General Discussion

What makes a game great?  Gamers and no matter how poor a game is as long as there are thousands of players online then it will continue to make money. 

So why is that almost every time a game launches the company has multiple servers 10 or even more!  I know I know its to help the load and reduce lag etc.  However I really feel its the downfall or at the least speeds up the downfall of some major releases. 

Lets take an example:

Pirates of the Burning Sea:

They have multiple servers and even at launch they were patchy at best.  The company said the game only works with thousands online at any given time so why stretch the population out thinly?  Isn't it wiser to have a launch with 4 or less servers and know that if the populations max out you have another 6 you can utilise?  So players like me who get sick of wandering around in a ghost town decide to leave and then they announce server mergers.  This creates mass publicity, not the good kind, as well as disown the players who are thinking the game is doomed. 

Take the opposite example:

EVE Online at launch had 1 server and still has 1 server.  When I joined at peak the game would have 4000 players and you could see it in black and white.  What would have happened if they had 10 servers?  On average 200-300 players would be online and it would have died a death. 

Tabula Rasa arguably could be accused of being another PotBS but it continues to maintain a core following and even grow gradually because there are only 4 servers!!  It would have died months ago if the population was spread out too much.

Regardless of all the reasons above, having multiple servers confuses the hell out of me and nothing pisses me off more than hitting level 25-30 and finding out the server sucks and the best gamers are on a different one.  Something that you only see after 2-3 months post launch. 

Stop spreading the population, stop causing confusion at the start of launch and open servers rather than merging them due to unrealistic expectations.  Seriously where do these companies get their estimations?  Probably hear it from 10 fanboi's screaming how great it is in Beta then drop out at launch because their parents make them go to bed after primary school. 

Yes I am in a bad mood!

I would say that the number of servers is based on three factors:

- Technology of the server code and the number of user connections possible on hardware.  Only in the last three years roughly has the technology become possible to allow for one server cluster without a maximum limit. 

- Static Theme-park Mentality.  Most of the MMO's are built as static theme-parks, aka Disneyland.  Players go to certain lands (Frontier Land) to go through those experiences (rides).  When players get bored at one place, they then go to another (Tomorrow Land).  In such environments, players have no impact to the world. Hey, there is a dragon raining down death in the lands, let's go and stop it.

Been there, done that, pal.  In fact I have killed it 5 times now and this is how you do it...

Granted, trying to make an automate adaptive storytelling system that can change with the actions of players, is a mighty feat.  So the easy way out is to use humans to use tools to make changes to the environment...  but that becomes an administrative nightmare when there are more than four servers to deal with.

- Scale of the world.  Eve-Online was able to use one server cluster for one of the reasons, the scale of the galaxy is small.  The size of the environment is limited to the technology of the server as well.  Eve-Online could not function with one server (most likely now with the new server upgrade) early on if it had used real-life scale.  Planets are small spheres and the ships about the size of a normal character in other games.  Now had the planets be the size of real planets compared to the ships used, one planet would be the server cluster.

Dracus, fyi, scale does not equal data consumed by the server processors. And yes, the planets and ships are scaled down, but not to the level you claim. In fact, I would say the solar systems as designed by Eve are a bit bigger than expected (as most solar systems observable are quite small with even gas giants very near their parent star), possibly bigger than our own. This is a good thing as this keeps traffic less clustered. What makes Eve lag is the data routing from one player to another player, so it's not the size of the ships, it's the number of data nodes (buckets) that have to be addressed (filled).

-- Brede

Iam with you on this i told them along time ago that even 4 servers is to many.

They need  only one to start if that one fills up to much , then  turn on another one simple as that.

If population drops after adding 3 then drop back down to 1 server  .

This will keep ppl playing because i am just like this guy i will not play a single player game .

So if i dont see no one in the game then iam leaveing no matter how good it is!

Actually Eve doesnt just have 1 server.  It has a huge cluster of servers with just one name because Eve's "python" server configuration uniquely differs to how other MMO's server farms are run.

However, I digress, I do agree that its better to start with too few servers, than too many.  Otherwise, like you say, the population across the servers spreads too thin and people start complaining about such things as not being able to find groups, can't do group / raid quests, that they think the population is dwindling because they cant see anyone.

Oh man...I would love to have seen World of Warcraft release with only one server at release...

I think it depends on how popular the game is when its released and how many people they plan to get at launch. Why should I have to play on one server, fighting thousands and thousands of people to get on and the server crashes constantly? Too less and people aren't happy because servers crash and there is a lot of lag.

Also, I think it depends on the world size...Eve has a huge "world", so people are spread out more.

Again, take a size of say Warcraft, it wouldn't make sense to have 10,000 people on one server...that would be a huge mess.

So, to sum it up...depends on world size and depends on how many people they expect at launch. And also, does depend on the server capacity as well

just in case....you dont want 50000 trying to log into one server

I recall when I first joined DAOC I was new to MMO's and I decided to play on one with an "average" number of players. 

I regretted that decision once server populations started to fade as my server quickly grew dull and stagnant, while the most populated servers actually gained population.

Now I purposely try to find the highest population servers right from the start.... so I agree, start small, keep em full.

Short answer may be that most games are planned with about 5000-8000 players online at a time.

Eve and instanced EQ2 may be the exception, but both use 'crutches' to circumvent the limit.

Anarchy Online tried to start with one server...