DCUO- will be out November 2. Can apply for beta on main site now.

[Numtini]

I don't know what companies do about the server issue. There does now seem to be a built in "wow tourist" crowd who is going to try nearly everything, but never switch. Rift seems very healthy to me, but probably could use to lose a few servers. I just hope they merge rather than just cross-servering dungeon queues.

[Nebu]

I don't know what companies do about the server issue. There does now seem to be a built in "wow tourist" crowd who is going to try nearly everything, but never switch. Rift seems very healthy to me, but probably could use to lose a few servers. I just hope they merge rather than just cross-servering dungeon queues.

I agree with everything you've said.  Trion had to add servers due to the login queues.  The WoW tourists seem to be much better about buying boxes than they are at hanging around (see WAR, Aion, etc.).  I would hope that Developers would pre-engineer a method of handling this phenomenon.  Were I to release a large budget game, I'd be thinking about expansion and contraction mechanics long before my title released. 

[Draegan]

Rift servers are not that bad at all.  At least, all the EU servers are at medium right now.  US ones are down for a patch right now.

What does "medium" mean, exactly?  I can't find anything that defines the Trion server load metric. 

I can tell you as someone that plays on two different servers at endgame that there are real population differences between US servers.  The PvE/RP servers have a must more robust player base than the non RP server I play on.  Also, not that I pay much attention to the white noise, but the Rift forums are ripe with threads begging for server transfers and consolidations.  That's not something players would beg for unless it was needed.

People cry and ask for server transfers and consolidations in every game no matter what reality says.  Some people think their server should be teaming at 4am.  Some people think servers are dead just because they can't get a group too.

  All the US servers read medium as of 2pm EST.  I say that's pretty healthy.

Not sure what metric you're using.  Maybe you're on the wrong faction?  Faction inbalance is always an issue. 

[Nebu]

All the US servers read medium as of 2pm EST.  I say that's pretty healthy.

Again, what does "medium" mean?  It's like terrorist code "orange". 

Faction is an issue, I agree.  I also agree that the game is healthy.  I just happen to think that the game has too many servers and would benefit from fewer servers with a "heavy" load during primetime to a) provide enough interest to defeat epic zone invasions for the few of us that still participate and b) so that I don't have to wait in long queues for BG's.  There aren't many servers with a load fo "heavy" during primetime and it's obvious.  Stillmoor is the only zone that I see people in on a regular basis anymore on my server.  A month ago I was fighting for spawns.  Now I'm dealing with tons of yard trash that I never even knew existed. 

[Numtini]

Medium, in my experience, means I will regularly come across people while I'm adventuring in a low/mid level zone and that if I watch the chat, I can probably find a group in an hour or so by simply watching LFG/level/regional and waiting for someone who's spamming and suggesting we form a group.

[Venkman]

That worked very well for Champions Online. Even when player population was very low, the instanced environments still looked pretty busy.

Yeah, and it scales really well.  I played a bit of it when it went to free to play and the population seemed really high (comparable to the game's initial release almost).  I have some problems with the model, but if your game world doesn't matter anyway, there's no shame in it. (No one REALLY cares that there are 14 millenium cities, since you can't affect those zones anyway, and it does mean that the public quests with longer cool downs can be done more often.)

Curious about this. How flexible are the business relationships supporting instanced uni-servers? I could see sharded servers being effective for short term rentals during early peak, knowing the peak will fall off (Trion isn't stupid, they know the WoW boomerangs). Is that basically the same with instanced uni-server? If so then the only real difference is the user experience and bad PR of merges.

[Lantyssa]

An instanced uni-server as you call it would probably be a server farm.  If this is the case, then it should be fairly trivial to add or remove capacity as needed.  At least in theory.  Projects like this always have a way of skimping where they shouldn't.

[Furiously]

That worked very well for Champions Online. Even when player population was very low, the instanced environments still looked pretty busy.

Yeah, and it scales really well.  I played a bit of it when it went to free to play and the population seemed really high (comparable to the game's initial release almost).  I have some problems with the model, but if your game world doesn't matter anyway, there's no shame in it. (No one REALLY cares that there are 14 millenium cities, since you can't affect those zones anyway, and it does mean that the public quests with longer cool downs can be done more often.)

Curious about this. How flexible are the business relationships supporting instanced uni-servers? I could see sharded servers being effective for short term rentals during early peak, knowing the peak will fall off (Trion isn't stupid, they know the WoW boomerangs). Is that basically the same with instanced uni-server? If so then the only real difference is the user experience and bad PR of merges.

