in favor of subscription games vs other types of transactions. The whole pay to progress model just doesnt work in my opinion yet game companies continue to think it does. To me it creates a slow fade that eventually kills a game. Subs all the way in my book. Only the dev team can know what size that needs to be to keep this rolling.
Secondly it comes down to server population. Nothing kills a game like this faster then ghost town servers. When there is no one to play with why even play. Blizzard has combated this issue with cross realm grouping. While the logic is great and functional to me it break the game. It allows more people to be idiots with no sense of responsibility to other players. It is great for those players who want content on demand. Not my cup of tea personally.
The server population should be big enough that it feels alive. Like you are actually part of a living world. I would rather deal with a bit of over crowding then ghost town situations. As others have mentioned it would seem nice to have server pops in the range of 2k i would say 2k-3k. However that is also dependent on how large and how much content is actually there. When it comes to adding new servers I think slow and steady wins the race. Hopefully people would be patient enough to understand that. If the game launches with a boom people might scream on a heavy pop server. However it sucks in a couple months if there is a decline now your server is a ghost town. I would assume when they starting letting testers in you will be able to gauge how much load starting areas can handle and scale it accordingly.
I guess in a way this really comes down to when does a zone feel lively. For larger open zones even if you don't see people but you can hear them or go to the camps and see them you might be talking 30-50 players. The same is probably true for newbie zones as well if they are large. On the other hand I dungeon can feel crowded if there is more than two groups even if they are not full groups. In any given city or population center you probably want a good amount of people as well maybe the same amount or more than an open zone but it will feel more crowded. There are of course some mid sized zones that are some where in between. Lets say we have 6? starting cities and newbie areas thats 600 people. Then another half a dozen big zones? 300. 8 small dungeons? ~100 maybe 10 mid sized zone? 300
Newbie & Cities - 6*50+6*50 = 600
Large zones - 6*50 = 300
Mid sized zones - 10*30 = 300
8 small dungeons - 8*12 ~= 100
Total - 1300
This would obviously scale with the amount of zone and the real key is to make sure that is level distributed appropriately. This is just a feel sort of think to me and are nice round numbers to put them out there and would represent top end of tolerable crowdedness to me.
Allow me to be a bit "high-level" and Gibson-esque (Neuomancer). Digital world skewedly mirrors real. Voice-overs. NPC says is what is said, but what is written is also what is said. (Old-school will hearken to waking up early one day and playing EQ and meeting Finns! and Germans! and some Japanese! and oh-right is must be late for you.) So... everyone's talking about going global. Have the NPC's speak different RL languages out loud, but what is written is also what is said (make language selection, now) So I go to town X, hear a thick what-did-you-say scottish accent, but I can read the text in English. next town, wow that sounds like Japanese, at least I can read the text, next town, Nowegian- and again the text- learning from the accents in Skyrim, and the neat "accent-tag" project on you tube. Stands to reason- like in the original planet of the apes, distributed during a time of high racial tension in the U.S how the actors dressed as Chimps, Gorilla's and baboons tended to also gather with other...chimps, gorilla's and baboons when off camera and in the cafeteria during lunch break and commented on such innate species (dare we say racial) identification even with a mask on- which is also why uniformed students tend to not bully or fight as much as public school or non-uniformed students . then polishing the dark aspect of the gibsonesque world into a nice and neat and friendly shine in an MMO. Or Tolkien Elvish. or even Star Trek Kilngon, heck there are enthusiasts (like were used in Ken Burns "the Civil war"- I knew one) that will do it for free. That charge on little-round top? all "re-enactors" who did it yearly, themselves for fun. Slap a plea from burns to " hey guys, can you help out" and they ALL came, all also had period perfect costumes, too. Look at Cosplay.
Just saying. That might make a stable 24 hr population, that moves with the sun
Kilsin said:
"Surprisingly enough, EQ and VG had healthy populations per server when they were around the 1500-2500 mark and VG even in the later years had 500-750 during US peak, which felt a bit empty in places and made it a bit tougher to get groups but the 1500-2500 felt really lived in and populated, I am not sure if 8k-10k would work, it may be way too over populated mate."
This is so so true , and in a world where exploration is key the real concurrency may not matter a lot other than for community / trade purposes , it is the world I care for and the friends I drag along.
The problem is this number changes over time, as the population matures and levels up past beginner areas even 1500-2500 strong server becomes lonely for a new player to an old server.
Things to help this is for the Dev's finding ways to have the higher level players either making alts / keeping a healthy flow of new players / other ways of keeping higher players interacting with lower level players.
I may sound alittle negative at times, and prob will again in this post, sorry! :)
Numbers don't matter to me in this regard, the one and only reason why EQ felt so alive up through the first expansions is the fact, that they werent developed with content that put people into their own instance, be it houses - guild halls or instanced dungeons/raids.
