Server Merger Needed to Sustain Playerbase

[Saborwrath1]

The gist of this post is that Torchbearer and Excelsior and should be merged or at least thought about in the coming months.

The meat is I am an old CoX gamer much like yourselves and I can tell you that Solo'ing is not for me. Waiting and broadcasting for a team is tedious and loses players, while recruitment will likely not happen unless some youtube persona takes interest, we can boost available teams using simple maths. 

Currently, even on the weekend, Excelsior tops out near 800 to 900 players. Some saturdays see it in the low 700s. This means basically there can only be 112, 8 man teams. or 180 effective 5 man teams.
The problem is this pool is randomly split across archetypes so you could have a tanker pool under 50 players, and honestly all this low population discourages soft support characters that cant solo easily.

Ive seen this game die once. Id rather not lose it a second time. Merging these servers would put the weekday pop back over 700, and the weekend pop towards 1100. This is game saving. Thats a player pool i can pick a team out of at any given time. Because I and i know most others love the social aspect of this game. It would be a shame to lose it due to a disjointed population.



 

[Frostbiter]

Server transfers are free, just pointing that out. What we really need is a poll to gauge community interest though.

[NNDeepdish]

The servers are paid for by the donations and there has been no issue meeting the donation goals within hours of them being opened. Way too early for these "sky is falling" freakouts.

You can transfer to whatever server you want. Some people like low pop servers.

 

If the donation goals start struggling, let's freak out about it then.

[Solarverse]

6 minutes ago, NNDeepdish said:

If the donation goals start struggling...

Which they won't...carry on.  😉

[Ukase]

I'm by no means a historian, but I thought the whole reason of adding the extra servers was because with all those players, the zones were having a lot of lag, and in some cases, causing crashes of not only players, but the servers themselves. 


But - you bring up the social aspect. I thought I was teaming less because I was soloing more, not that I was soloing more because I was teaming less. I completely agree with you on the overall disappointment in having to wait to form a team or a league.  I just don't think merging servers is necessary. At least, not at this time. 

[DougGraves]

I would like to see the player base consolidate on one server.  While the idea of voluntary migration is nice, it probably is not practical.  Unless everyone you know plans on migrating, it is painful to migrate yourself.  So while there is no cost, there is a high social barrier to switching servers.

 

But it would have to be a popular thing, not just fiat.

[Lines]

There's the issue of character names, of course.

[Ukase]

Yeah, I moved a character to indom for A DAY for some pvp. When I t'fer'd my character back - someone took my name! 

[Apparition]

Yeah.  Server merges would not go over well at all.  Names would be taken, and I'm sure you'd lose some people due to losing their character name.

 

In fact, IIRC, a Homecoming developer said that server merges would never happen due to this reason.

[Shred Monkey]

I don't think the sky is falling, but I do understand the OP's desire to play on a highly populated server.  It's just more fun.  I would encourage anyone else who feels this way to move to Excelsior as it currently has the highest population already.

[Rathulfr]

9 minutes ago, Ukase said:

Yeah, I moved a character to indom for A DAY for some pvp. When I t'fer'd my character back - someone took my name! 

Which is why I always secure my character names on both the source and destination servers before and after transfers by using a couple of the free renames and disposable placeholder toons.

[Bill Z Bubba]

I'm teaming more now that I ever did on live. Also playing a lot more squishies than I ever did before. My uptick in teaming has nothing to do with the player population but is entirely because of the small group of people that I found myself teaming with.

 

Small... as in less than 10 players.

 

As others have stated, no server mergers unless it becomes financially necessary. There's only 5 shards for fark's sake.

[Apparition]

53 minutes ago, Saborwrath1 said:

The gist of this post is that Torchbearer and Excelsior and should be merged or at least thought about in the coming months.

The meat is I am an old CoX gamer much like yourselves and I can tell you that Solo'ing is not for me. Waiting and broadcasting for a team is tedious and loses players, while recruitment will likely not happen unless some youtube persona takes interest, we can boost available teams using simple maths. 

Currently, even on the weekend, Excelsior tops out near 800 to 900 players. Some saturdays see it in the low 700s. This means basically there can only be 112, 8 man teams. or 180 effective 5 man teams.
The problem is this pool is randomly split across archetypes so you could have a tanker pool under 50 players, and honestly all this low population discourages soft support characters that cant solo easily.

Ive seen this game die once. Id rather not lose it a second time. Merging these servers would put the weekday pop back over 700, and the weekend pop towards 1100. This is game saving. Thats a player pool i can pick a team out of at any given time. Because I and i know most others love the social aspect of this game. It would be a shame to lose it due to a disjointed population.



 

 

Honestly, 800 players on the weekend simultaneously for a sixteen year-old MMOG is pretty good.  I mean, it'd be nice if that number was tripled or quadrupled, but that's not at all realistic.  City of Heroes will never get the numbers it had fifteen years ago, nevertheless Fortnite player numbers.

[Carnifax]

Even on Reunion its rare that I'm left hanging for a team. And I tend towards supports.