And having to deal with duplicate names at a later date.

[Lantyssa]

Champions Oniline, of all games, solved that problem.  "name@account" if you need to differentiate.

I think if you add in "perma"-instances by naming the instances the same as servers are nowadays, you can still have communities, but allow for a bit more of a dynamic adjustment as populations decline.

[Malakili]

Champions Oniline, of all games, solved that problem.  "name@account" if you need to differentiate.

I think if you add in "perma"-instances by naming the instances the same as servers are nowadays, you can still have communities, but allow for a bit more of a dynamic adjustment as populations decline.

Worked especially well for Champions as well, because character creation was basically the big thing, and if you can't name your guy what you want, thats kind of a big blow to a game that touts making any super hero you can imagine. 

In any event, of all the things Champions did poorly, this wasn't one of them, it actually worked quite well.  As for the business relationships question, I really can't speculate on that because I don't have any knowledge of it.  On the player-experience side of it though, I can say that when I was playing CO at launch and it had its big drop off I stuck around for a bit, and even though it was very evident that there were less shards around, the fact that my experience didn't change drastically was definitely something that kept me around a few extra months as just a pure super hero fan.  Had my super group had to change servers due to a shut down, change my character's name, etc, I think I probably would've just said to hell with it.

Not to mention other bonuses like - you can never meet anyone that plays the game and not be able to play together if you want to.  That has happened to me in WoW so many times I stopped keeping track.

[Nija]

Not to mention other bonuses like - you can never meet anyone that plays the game and not be able to play together if you want to.  That has happened to me in WoW so many times I stopped keeping track.

There are a few people amongst my group of friends that transfer servers to play with co-workers for a few weeks each time a new expansion hits. Eventually their RL friends/coworkers burn out and they transfer back to the poopsocker realm.

[Hutch]

Now I want Blizzard to name their next new WoW server "Poopsocker".

Assuming that they get to the point where they need one, that is.

[Abelian75]

I'm not a big fan of the instanced-zone thing either, honestly (I think it makes it feel really artificial and exposes something you really shouldn't have to think about as a player, especially in a more "world-y" game like Rift).  But something needs to be done, because this is going to happen to every single MMO in the future, pretty much.  The only reason it didn't happen with WoW was because they exploded the market.  Even if a new MMO ended up "killing WoW", it would still happen to them.  You'd have to make a game that drew in as many new MMO players as WoW did, which is a bit of a longshot to count on.

One alternative is just to pre-announce merges.  Just name servers something like "Happyland 1" and "Happyland 2" and just say that those two servers will merge once the populations are less active and able to support doing so.  So basically when Rift launched all those additional servers, they would have been 2nd versions of previous servers (not the most-most active ones, which will always exist and will always be filled to capacity, and thus wouldn't end up being able to merge).  Probably not the most elegant idea, and possibly a terrible one, but if you aren't going to do a single-server sort of thing, you really just need to make it clear from day 1 that merges will happen.

[Numtini]

I really don't like instanced zones a la conan. It made the game feel unreal. That's probably an illogical distinction, but so be it. I actually mind the "channels" idea where the entire server has two channels to be less objectionable than every zone has channels.

[Draegan]

I hate dividing the same world zone into channels.  It makes the game world feel cheap.

[Malakili]

I'm not a big fan of the instanced-zone thing either, honestly (I think it makes it feel really artificial and exposes something you really shouldn't have to think about as a player, especially in a more "world-y" game like Rift).  

I used to care a lot about this, until I realized that MMOs aren't actually about being worldy anymore.  Maybe a handful of them out there are but as long as your game isn't, there isn't really an advantage to having coherent worlds, its all just zones and dinggrats.   Now, that in itself might be a turn off, but quite frankly, when your world is a static backdrop for questing, it really doesn't matter if there are 10 copies of it.

Edit: My point being that if the fact that it being divided up bothers you, I suspect its actually the game itself that bothers you and that dividing it up just makes you notice more.  This is a sign you should play a different kind of game.  This is why I'm hoping Tribes Universe of Planetside 2 delivers....or else I'll resub to World War 2 Online again.

[Venkman]

Exactly. There's very little "massive" in the end user experience anymore. Mostly because the amount of "massive" in the early days has introduced mechanics and issues players didn't end up liking en masse.

