Originally posted by Calerxes

Originally posted by rygard49

Originally posted by Calerxes

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by Calerxes

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Originally posted by botrytis If you log into a full server, you automatically get kicked to Overflow. So there is no wait in PvE.

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So the server is not full then, thanks.

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The overflow server is a different server. If the server wasn't full, you wouldn't be moved to a different server...the overflow server.

 

 

So when I play a game like Perfect World and I'm in channel 6 on the Dreamwaever server am I on dreamweaver or an separate server? No I'm on another instance of the world on that server. Arenanet is doing the same thing and calling it something different thats all, the server is not full.

Makes me wonder if the game assigns people arbitrarily to the overflow server in order to present a populated game world. Otherwise what if all of the servers are open except yours, and you're the very first guy that needs to be routed to overflow? You'd be by yourself in this giant game world.

Also, the GW2 wiki about the overflow shard says it's shared by all servers, so I think it actually does change which server your information is physically stored on until your 'home' server opens up.

 

So if they can do that for the overflow server why make servers in the first place? The overflow server at launch must have been a massive server of its own bigger than any of the proper servers or were there channels as in my example? could you play with people of other servers and did you infact do that?

I donno, man. Good questions. Maybe they had multiple overflows at launch?

For the last question: "The overflow version of a map acts exactly like the normal version except that it is universal to all servers, meaning that players from other full servers will also be present." Souce.

Really all I'm going by is in the wiki. We'd probably need someone who's intimately familiar with the server infrastructure to give us any more info than that, and I doubt ANet will be volunteering any such person to answer those questions.

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Originally posted by Calerxes

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Originally posted by lizardbones  

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Originally posted by Calerxes

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Originally posted by botrytis If you log into a full server, you automatically get kicked to Overflow. So there is no wait in PvE.

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    So the server is not full then, thanks.

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The overflow server is a different server. If the server wasn't full, you wouldn't be moved to a different server...the overflow server.  

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So when I play a game like Perfect World and I'm in channel 6 on the Dreamwaever server am I on dreamweaver or an separate server? No I'm on another instance of the world on that server. Arenanet is doing the same thing and calling it something different thats all, the server is not full.

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Originally posted by Calerxes

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by Calerxes

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Originally posted by botrytis If you log into a full server, you automatically get kicked to Overflow. So there is no wait in PvE.

---

 

 

So the server is not full then, thanks.

---

The overflow server is a different server. If the server wasn't full, you wouldn't be moved to a different server...the overflow server.

 

 

So when I play a game like Perfect World and I'm in channel 6 on the Dreamwaever server am I on dreamweaver or an separate server? No I'm on another instance of the world on that server. Arenanet is doing the same thing and calling it something different thats all, the server is not full.

it's semantics.  but i agree with you.  just cause they call it a 'server'  doesnt mean it's not an instance.

THese threads are getting rediculous. If you don't like the game why post so much disdain for it? IMO the game is quite healthy and I see people all over the place all times of  the day on TC.

There are quite a few MMOs out there that I don't like. I just don't see the point of going to any of their forums and talking crap about them.

Originally posted by Zeus.CM

Okay, so this is settled. When server is full it means many people are online at that moment on that server. This image was taken one minuta ago:

 

At this very moment 21 servers are full, around 30 high and 5 servers on medium. There is no low populated server.

This is correct.

The rest is just crying from people who called it wrong.

GW2 is doing very, very well.

Sorry kids.

Server statuses are probably not updated realtime.

It makes sense to report the highest status the server was in for a certain period of time - let's say 12 hours at least (probably more) to avoid confusion when concurrent populations drop during off hours.

While that is cheating somewhat, it does more good than bad. Still, it precludes server statuses as being any kind of indication of the well being of the game (among many other factors).

Originally posted by rygard49

Originally posted by Calerxes

Originally posted by rygard49

Originally posted by Calerxes

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by Calerxes

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Originally posted by botrytis If you log into a full server, you automatically get kicked to Overflow. So there is no wait in PvE.

---

 

 

So the server is not full then, thanks.

---

The overflow server is a different server. If the server wasn't full, you wouldn't be moved to a different server...the overflow server.

 

 

So when I play a game like Perfect World and I'm in channel 6 on the Dreamwaever server am I on dreamweaver or an separate server? No I'm on another instance of the world on that server. Arenanet is doing the same thing and calling it something different thats all, the server is not full.

Makes me wonder if the game assigns people arbitrarily to the overflow server in order to present a populated game world. Otherwise what if all of the servers are open except yours, and you're the very first guy that needs to be routed to overflow? You'd be by yourself in this giant game world.

Also, the GW2 wiki about the overflow shard says it's shared by all servers, so I think it actually does change which server your information is physically stored on until your 'home' server opens up.

