Tobold's Blog
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
 
EQ2 and the dangers of expanding

In November 2004 two major MMORPG were released, Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft, and that was widely seen as some sort of head-on battle. Now EQ2 is quite a successful game, having reached as many subscribers as the original Everquest. But of course in direct comparison with World of Warcrafts success, many people regarded EQ2 as a failure. Nevertheless, in one aspect EQ2 is clearly leading, beating WoW 2:0 in released expansion sets. And now this expansion is causing some trouble, which might serve as a warning to WoW.

Basically what happened was that the number of zones in the game nearly doubled, you might call it "Tobold's 40% per expansion rule". :) But while the number of zones grew, the number of players per server staid constant. Thus the average number of players per zone dropped, and the lesser populated servers began to feel empty.

In a producer's letter SOE is now announcing countermeasures. There will be first some free voluntary character transfers, and afterwards some emptier servers will be closed and the characters from them moved to other servers.

World of Warcraft will be expanding its number of zones as well, when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out in the second half of 2006. And with servers being limited to about 3,000 players, adding zones will also dilute the average number of players per zone. In general we can expect older zones to become deserted, while newer zones might be overcrowded at the start. I remember visiting Everquest after some years of inactivity, and finding all the zones that I remembered as being most popular now being totally void of players. While there is little risk of Blizzard adding expansion sets to World of Warcraft too fast, in the long run the thinning out of players per zone is something that will inevitably happen.

Now I believe that 3,000 players per server is a limitation that might be overcome with new hardware. My favorite solution would be to increase the total limit to 4,000, and then introduce separate limits of 2,000 players for Horde and Alliance. Thus the Alliance would experience no change, and the Horde would get some room to grow, for ultimately a better balance between the factions. That would make PvP a lot more viable, and even enable Blizzard to introduce a more interesting DAoC RvR type of PvP. And at the same time adding 33% more players to each server would counteract the dilution of players caused by the addition of new zones.
Comments:
Blizzard has some technical problems, and I don't know if they can afford to increase the population of a server by 33%. On Dark Iron, every Monday (24 hours before realm maintenance) the server begins to bog down horribly.

My intuition says that they are tracking and calculating too much PvP data due to Battlegrounds, but it could be a memory leak somewhere else *shrug*
 
The prior big issues they had was back in January and February '05. Then, I think the problem was three fold:

- This applied to Pacific/Mountain servers. They're not called that anymore, but the hardware hasn't been moved.
- Pac/Mtn serviced Australia.
- While most other servers enjoyed a high peak and low valley of daily usage, Pac/Mtn didn't. It had TWO peaks, one for west coast US and one for Australia, basically a half a day away. Therefore, not as much time to clean up the database stuff as on other servers.
- Alliance, even then, greatly outnumbered Horde.
- Alliance trade took place in IF, on Eastern Continent.

The net result was a continual crashing of just Eastern Continent on these servers. As people started to get smart and migrate to Kalimdor though, the whole server started going down.

This started to get resolved by continual emergency patches, but also by new servers, and people quiting in disgust.

I don't think anything is technically different though on the back end. Therefore, I'd agree that upping the population limits may not even be possible.

This shouldn't necessarily hurt though because with the NEW zones come the ability to reroll NEW characters. Some of these will definitely hit areas they were already familiar with to maximize their leveling. Therefore, at least right now, giving something for endgamers and newbies alike should prevent too much spread.
 
Spreading players out is always something most MMOs miss on.
 
The spreading out occurs in a few different places and isn't easily fixed.

All the leveling zones that are "beneath" the new content will stay effectively barren. That is the current state today, as anyone who has tried to get a Mauradon group in the last 6 months will tell you.

The leveling zones that are new will be jam-packed with formerly-capped players. This is pretty much unavoidable, but Blizzard did a decent job with it in the last expansion by having monster spawn rate change with guys in the area.

WoW already has tons and tons of empty space, since the world is rather large, but all new content is focused in a very small area. Adding new zones only serves as a relatively small distraction for the masses who spend 90% of their lives talking to a goblin and dueling in small teams.
 
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