This isn't a bad thing depending on taste, just the way the market has gone. There's still UO and Eve, which are awesome in their own right. But that's the model of experience the masses don't want, and the money has followed.

[Abelian75]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying instancing zones is definitively sucky or anything.  It's more that I have a feeling that it has some negative effects that are really hard to define or measure.  On paper there doesn't really seem to be anything about them that would be a bad thing at all, other than awkwardness finding friends (which is the "exposing shit a player shouldn't have to worry about" bit).  Yet I feel like they end up hurting the game in ways that aren't easily explained.

Now, even granting that, it's not that hard to argue that the benefits of a single server outweigh any of those nebulous, hand-wavy downsides anyway.  I bring it up not so much to suggest that doing a champions/guild wars style single-server thingy is a terrible idea, but rather that it might be worth thinking of variations that seem almost identical, but somehow make the experience better.  The earlier suggestion of worldwide instancing rather than zone specific is interesting, and I have a feeling that would actually make it seem less wonky and artificial.  Conceivably you could just make as many channels/instances as the most dense zone requires, but in other areas put several channels into one instance.  So you'd pick, say, channel 55, and in Meridian/Ironforge/whateverthefuck that would equate to an instance containing only channel 55 dudes, whereas in bumfuckzone/Winterspring, you might have 44-55 all in the same zone together.  There are potential issues there, but I do like the idea of picking a single channel once and seeing a relatively consistent set of people whenever you play. 

[Kageru]

Exactly. There's very little "massive" in the end user experience anymore. Mostly because the amount of "massive" in the early days has introduced mechanics and issues players didn't end up liking en masse.

I don't think it has that much to do with the players, other than they want the big bucks and that means going for the broadest lowest common denominator. The game designers want to be able to produce rich content and directed challenging gameplay. So WoW zones are like a guided tour through a theme-park whereas EQ was a map which might have stuff on it if you go exploring. But exploring means people might miss the rides and a large world means it costs a lot to create even small packets of content.

[eldaec]

Champions Oniline, of all games, solved that problem.  "name@account" if you need to differentiate.

CoX, DAoC, and EQ2 did the same. I have a feeling EQ1 did it as well.

It surprising how many mmog problems were solved before 2004, only for the solutions to be entirely forgotten by everyone if they didn't also appear in WoW.

[Lantyssa]

They let you have cross-server chat, but I'm not aware of CoX, which I am playing at the moment, nor EQ2 letting multiple characters have the same name on the same server.  Never played DAoC.

[Numtini]

Your name was unique in EQ2. If you did crossserver chat, you just added their server to it. But you got your own name, not an email address.

[UnSub]

CoH/V had unique character names per server, as well as a unique global account name. So you could have "ThunderGod@BigMan" and "BigMan@BigMan", with "ThunderGod" and "BigMan" being linked to only one character per server (there may be other ThunderGods on other servers) and the unique global account name BigMan.

ChampO only forced the unique global account name, so that you could potentially see 8 "ThunderGod" characters at the same time, but they would be "ThunderGod@BigMan", "ThunderGod@L33tD00d", "ThunderGod@HammerTime", et al. You can flip options about what part of the names you see (iirc). I like this system a lot more because you know you are going to get the name you want and not get all the way to the end of creating your character only to find you have to find a name variant that wasn't yet taken.

[Koyasha]

Yeah, unique names makes no sense and never has.  The only logical reason for it is to ensure you can send tells and such to people.  But as several games have shown, there are other options for that, far better options, like the global name, which make it easier to contact people you know regardless of what character they're on.

Although I don't much care for DCUO this is definitely something they did right and I wish every other game would copy.  I find it strange how some simple convenience features that have been around for a very long time (global names, secure chat channels, etc) don't seem to get copied very much at all, even though they would go great with any game regardless of other mechanics.

[Rendakor]

Tabula Rasa handled that by giving you a single last name for all characters on your account, and allowing multiple copies of any given first name. It's the same thing as what ChampO did, but looks better in-game to me than the email address style.

[Numtini]

Tabula Rasa handled that by giving you a single last name for all characters on your account, and allowing multiple copies of any given first name. It's the same thing as what ChampO did, but looks better in-game to me than the email address style.

That sounds like a great way to handle it to me. My big objection to the email address style of names is that community is already a precarious thing in most MMOs. I don't want to see it degraded further.

[Malakili]

Tabula Rasa handled that by giving you a single last name for all characters on your account, and allowing multiple copies of any given first name. It's the same thing as what ChampO did, but looks better in-game to me than the email address style.