 

So if they can do that for the overflow server why make servers in the first place? The overflow server at launch must have been a massive server of its own bigger than any of the proper servers or were there channels as in my example? could you play with people of other servers and did you infact do that?

I donno, man. Good questions. Maybe they had multiple overflows at launch?

For the last question: "The overflow version of a map acts exactly like the normal version except that it is universal to all servers, meaning that players from other full servers will also be present." Souce.

Really all I'm going by is in the wiki. We'd probably need someone who's intimately familiar with the server infrastructure to give us any more info than that, and I doubt ANet will be volunteering any such person to answer those questions.

Sorry Rygard that questions were not meant directly at you I was just thinking on the fly, I know you were getting you info from the wiki, I didn't expect you to have the answer sorry if there was some confusion.

Originally posted by GeezerGamer
That post leaves as many questions as it answers. I interpret the statement to say player's logged in. But the context of the statement is talking about accounts and alts assigned to that server as Home. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

When you visit, your account stays assigned to your home world, along with all other 'non-visiting' characters.    So you can 'visit' another server with your elementalist, but have your necromancer on your 'home' server and play there, too.

However, if you TRANSFER servers, all characters go to the new server as 'home server.'

Originally posted by MosesZD

Originally posted by GeezerGamer
That post leaves as many questions as it answers. I interpret the statement to say player's logged in. But the context of the statement is talking about accounts and alts assigned to that server as Home. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

 

When you visit, your account stays assigned to your home world, along with all other 'non-visiting' characters.    So you can 'visit' another server with your elementalist, but have your necromancer on your 'home' server and play there, too.

 

However, if you TRANSFER servers, all characters go to the new server as 'home server.'

 

 

[mod edit]

Here's the question that was responded to by the community manager.  There is nothing about 'visiting' in it...

What does it actually mean when the server populations says “High” or “Full.” Does ANet go by the number of people CURRENTLY on said server, or by the number of accounts MADE on said server.

Also, is there any official sort of chart/graph that shows each server’s current population in comparison to eachother?

I am currently on Henge of Denravi, and even though it says “High”, and is the second server down from one that says “Full”, most of the areas seem so deserted. Granted, I only just started the game a day or two ago, so I may not have gotten to any majorly populated areas.

Thank you in advance. =) 

Edit: I personally believe that the answer is a bit disingenuous.  It looks like the community manager intentionally 'misunderstands' in order to answer the way they want to.  It is certainly not the most clear or direct way that question could have been answered.

As for "troll conclusions", some of us don't simply accept anything we are told as true.  We observe, consider, then decide what to believe.  It's unfortunate, but much of what people tell you on a daily basis is false or a twisted half truth.  This forms the basis of discussion in this particular thread.

The trouble here is you're taking things too literally from somebody trying to speak to the layman. There is probably no hard cap to determine what "FULL" is.

FULL will be dynamically calculated, based on the number of accounts on the server and the frequency of account logins, with many other data points in the mix such as server resource usage. Any patch could change resource usage and affect performance. 

They invented the "overflow" system, surely they wouldn't resort to manually adjusting what "FULL" is.

For new accounts/transfers, they already know the number of accounts the server holds. It's not as simple as that though because they know accounts do not equal concurrent users, especially in a B2P game. This is why they will look at frequency of account logins, hours played and time of day, amongst a million other things. There will also be a buffer zone allowing for infrequent players to return.

It wouldn't surprise me to see a drop in population either, even though the server still says FULL.

This is because there are many accounts created initially, a lot of which may not be played often. Until they build up data to determine frequency of play, divided by accounts, there will be a large margin for error and hence server full, when it might not seem so if you login.

That's my take on it anyway and of course none of that would prevent "FULL" being overridden by an artificial figure should they want to make a server look healthy. I've seen no evidence of that here though. The servers do look healthy to me.

Needs a CC that can actually speak English to clear it up.  No offense, Eva.  Your accent probably makes up for it.  Call me.

It's easy to see that the server capacity rating you get actually means the amount of players currently logged in.  If it just meant how many characters were made on the server, then the indicator would never go down, but they do take a dip when prime-time ends.  Unless people somehow delete their accounts when they are done for the day and make new ones the next day, the latter interpretation makes no sense.

The CC was saying that there's no difference between home users and visitors when it comes to recording capacity on a server.  The indicator for server capacity does include visitors, so a server that says 'full' has both home players and visitors contribute to that rating.

On the other matter:  server capacity ratings should never be used to judge the state of an MMO's population in comparison with other MMOs.  They mean nothing without concrete details, like how many users makes a server 'full'.  A GW2 server might be able to hold 10000 users (warning: wild number throwing), while a RIFT shard can only hold 5 players (just bear with me yo).  So what happens if that GW2 server is 'Medium' and the RIFT shard is 'full' - does that mean that RIFT is doing better with its playerbase of 5?