You can have 10k players on 1 server and it'll feel empty if everyone is sitting in their own instance, or crowded with 500 if there's not enough zones or zonewide channels i guess.
Getting that feel right in 2015 is tricky, and i wish i could hand pantheon devs the silver bullet to nail it the first time, best i can do is wish them good luck, and promise to stick around even if the first couple tries dont meet the goals :)
While I like the idea of mega-servers, these are made for games which rely on instancing. For a game that will have open zones and dungeons, there needs to be some kind of limit on how many people can share the world at the same time. The numbers provided by Kilsin, and the calculation done above by cram9030 seem to be a good approach for active server populations. I think such a number (1500-2500) is enough for a healthy server community. Depends on the world size too of course.
Now for the total game community, obviously the more the merrier! :)
The only real people who can answer this sort of question are people who have experience in running other MMO's.
I can pluck a number out of the air but I would have no idea how many are on a server that I have ever played on. It kind of needs to also be dynamic. If you had 30-40 zones then fewer people online would make it seem full. As expansions come along and more zones are added and people spread out more, then you need more people to help populate the zones so if you expanded another 20-30 zones you would need about 70% more to make it feel populated to come up through the lover levels. Most people will be in a similar level range and move together so top end will feel populated, it would be lower level's that would have fewer people.
It is sort of like needing a round robin of a preferred server to encourage new people onto populated servers to populate the lower level zones as they would be empty while older players are in the higher level zones.
Aerolia said:
Megaservers seem to be the thing nowadays.
Thoughts?
Depends on the style they want to promote for the game. Would be fine in a WOW, GW2, Rift, Archage type game where it is run around do quests (with fast mob respawn times), turn them in and carry on to next quest and in 90 minutes move to new zone.
In a game with a bit of grinding, like EQ where you would hold a camp for 5 hours there would be no camps available for people.
X
Tough question. Since I'm not very good with numbers, and when I think about an MMO i generally think about mass amounts of people being online, I was going to say something ridiculous like ONE MILLION! Eheh... but after reading everyone else's responses, I guess a few thousand will suffice. A lot of people made very good points about how large the world will be, how popular the game will become, etc. so it's hard to give an exact number, as many other have stated. However, if I have to give my own personal input that isn't a gigantic ONE MILLION! (lol) I'll stay 2,000 people during peak hours should be good.
Personally I'd like to see Pantheon gain mass popularity with many more than that online, but I guess we'll see what happens! ;)
P.S. I'm looking forward to the end of September! Can't wait to see what you all have been working on! <3
2000 people on an eq1 server is way too many and the zones are incredibly crowded...
2000 people on a Vanguard server is not as much... not that this ever happened heh ;)
My personal opinion on this is that less is more... I'd like to see more intimate servers that cap around 1200ish ppl
Another thing I would like to see is a 2 character limit per server... 1 main, 1 alt
It's all about reputations that follow the players.
I don't need a massive sprawling world like Vanguard tried to do... I want it to be tight and polished and immersive.
I want to spend a couple weeks around the starting area... meeting people, cobbling together a set of items, figuring out the lay of the land.
If the game is not dangerous enough people spread out faster.
Thanks for reading,
Kiz~
Angrykiz said:2000 people on an eq1 server is way too many and the zones are incredibly crowded...
2000 people on a Vanguard server is not as much... not that this ever happened heh ;)
My personal opinion on this is that less is more... I'd like to see more intimate servers that cap around 1200ish ppl
Another thing I would like to see is a 2 character limit per server... 1 main, 1 alt
It's all about reputations that follow the players.
I don't need a massive sprawling world like Vanguard tried to do... I want it to be tight and polished and immersive.
I want to spend a couple weeks around the starting area... meeting people, cobbling together a set of items, figuring out the lay of the land.
If the game is not dangerous enough people spread out faster.
Thanks for reading,
Kiz~
I don't know what that magic number is but it's always nice seeing the same names around town, even if you never talked/grouped with them. So the high end # should be so people see the same names occasionally, but not so high that you never see the same name twice.
It should also be small enough so you can know she's that guilds top dps or he's the nicest Alchemist on the server, but big enough so that the new guy on the block can make a story/legend for themselves as well.
Also, just curious, but i remember reading way back that it took about 20k accounts on a server to have 1500 accounts on at peak times? Is that still true?
May seem like a lame answer but enough to make it feel as though it's not over populated but enough to feel your not alone. When I think back to eq1 and now in wow I would say because the game won't have the issues like wow where there are 2 sides to every server I would thin peek hours your cherry on top is anywhere between 1500 to 1800.
Geography and size play a large role but if we understand VG was originally to large a starting geography and Pantheon will begin a bit smaller 1500 to 1800 will server nicely.
xan