That sounds like a great way to handle it to me. My big objection to the email address style of names is that community is already a precarious thing in most MMOs. I don't want to see it degraded further.

So is your worry that having everyone in one big pool is just too many to form meaningful communities?  I'm not saying thats necessarily wrong, but I'm just trying to make sure I follow.

[Numtini]

So is your worry that having everyone in one big pool is just too many to form meaningful communities?  I'm not saying thats necessarily wrong, but I'm just trying to make sure I follow.

I was thinking of the email address type of global identifier. I feel like it depersonalizes other players, which is a general problem in current MMOs. The lastname thing gets around that. It's a more elegant want of handling the issue.

However, I also do think that large servers do present issues with community formation. I think there's a sweet spot where you have enough people to group with, but where you actually recognize names and people. But I think I'm just on the losing side of this battle. I like MMOs. And most people don't. And the industry trend is to slowly boil the frog with the end product most likely being no part of the "massive" part of the experience left other than the subscription fee.

[Venkman]

Exactly. There's very little "massive" in the end user experience anymore. Mostly because the amount of "massive" in the early days has introduced mechanics and issues players didn't end up liking en masse.

I don't think it has that much to do with the players, other than they want the big bucks and that means going for the broadest lowest common denominator. The game designers want to be able to produce rich content and directed challenging gameplay. So WoW zones are like a guided tour through a theme-park whereas EQ was a map which might have stuff on it if you go exploring. But exploring means people might miss the rides and a large world means it costs a lot to create even small packets of content.

Yea, that's pretty much it. I don't separate "the players" from "lowest common denominator" though, because in this medium, you need a wide enough playerbase to maintain your cashflow.

Not everyone sets out to create a WoW killer though. Some never market themselves that way, appropriately scale their resources to the players they think they'll get, and live happily for years right-sized for their audience (ATiTD for example). Others though chase the dreams of the big bucks because of a few press releases and managing to secure a large IP they think they can easily slap onto a carbon copy of the successful game. And when they miss their mark, there's six other companies in the wings waiting with their press releases and licensed IP.

That's pretty standard in many industries though. Luminaries that also had business success are rare, and usually launching a new experience rather than coming in late and capitalizing by perfecting.

On EQ1 though, I disagree. EQ1 was exploring in spite of the game play and UI. It could be that because it was so early in the life of this medium. But we only need to look at EQ2 and Vanguard to see what they'd have done with the EQ1 UI and game play if they had the 20/20 hindsight going in. UO would be more an "explore-y" game, same with SWG. You could join the content funnels (more of which came later to both games). But early on it was more the lifestyle of living the world than consuming the content on a linear track.

I'm with Numtini on their final paragraph.

[Abelian75]

However, I also do think that large servers do present issues with community formation. I think there's a sweet spot where you have enough people to group with, but where you actually recognize names and people. But I think I'm just on the losing side of this battle. I like MMOs. And most people don't. And the industry trend is to slowly boil the frog with the end product most likely being no part of the "massive" part of the experience left other than the subscription fee.

I wouldn't necessarily lose hope.  Sure, the industry trend is to move toward an extremely guided, single-player focused MMO experience.  But the industry trend has also been to release MMOs that, without exception, fail utterly at meeting their expected player numbers (with the possible, indeed hopeful, exception of Rift.  lol at myself for having just said "without exception" and then listing an exception.)

The point being, yeah, the genre has moved away from the niche, hardcore player.  But at some point people may realize that trying to be the next WoW isn't working.  And if Rift DOES see a large falloff, I really think there is almost no hope at ever replacing WoW, because that game is pretty goddamn good.  It may just be that there won't be a single, colossal game like that in the MMO space again.  Which would actually be kinda awesome, and I say that as someone who is a big fan of WoW in general.

[Lantyssa]

I'm keeping some hope that GW2 changes things.  Only a little, 'cause I don't want my dreams crushed, but it's our best hope for the moment.

[Koyasha]

I was thinking of the email address type of global identifier. I feel like it depersonalizes other players, which is a general problem in current MMOs. The lastname thing gets around that. It's a more elegant want of handling the issue.

I'm not a big fan of the last name format because I like giving my characters exactly the name I want for them, nothing more, nothing less.  That should include a last name, but it shouldn't have to be the same last name as every other character on my account, simply because I might have a completely different character idea.  I didn't play Champ or DCUO enough to have many distinct characters, but in CoX I have characters from widely differing backgrounds, and it would make absolutely no sense to have them all share a last name.  Similarly, in any game where there's multiple races it also would make no sense.

