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Whoever invented Mega-Servers/Familiar-PlayerChannels does not understand the first "M" in MMO
JIUBHUNNY420
Member Posts: 131
I have no idea how this is becoming the new big trend in MMO's. I never understood Channels when I first saw them in AOC, I had never even heard of them before that game, but the thought of "We have this big open area, but were only going to put 50 people in it max at any given time" is just completely offbase with the first M (Massively) of MMORPG. In AOC it made sense only from the aspect that the zones wernt all that big so it just wouldnt work with that type of game. ESO is supposed to be these big sprawling open areas, yet its starting to sound like they might be alot smaller, with channels putting you exclusivley with people you have adventurered with before/guild mates.
Now Mega-Servers, yes, thats an awesome idea guys! Lets continue to distinguish unique communities by making them all part of the same Server! Now see, if this game didnt have channels, Id be all for a megaserver, one big place for everyone to explore and adventure togehter, thats an MMO feature! But the combination of the two is just a hollow attempt at trying to hide the fact that developers are cutting corners to make MMO's into the equivilent of a lan Multiplayer game.
I Am not saying by all this, Screw ESO, dont play it because of Channels and MegaServers. Not at all, but with everyone talking about how MMO's are made to make money now adays, where has there been a succssful game that uses either of these two "Features" if I dare to even call them that?
Anyone else turned off by the Mega-Server/Familiar Player channels in ESO and other modern MMO's? Will EQ Next be...well next to don this current market trend??
J-Hun Lookin to Creep Yall!
Comments
And yet it is no different then having separate servers.
All are a form of splitting the community up in such a way to not stress the server infrastructure and all have their own pros and cons.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
I would say it really depends on Cryodill/ how instanced/ how many players per channel.
If a single channel can only hold up to 100 players then you have some serious problems. If its got thousands then that won't be as bad.
But the more I read about this game after their push back the more it sounds like they lost direction and have no idea what they are doing.
I would have to disagree. I feel much more connected to the people on my server they are always there and not in some phantom zone. You start to see the same people and I find nothing more emersion breaking then having to bring up a list of diffrent channels and having to zone into where I just was to find someone:(
Lets stop the madeness and making it easier for these companies at our expense.
Little forum boys with their polished cyber toys: whine whine, boo-hoo, talk talk.
Yes but a Server is a community in itself. One of the biggest draws to playing on a named server is that certain sense of community, your all members of "Feldsper Server" or "Corbantis" or "Earthen Ring", you know people based on the server, you cant have that same experiance if your always in "Channel 26" with all your buddys. It leaves no room for real random encounters with multiple different personalities. Its saying "Heres all the people YOU want to playwith, dont worry about making friends in game, cause you have your own right?" What if you dont have alot of friends in game, then your just going to be playing alone because you wont ever have anyone joining your channel. I dont know why everryone has to be put in there only personal channels away from the general populace with only a small number of random elements.
J-Hun Lookin to Creep Yall!
I think it's often forgotten that certain games or zones are better when the population is thinned out per instance. It's certainly not a black and white subject. The more mysterious the land the less the number of players should be visible IMO. How can you truly offer a feeling of foreboding danger when there are 100 players running around?
Another point of note is; when was the last time you walked into a bustling city in Skyrim? How about Morrowind? Many areas were nothing but some shacks, boats and swamp. What kind of sense would it make to see 100 people standing around dancing on top of mailboxes in such an area?
The PVP areas are a different story, it's a warzone, which means armies fighting each other.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Instancing dungeons is bad enough, instancing entire regions completely kills any sense of being in a virtual world, to me. I'm just not interested in playing that type of morpg.
zzzzzzzzzz I bet you play anyway lol.
There Is Always Hope!
I think one of the problems. Is you make a server and have X amount of land in the game. X amount of land can accommodate Y amount of players. So what do you set the server caps at? Obviously 10,000 players in a zone designed to hold 1,000(just to use some numbers) would cause a lot of issues. Long term, if you cap the server relatively low you run the risk of eventually having zones becoming barren when the smaller player base becomes top heavy and the population lowers.