 

Did a Everlasting team during the week at 11am (which is what, 3am / 4am) on my defender in Croatoa which was intended as a "maybe ill get one blaster or scrapper to buff" which turned into an 8 man in minutes by accident.

 

So I dont really see the need for this. If Reunion is quiet I try everlasting. If there's really nothing happening I'll maybe solo a brute or scrapper.

 

Edit : and id be madly annoyed if Reunion got merged and I lost the Carnifax name. Had it on live and as my global (boo to whomever took it on Everlasting)

Edited January 15, 2020 by Carnifax

[Rathulfr]

Historically, Excelsior and Everlasting usually jostle with each other for the highest pops, while Torchbearer and Indomitable battle for the basement.  So I'd prefer to see Excelsior (1st) merged with Indomitable (4th), and Everlasting (2nd) with Torchbearer (3rd).  That should split the NA pop evenly between two shards.

 

That doesn't address the character name issue, though.  That's still going to be an extremely tough nut to crack, and painful for everyone involved.

 

[Apparition]

1 minute ago, Rathulfr said:

Historically, Excelsior and Everlasting usually jostle with each other for the highest pops, while Torchbearer and Indomitable battle for the basement.  So I'd prefer to see Excelsior (1st) merged with Indomitable (4th), and Everlasting (2nd) with Torchbearer (3rd).  That should split the NA pop evenly between two shards.

 

That doesn't address the character name issue, though.  That's still going to be an extremely tough nut to crack, and painful for everyone involved.

 

 

Yep.  I know that if I were to lose my name, I'd probably just leave.

[Sovera]

As an European in Everlasting sometimes getting a team can be annoying. I'd love for the LFG tool to work so I can just AFK waiting for it instead of spamming the chat every two minutes.

 

Not, not, not, not cross server LFG. I loved the faster queues and not having to spam the chat for 30-40 minutes to get a team back in TBC of WoW, but it took returning to CoH these past months to rediscover the small pleasures of playing with the same people and recognizing names, and being recognized! Cross server is good for anonymous speed play, but not here.

[Rathulfr]

1 minute ago, Apparition said:

 

Yep.  I know that if I were to lose my name, I'd probably just leave.

While I wouldn't necessarily leave, I would be sorely put out.  It's why I have a level 50 "Rathstar" on all 4 servers. 

[Carnifax]

I would love a "public teams" mechanism though where teams could flag themselves as lfg and you could just join it.

[Number Six]

36 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

As others have stated, no server mergers unless it becomes financially necessary. There's only 5 shards for fark's sake.

Even that is unlikely, because as I've pointed out more than once when these conversations come up, our servers don't work that way. Shards are cheap. The map cluster that accounts for the majority of the cost serves all of them (except Reunion) and can be scaled up and down independently to fit the overall number of players across all shards.

 

That's how the game was designed to be run and why Paragon never seriously entertained the idea, because it would not have been necessary to do that to reduce expenses.

[Haijinx]

Wait .. 100 x 8 person teams is a dire situation? 

 

 

[Snarky]

Uh. I started on Liberty back on live. I did not even realize it was a dead server.  Redside to boot

 

i migrated to Freedumb and was invited to a neat community on Virtue named Brickhouse

 

i abandoned a huge base i had been working 6 months to build on Liberty

 

i spent a year on Freedumb. i left a smaller base there

 

look. Server transfers are free. If you dont like where you are i suggest you look at may e Everlasting

 

my main complaint about Everlasting is when i see a post for a team or TF if i dont jump FAST i will miss getting a spot!  Should the Devs step in and put in a mechanic to split pooulations or slow team building?  Or do we just figure out how to make it work?  (When i start badging in earnest i may even have to lead teams.  Grrrr)
 

 

[Scarlet Shocker]

Back in the day, before the EU and NA communities were married together, there was a continual cry on the EU forums of "Merge teh servers", specifically Union and Defiant.

 

It was claimed by these posters that the server populations were too small to be sustainable, and that failing to merge them would cause the Dooooooooooooooooom(tm) for the game. This continued despite reasonable responses from official community leads.

 

Then of course the two communities became as one and much cross fertilization happened (sometimes in real life, I'm led to believe but that's a different story) and that argument went rather quiet those who felt they needed to find higher populations moved to places where they had more "Freedom" and could find Virtuous lesbian cat gurls etc.

 

But apparently, it turned out that the numbers for Union and Defiant had not been far behind either of the two main servers all along. Sometimes, Union even became the most populous in terms of concurrent numbers.

 

What was noticeable was that those who seemed to want servers to merge at that time seemed very reluctant to take part in community events and efforts. That in turn prompted me to suspect that the issue isn't server population, but how players engage with said population. I haven't ever felt it to be too difficult to find a team even on "slow" days.

 

The one caveat I'd make with that is the criteria for the magic dots that say how busy a server is seems to be slightly confusing and it would generally be better just to have an "on" or "off" setting and in emergencies a "very high load" but those are very much first world problems.

[WanderingAries]

3 hours ago, Lines said:

There's the issue of character names, of course.

Character, SGs, Bases, oh my

[Myrmidon]

I find PUGs like running water on Excelsior, so no issues on that front.