The only time you can use server capacity ratings to talk about MMO population is when you're comparing the game to itself and there hasn't been any changes / upgrades to the server infrastructure that may have increased the capacity of the servers.  Then you can clearly make observations about how the population changes over time - but once any server changes happen, your results suddenly mean nothing.

Ban_Khaeros is right. It doesn't even make sense that the server status represents the number of characters or number of players registered on a particular server. All the players who no longer played would still be counted and the server statuses would fluctuate less and less over time. Eventually, the number of people not playing would exceed the number of people playing and the server statuses would stop changing. The server status continue to change, sometimes dramatically.

We don't know the numbers, but we do know that a "Low" server has less activity in the zones and less global chat than a "High" server. It is a very noticeable difference. It is especially noticeable in WvW. This is another indicator that the server status represents logged in users, not registered users.

The only real question is "How many logged in players does 'Full' or 'High' represent?" That question will never get an answer so there's not too much point in arguing about it.

Originally posted by muffins89

Originally posted by roo67

Originally posted by muffins89

Originally posted by Calerxes

Originally posted by Pivotelite

Originally posted by fundayz

Originally posted by Pivotelite

And all three times there were people saying "No, it's healthy, population is rising, look more servers full now den a munth ago hurr durr!!!!".

It's called changing population distributions...

The lower level zones may not have as many players as launch (no duh!) but that means squat for the overall population if people are simply gathered in higher level zones.

If GW2's concurrency numbers were falling as quickly as some claim we wouldn't be seeing new servers being opened.

 Would I be seeing less people outside instance locations, in Lions arch, in Spvp, lowlevel zones and WvW as well?

 

They must all be clumped on one another in a secret spot for GW2 elite players.

 

 

 

Can you log into a full server?

yes.  which is why those saying that it means actual people logged in are wrong.  it's artifical to control population.

You can also log into full servers on WoW . I've done it on Outland EU many many times without a wait . Good point though but to suggest that this only applys to GW2 is a false assumption .

As for the OP . Its pretty obvious if he thinks alts are counted hes misunderstood what was written .

nowhere have ever said it this only applys to gw2 or any other game.  that is your false assumption.

True but you also didn't state that it didn't only apply to GW2 . Had you said "well this also applys to other games" then the suggestion it wasn't just confined to GW2 wouldn't have come up :) You are posting on a GW2 thread so without suggesting that it doesn't simply apply to this paticular game its a fair assumption to make . As I said though it is a good point . Maybe the assumption I made that it was a good point wasn't quite right and you were simply trolling ?

Originally posted by dimnikar

Server statuses are probably not updated realtime.

 

It makes sense to report the highest status the server was in for a certain period of time - let's say 12 hours at least (probably more) to avoid confusion when concurrent populations drop during off hours.

 

While that is cheating somewhat, it does more good than bad. Still, it precludes server statuses as being any kind of indication of the well being of the game (among many other factors).

This didn't cross my mind, but would make sense why some (many?) servers are being shown at a certain status almost 24/7.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Most-NA-servers-FULL-around-the-clock

ITT people lacking grammar and logic.

Kind of funny how some people try so desperately to find faults in GW2.

Now it's clear

1) server status screen shows "concurrent online players" 

The status goes up and down during the morning, afternoon, evening, night

2) server status shows players and not characters (especially not chara + alts...ha ha that was a good laugh)

Not only is the dev message perfectly clear but it wouldn't make sense with the up and down in the status screens during the day.

BTW no point in comparison with what happened with Tera. The Tera server status screens updated once every few months and devs said at the start that they were showing characters created and not players online.

3) When a server is full it's full and when you try to log in you are put in an overflow.

An overflow is a completely different server and not an instance. Devs said so and there is actual proof you can all check :different players from different servers get to a single overflow.

Oh and btw you can't join wvwvwvw from overflow servers.

The first page of this thread is very funny. ;)

Originally posted by Greyhooff

Originally posted by Zeus.CM

Okay, so this is settled. When server is full it means many people are online at that moment on that server. This image was taken one minuta ago:

 

At this very moment 21 servers are full, around 30 high and 5 servers on medium. There is no low populated server.

 

This is correct.

The rest is just crying from people who called it wrong.

GW2 is doing very, very well.

Sorry kids.

The irony in this post is just of the scale especially with the photo in the sig. The whole point of this thread is that Arenanet is doing exactly what other companies have done, fudged the numbers to make the game look like its doing well but there are many reports and other indicators that its going the same way as Rift, SW:TOR, and even MOP now this is not a bad thing in itself the bad thing is comapnies fudging the numbers.