Really this question is only answerable when you know the size of the areas involved. Especially the areas where population tends to converge. Large towns, trading areas, popular dungeons, etc. On top of that you have things like instancing and ability to communicate. I can tell you the early days of P1999 when they had a global chat channel the server felt alive almost always because everyone on the serve could communicate at any given time. Not that I think global chat is a great idea or anything. Just saying being able to interact with other players is what makes a game feel alive.
I don't think ending up with a situation like LGuk in vanilla EQ where everyone is standing around for hours fighting over a tiny number of spawns and drop locations is a good idea. I also don't want to have the Vanguard experience where I can spend an hour running and never see another soul. The game areas should be big enough to not be overcrowded but not so big that the entire server feels barren when the population dips. Just think about modern EQ or WoW. The amount of landmass is obscene and anyone not near max level is unlikely to see another person outside of newbie zones or cities. *shrug* It's all relative.
I think we can all agree that a seamless world with 1,000 players is probably going to feel more empty than a zoned world with 1,000 players.
While it's fun to try and play around with the numbers, we really don't know what a healthy population will look like without knowing the number of zones. You can guesstimate, but until the world is up and running populated with players, you won't know if the server can handle it. Some times you can't just throw more hardware at an application, the coding can only take you so far.
Per Server My Guesstimation would be 1500 average online but more would be better (just not too many it ,could grow over time as expansions are released the old players know each other already get some fresh blood over) as long as you have a large enough Game World to occupy all the players in a non instanced World. It needs enough spots Dungeons points of interest thing ppls want to invest time to spread out the Population enough to not feel empty and not feel too flooded. I would invent a formula :) like 1 Dungeon with 5 interesting spots = 30 Players occupied there 15 Dungeons with average 4 spots for 6 players each max not each group has full player count so lets take 5 players each group = 300ppls occupied 20% of the Population is low lvl 80% high lvl Dungeons are spread accordingly . 100 Are crafting atm ..50 Powerlevel theyre friends 200 are Raiding 250 are trading and buying 200 are traveling 400 are camping nameds or cool loactions at non dungeon spots or finish a real important and not boring quest. thats 1500 occupied on my imaginary server :). (Disclaimer Warning numbers could be way off.)
bigdogchris said:I think we can all agree that a seamless world with 1,000 players is probably going to feel more empty than a zoned world with 1,000 players.
While it's fun to try and play around with the numbers, we really don't know what a healthy population will look like without knowing the number of zones. You can guesstimate, but until the world is up and running populated with players, you won't know if the server can handle it. Some times you can't just throw more hardware at an application, the coding can only take you so far.
I also think around the 1200-1500 number. A community that size allows you to get to know a lot of the players on the server, (or at least a they're a friend of a friend) there are usually enough people around to find a group, enough to have a decent economy and (assuming the world size is reasonable) not too many and not too few to feel over crowded or empty.
Yeah, that's a tough one. First, it definitely connected to how big the world is. Too many people and it gets crowded and there's too much competition for resources. Too few online and it's hard to find groups and for community to form.
EQ, well at least vanilla EQ, worked well with between 1000 and 1500 people online during peak hours per shard.
How many will make sense and work well for a Pantheon shard? Too early to say, but it is most certainly very important and something we will be watching closely, especially in the later phases of beta when we bring a lot more people into the game.