Now, if you cap the server to accommodate for 10,000 players in a zone with 1,000 in each separate instance. Eventually when the population evens out you're down to 5 instances with 1,000 players each or even 1 with 1,000 players in it. Rather than a singular zone which now only has 100 players because the other players are all on their own separate servers with 100 players in each.
Back in the old days, developers didn't account for these type of things because the genre was so new. EverQuest had tons of servers and has had a lot of mergers over the years. Mergers look bad for a game, and also upsets players as sometimes they don't want their community combined with another's. Even WoW had this problem and had to develop the cross realm play thing to help it out. Again, something that a lot of players didn't like.
In a perfect world, I would rather not have it either. But in reality I understand why it is necessary. A lot of people probably don't even realize EQ2 has this feature because they haven't needed it in a long time. But at launch there were several copies of each zone.
Never said it was all I am saying is they are all forms to lighten the stress of server loads (servers as in mainframe PC). I prefer the server approach but I do not think there's nothing wrong with either having a mega server nor having channels within a server. It's not like you ever interact with everyone at any given time anyway.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
It's is a bit different, take Vanguard which has two servers but each server is a persistent world and has no instancing, you are with every single player on that server all the time.
No channels or instanced copies of the world.
Think about old EQ and how the servers worked.
Which is why im so worried for EQN...
If ESO went this route, theres no doubt i could be possible for EQN as well.
The only reason I have hope that it wont, is because I think SOE has had enough time and research to determine that its a setback in MMORPG gaming, not a movement forward. Also I think Smed and the rest of them are chalking this up too much for it to be a "Lesser WoW".
J-Hun Lookin to Creep Yall!
You know what else is Immersion breaking ? Going afk in order to get a drink or something to eat. Saying something is Immersion Breaking is overused and overrated.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Single server games are actually true MMOs, the multiple server ones are really bastardizing what you could call an MMO. I am not saying what TESO is doing is right or wrong in all other respects but the single server approach is the way to go.
Also who the Hell said a single server fractures the community worse than multiple needs to lay off the absinthe.
Agreed. Actually, one could even call multiple servers the most common form of instancing in MMOs, and we all know what the general consensus here is about instancing and what it does to community.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
i dont know when were channels introduced to mmos but ive been seeing them for many years in mmos. Almost every F2P mmo has channels (all Perfect World Entertainment mmos have channels). And much older mmos as well. Conan was far from the first mmo to include them.
I have to say that until technology becomes good enough to have more than one region (NA / EU?) on the same servers without lag and latency issues i am ok with channels even within a single region. We are already being separated from other regions which means less people already. When that day comes taht tech can handle all that smoothly then yeah, gimmie single server no channel goodness. Meanwhile, keep working on tech advancement.
Just my opinion.
100% agree also with the OP !!!!
I can't take a serious look at this game because of the mega server crap. And to top things off they are ADVERTISING IT AS A FEATURE
- First of all mmorpg.com and mmos are becoming infested with solo players.
- Next your words are perfect, yet 90% of the people here STILL don't understand what your trying to say...This topic comes up every few weeks and people try and twist it around.
- This is the real kicker.....People don't know whats good for them !....The players that are not solo players and the ones that would like a good long lasting mmo that they can call home for months and years don't seem to have a problem when they see mega server !
People like this cant reason out whats wrong, they just stop playing and on to the next. They simply can't figure it out that A COMMUNITY DRIVES A LONG LASTING MMO. It reminds me of credit card users....you know the ones that use them as loans.
Guildwars 2 has a smart server feature.......I belong to a very large Guild, we all logged on the first several weeks, we were all on a voice chat. The guild desperately tried to have guild events, they did everything right. But when you first log in, and several times during play players would be taken to smart holding servers........Needless to say, real mmo people were dumping the game in large chunks, leaving the solo fun fun players behind.
