Servers? We don’t need no steenking SERVERS!
I’m still playing Warhammer Online.
This means that every night I’m ussually involved ina conversation over Teamspeak about what is wrong with the game because believe me there is quite alot wrong with it.
Now don’t think that when I say that I mean things like Witch Elves being overpowered or every second Order player being a Bright Wizard. No we ussually end up talking about the Servers being underpopulated.
See when WAR launched Mythic and GOA did something that has had some very unintended negative consequences: They lowered the Player cap on the servers. This was no doubt done so that they could go around shouting about the smoothest MMO launch in history (Which for the record was nowhere near as Smooth as they would like you to believe if you were unfortunate enough to play on Karak Eight-Peaks which crashed about a dozen times in the first week).
This low player cap meant that the servers had huge queues and Mythic were then forced to roll out more servers to handle the load. Then a few weeks later they raised the Player Cap and the servers which had massive queues suddenly had none. However there was no new influx of players to take up this slack and the result was that the population was spread over more servers than nesecerry.
What does this mean for the game then?
Well with the WoW expansion having just stolen a huge portion of the less dedicated players (and the change is noticable in game. Areas that were busy 2 weeks ago are now lifeless) it’s reached a point where Mythic are either going to have to merge servers or somehow magic up another few hundred thousand new players.
Here’s the thing though: Server merges don’t occur because there aren’t enough players. They don’t mean that a game has failed and doesn’t have enough subscriptions to survive. They mean that there aren’t enough players per square foot of ingame land. Now this may mean that they don’t have the subs in the first place but in the case of WAR it’s more that Mythic seriously overestimated how much game world they needed for the number of players on each server.
WAR shipping with only 2 capital cities for example is a supremely good thing. I actually hope they don’t ever introduce the other 4 cities because it will only result in either 4 cities being empty as the population condenses around the 2 active ones (see Jita in Eve. Players congregate where other players are and there is nothing you can do to stop this) or the population in the Empire/Chaos tier 4 areas being reduced to a third of it’s current size. Both of these things are undesirable.
Heck I think the game could have shipped with just one of the race pairings zones and done better as a result.
Scenarios are something else that have failed fairly spectacularly. In each Tier there is 1 scenario that is played frequently leaving the others to rot. This is the result of a Queuing system that is so flawed it’s amazing it ever made it into the game…
A scenario consists of 24 players. 12 from each side. Each player can queue for any number of scenario maps at a time. Now when 24 players are all queued for the same map the scenario map will start.
The problem occurs when you have 22 players who don’t care which map they want to play and 2 players who don’t want to play the same map as each other. These 2 players can stop scenarios running at all for the other 22 players.
Example:
22 players click “Join All” and queue for every scenario map they can.
1 player joins Tor Anroc.
1 player joins Doomfist Crater.
Now as the most players registered for any one scenario map is now 23 this means that no scenario will trigger even though 24 people want to play a scenario. The minority have thus ruined the experience for the majority.
Why anybody would choose to use this kind of system I don’t know. It’s allowing a small minority of people to define the play experience for the majority which is bad design whichever way you cut it.
However these server problems are all symptomatic of something worse: Genre stagnation. Why does WAR use discrete servers at all? Why do only MMO’s use this kind of per-map queue system?
Both of these problems can be solved if you just ignore the way things have “Always been done” and look at ways to eliminate these problems.
Guild Wars should be the model that more games follow as regards servers. Every character in the entire game can play with any other character in the game. Nobody ever cares what server they are on because all the player stats and gear etc are all stored on one server while the actual gameplay is run on map servers.
This is very similar to things like Team Fortress 2 which stores the stats of every Steam account user centrally so it never matters which server you log into your stats follow you everywhere.
Eve does some clever things regarding decoupling servers from their actual physical location. The Chat servers are not the same as the world servers meaning that if CCP were so inclined they could build a web interface to your corporations chat channel. The same goes for a regions market which is handled on a seperate server from the games combat.
There is no reason at all to continue to design a server architecture around this rather archaic concept of a “Shard”. Unfortunately a Server Architecture is not something you can patch post-launch. WAR is stuck with it’s shard related problems forever now and this will include what I’m sure are inevtiable server merges to get the players per foot number up.
The Scenarios are a different matter however. You can kind of trace the problems here from several sources. The original design of senarios was to have only a few per region that were appropriate to the story etc for that area. This soon got thrown out though because of the previously mention problems: Not enough players per foot.
Mythic then sensibly added the ability to join any scenario from anywhere in the tier. Scenarios started occuring more regularly as a result. The same scenarios kept happening more frequently than others though as a result of poor map design more than anything else. The most popular scenarios are either the simplest to play or closest to team deathmatch.
This prompts the addition of the “Join All” button which does help to increase diversity a little. However you still don’t get away from the problem that the scenario being played is defined by the minority that only want to play one map.
The solution however is sitting out there staring everybody in the face: Map Rotations.
The problem is caused by players being able to choose which map they want to play. This is something that doesn’t really happen on multiplayer servers outside of MMOs. TF2, CS, Quake 3, World in conflict etc are all based on the idea of you joining a server and the server rotating the map that gets played. It’s a system that has worked well for decades now and in the context of instanced scenarios that are entirely seperate from the rest of the MMO it would fit perfectly.
The solution then is to present a list of the Scenario servers that are running that players can join running a fixed map rotation (or if you want to get complicated use a democratic voting system that allows the majority of players to decide what gets played). Scenarios will continue to run constantly on that server so long as the teams are about even up to the maximum of 24 players. If one side gets more than 2 players up on the other side the server shuts down until more players have joined to make the sides even again.
This would solve those problems of it being outside peak hours and there maybe being 18 people wanting to play scenarios but the scenario will never trigger. It will stop only 4 maps being the only ones that get played regularly (although a redesign on the unpopular maps will help there as well).
Added perks to this system: Once you join a Scenario Server you can stay on it for as long as you want. The same 24 players could keep playing against each other for hours becoming better able to work together and maybe actually making friends (and enemies) rather than being dumped back to the world between each map and never actually getitng to know the people you’ve been paired up with. Couple this sytem with a non-sharded architecture and you have a system where you will always find somebody to play against due to being able to play accross timezones.
I can’t imagine a world in which this isn’t preferable to the currently segregated flagging population we have now.