I prefer a background identifier that will only come up if it's needed - if there's only one Joe Steel on the server, then sending a tell to Joe Steel works fine.  If there's more than one, it could try to determine automatically who you're talking to - for instance, if you have one of them on your friends list but no others, then it will default to the one that's on your friends list, and so on.  I can see your concern, but forcing me to use the same last name for all characters would, at least for me, be far worse than having to append a global, even if I need to do so manually.

As far as server size, I do think that discrete, unchanging servers need to go away.  But you're right in that if you combine all servers into a single pool it's harder to make connections with people.  The previously suggested method of having multiple 'channels' each with a name seems effective to me.  In Phantasy Star Universe, there were 16 or so 'instances' of every public area, and people tended to choose a number and stick to it.  I would pretty much always use #7 if I remember correctly, and I saw a lot of other people around repeatedly because they too used #7.  But on occasion I'd have a friend in another 'channel' and switch to that one, or they would switch to mine.  Identifying with a particular 'channel' would be even stronger if they had names, not just numbers.  Allow people to form communities, and they will.

[Malakili]

I was thinking of the email address type of global identifier. I feel like it depersonalizes other players, which is a general problem in current MMOs. The lastname thing gets around that. It's a more elegant want of handling the issue.

I'm not a big fan of the last name format because I like giving my characters exactly the name I want for them, nothing more, nothing less.  That should include a last name, but it shouldn't have to be the same last name as every other character on my account, simply because I might have a completely different character idea.  I didn't play Champ or DCUO enough to have many distinct characters, but in CoX I have characters from widely differing backgrounds, and it would make absolutely no sense to have them all share a last name.  Similarly, in any game where there's multiple races it also would make no sense.

I prefer a background identifier that will only come up if it's needed - if there's only one Joe Steel on the server, then sending a tell to Joe Steel works fine.  If there's more than one, it could try to determine automatically who you're talking to - for instance, if you have one of them on your friends list but no others, then it will default to the one that's on your friends list, and so on.  I can see your concern, but forcing me to use the same last name for all characters would, at least for me, be far worse than having to append a global, even if I need to do so manually.

As far as server size, I do think that discrete, unchanging servers need to go away.  But you're right in that if you combine all servers into a single pool it's harder to make connections with people.  The previously suggested method of having multiple 'channels' each with a name seems effective to me.  In Phantasy Star Universe, there were 16 or so 'instances' of every public area, and people tended to choose a number and stick to it.  I would pretty much always use #7 if I remember correctly, and I saw a lot of other people around repeatedly because they too used #7.  But on occasion I'd have a friend in another 'channel' and switch to that one, or they would switch to mine.  Identifying with a particular 'channel' would be even stronger if they had names, not just numbers.  Allow people to form communities, and they will.

For what its worth, in Champions Online you could turn off the global identifier name from the UI if you wanted to.  So in chat you'd just see "Thunderman" or whatever.  Then the only time you would need to deal with that stuff is if you wanted to add someone to your friends list.  I ended up turning it on simply because the game was an altaholics dream and the friends I had were always making up new alts, so it was easy to keep track of who was who.

[UnSub]

Looks like the rumours are correct: Chris Cao is no longer the Game Director on DCUO. Mark Anderson has taken on that role.

The other part of that rumour was that Cao is now at Zynga.

[MisterNoisy]

And in a move that will surprise absolutely no one, DCUO is going F2P.

Free
New players will now have access to the current gameplay in DC Universe Online (including Gotham City, Metropolis, and all current raids and alerts), with the ability to create two characters, join a league and many other benefits. Free level players will be able to purchase downloadable game packs/updates, additional character slots, powers and more through microtransactions.

Premium
Any player who has spent at least $5 (including former paid subscribers and new players who have purchased $5 of in-game items) will qualify for the Premium access level. Premium level players will have more benefits available to them than the Free level player, including additional character slots, additional inventory slots, and higher cash limits. Downloadable adventure packs, additional character slots, and more can be purchased in-game.

Legendary
Maximum features and benefits are included at this level. Loaded with enhanced additional features, Legendary access will be available for a $14.99 monthly fee and includes all DLC packs at no cost, more than 15 character slots, more than 80 inventory slots, the ability to form unrestricted-sized leagues, and many other benefits.