Smart Mega servers my butt.....Well, add Elders Scrolls to the long list of flops. See that list of about a hundred and fifty mmos that everyone jumps around playing, trying to call home ?....well add another one !
You do realize why channels exist right? Since you might not I'll give a few reasons.
1.) Having to many players and not enough creatures/mobs/items to pick up/ect. A very basic issue many MMos suffer when over populated in an area. Having to kill enemies for say a quest, if their aren't any enemies around you can hit, you obviously can't go about killing them. It becomes a game of 'wait for a respawn' which is quite a terrible experience both breaking immersion and adding tedium to it all.
2.) Performance: Server side. MMos involved having lots of people doing many things at the same time. While they are designed for larger louds, there comes a point in games where just so much is going on at once it puts the server in great strain if so many resources are in one place at one time. Having channels mitigates this issue. latency becomes an issue when this happens with so much going on at once. However, this typically is done for the sake of...
3.) Performance: User side. Everyone has a different type of PC they are playing from. Some can support graphics and actions better then others. Channels mitigate having thousands of people cluttering together in one spot, something that can bog down even the greatest systems. This is one of the biggest things that tends to support channels, particularly in games which involve more action, meaning delay through either the system slowing down. Latency which is a server side issue becomes its own issue for the player as all those numberous actions from other players needs to be funneled down onto their system instead.
Channels don't exist as some 'feature' to attract players in. Its not there as some innovation but rather something to mitigate issues not having a channel causes.
Agreed 100%. I am surprised this channel discussion even popped up, I thought everyone already knew why they existed.
Don't get me wrong, I agree it would be great for everyone to be able to play on 1 sever and 1 channel. However, this isn't the old days when games where for a minority of people. Tons of people play games now, and it's impossible to fit them all on 1 server and 1 channel. I think many people here under estimate the amount of players that actually play these games XD.
The funny thing is if the developers listened, you all would instead complain about the lag and wait times on mobs XD. They didn't make the channels for no reason, like so many of you seem to think.
Its a discussion because although yes there are multple benefits for having channels, its at a greater cost for player interaction, which is already considered amajor issue in MMO's, hence the discussion.
How many times have you heard the same thing from recent MMO's, "It plays like a single player game", "Little to no raid or group content", "Playing for hours with purely solo content".
The point is, if your going to make channels, and even further remove the character from a massive community that is now dwarfed into a 50 person instance, stop calling the games MMO's. The name is meaning less and less and becoming more a gimmick because the companies are innovating in all the wrong areas.
The problems you talk about with overcrowding, etc. can be solved in other ways then simply limiting the scope of interaction you can possibly have to only you and your close friends and the occasional passerby.
Im sorry im not trying to seem snyde, I just feel like people dont actually have any sort of logical definition anymore on what constitutes an MMO's core gameplay mechanics.
J-Hun Lookin to Creep Yall!
Agreed. Nothing breaks immersion more than having to take a serious leak in the middle of a quest. Immersion is a crutch people use to say "I'm not going to play this" when there's really no reason.
Are there really people standing talking about what a great feature "channels" are, outside of being a solution for the issues the OP mentioned? I mean, "There are too many people in this area, switch channels" pretty much sums it up, right? To me, that sounds like an ideal solution to the problem. There are many more people per server now, so crowding is an issue. MMORPG pull in double or more the number of people who are going to stick with a game during the first month, so being able to shrink the space used dynamically makes sense too.
Also, the "M" for "Massively" is talking about the massive number of interactions that occur over time because the world is persistent. Not the number of interactions that occur on screen at any given moment. Those on screen interactions, outside of Eve when it turns into a side show, have never been Massive. They've always been limited by the client's abilities and the intensity of the graphics used. Unless we want to use 2.5D graphics similar to UO, that's how it's going to be until the machine hardware catches up to the software.
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