Server population

[Benihina]

Hello Devs,

Do you have any plans for improvement of the 3 lowers populated servers in a near future?

DDO has been for the most part an online Single Playing Game. There are simply too few players on about half of YOUR servers and its a deception to call the game and ONLINE game!

Since the servers are YOURS, then its naturally YOUR responsibility to improve them and make them thriveable for your playerbase.
Do you have any solutions to offer the players based in the least populated servers to be able to thrive and enojy the game as it was intended : an MMO?

DDO has been long a semi online game, and for the last year it can barely be qualified as an MMO.

Are you going to keep being silent on the matter and will you insist on not doing anything about the servers and population issue?

 

[Jummby]

Hello Devs,

Do you have any plans for improvement of the 3 lowers populated servers in a near future?

DDO has been for the most part an online Single Playing Game. There are simply too few players on about half of YOUR servers and its a deception to call the game and ONLINE game!

Since the servers are YOURS, then its naturally YOUR responsibility to improve them and make them thriveable for your playerbase.
Do you have any solutions to offer the players based in the least populated servers to be able to thrive and enojy the game as it was intended : an MMO?

DDO has been long a semi online game, and for the last year it can barely be qualified as an MMO.

Are you going to keep being silent on the matter and will you insist on not doing anything about the servers and population issue?

This gets kicked.around alot. People ask this all the time and they never answer questions on this matter.

 

[Wizard]

They should also do something for more group friendliness.

It's a MMO not an single player game, so there should never be a situation where you'd see a LFM and go "no I won't join this because":

- it's a repeat for me, not enough xp
- I'm not flagged
- It's too far and there are no teleports
- I'm just 1 level too high and gimp everyone's xp or I'm just 1 level too low and get quite a big xp reduction (latter is heroics only, thankfully)
- I solo because potentially waiting for people makes me lose xp (group xp bonus should always outweigh this except for rare super long afk cases)

 

[Titus Ovid]

Semi online game? Are you talking about downtimes ?

Or do you mean there is no Massive in this game anymore? Because to my knowledge there never was.
Orien was one of the smallest servers for a long time, now it is the biggest. Everything has pros and cons.

The pros for a small server are the familiarity and hopefully the camaraderie and support you get by simply knowing everyone. But the secret is you need to be connected, have a wide network. To be connected in this game is not easy with only online features. But one thing is an active global online chat. You can achieve that with a user channel for all players on your server and engage it, invite people, make it known and actually chat there. You won't be able to pull that off alone.
Discord helps, too. Same guidelines apply.

Why do I tell you this?
Because I doubt SSG will do anything of the sorts you wish for. The Orien/Sarlona immigration was a fix to a screw-up with foreseeable consequences and SSG still screwed it up. So on the one side I doubt they will do something like this again on the other side you don't want them to do something like this again because the chance they screw it up is way too high.

Cheers,
Titus

 

[AMess]

I moved from Khyber to Orien and I'll echo Titus' tradeoff comments. Khyber was great in the earlier days of DDO, but when I moved it had become rather vacant.

Taking a look at: https://www.ddoaudit.com/servers you can see the top two servers are Orien and Argo....I can for sure state that Orien gets very laggy during predictable times during the week. Though Orien nearly always has LFMs...it's still a multi-player game there! Judging from the forums, we hear some complaints about lag from Argo, but less so than Orien. So, my back-of-the-napkin math leads me to believe the ideal server population is somewhere at or just slightly below Argo.

Given my napkin math, we'd probably need to carve up some of the smaller population servers and equally divide them up into fewer larger servers. Here's the issue, let's say you are on a smaller server and you like the folks you run with...in any type of divide and rebuild scenario you may need to split friends into separate servers...which would not be good. DDO could ask folks if they are willing to be moved and consolidate the servers in this way, but some folks would be forced to move against their will. Plus, consider DDO sells it's players server moves (which has costs beyond dollars, like Monster Manual/Pets/etc)...the summary is, any server consolidation will likely make some folks angry and remove a revenue source....as a player, I'm in, move me to any Argo sized server and I don't care which.

A feasible solution could be to allow anyone from one of the bottom 5 serves move to Ghallanda or Thelanis for free until one of them approached 14.6% of total population. This could continue until the other hit 14.6%. Then the last free move would be from least populated server to highest among the least populated...meaning, if you're in a low population server you can always move up for free. (it's probably smart business move). And perhaps at some point you could entirely merge very small servers into one without splitting friends.