Feedback/Questions: MegaServer

#233 - April 2, 2014, 10:14 a.m.

Just want to quickly add for those who missed it, we’ll be covering the answers to the bulk of the questions in this thread in the blogs over the next two days after today.

We’ll also continue to monitor and adapt the megaserver system once it’s fully enabled to ensure it provides the best experience possible, so once you’ve seen it in action please make sure to leave comments, feedback, and suggestions as always!

#377 - April 2, 2014, 1:08 p.m.

Hi everyone!

First of all, thank you for your overwhelming involvement in commenting this feature. It has been very exciting for me to work on, and I am glad and proud that this excitement is shared by a lot of you!

As Colin mentioned, a lot of your concerns are to be addressed in the upcoming blog posts. I also wanted to answer some of the questions that I’ve seen on this thread.

How does the system know which language I want to use?
The system uses the language spoken in your home world (or your guested world, if you’re guesting). It doesn’t use the language of your client. It is done this way so there is no conflict of priorities between the home world and the language in the algorithm (as both are always aligned), and because in my mind, when you’ve picked your home world, you’ve picked the community you want to play with. And while you may want to set your client to a different language (because you’re better at it, or because you want to learn it), you still want to play with people from that community.

Will this system breaks existing communities?
The whole goal of this new system is to enhance the in-game social environment. We completely get that the community of your home world is important to you, and this is why MegaServers takes that into account. But I also think that with this tool, we can go further. While home world communities are important, they are also very abstract. Choosing which home world to pick is a difficult task, even more difficult when you’re playing the game for the first time, because more often than not, you don’t know what the differences are between each of those worlds. Also, home worlds communities can be quite unbalanced, population wise.

With MegaServers, the idea is to start taking into account more meaningful data to create communities. People you’re playing with, people sharing your interests or your goals, … We want to try to create this “town-like” feeling, in which while there are a lot of different people, you are also encountering the same ones frequently enough to be able to establish meaningful relationships.

This is one of the long term goals for this new system. On April 15th, we’re introducing the core elements that makes it possible, and in this configuration, the home world you’ve picked is very important. And for the other informal communities, we will monitor and adapt the system accordingly.

Once again, thank you for your comments, questions and involvement in this process! I’ll keep an eye on this thread as much as my tight schedule allows me to.
— Samuel Loretan

#509 - April 2, 2014, 4:41 p.m.

village idiot.1436:

I see from the blog the implications the mega server has for event timers has yet to be addressed.

We will be addressing this in part 2/3. Sorry for the delay, I’m guessing it was decided that each portion of this announcement was big enough to deserve it’s own news day. Given the volume of posts in this thread, it might be for the best.

#547 - April 2, 2014, 7:22 p.m.

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

Community isn’t just guild/friend list. Community is essentially everyone on your server, and that is being messed with.

One of the most exciting aspects of the new system is that it gets you playing with members of your home server more often.

#583 - April 2, 2014, 9:23 p.m.

A few more important points to be made here:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.
• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.
• If your world has a very low concurrency on a given map, we can put you and everyone else from your server into a map with a more comfortable number of players. The key term here is “comfortable.” There’s breathing room. Megaserver is not overflow in reverse.
• It’s very difficult to understand this situation if you’re not willing to look at the big picture. Similarly, you can’t really explain urban traffic by using a metaphor about seats at a dinner table. Server populations are big and they are not concrete. Players flow in and out all of the time, even when it seems like a map is completely full. The major change in the way the game is handling population is that it’s making better-informed decisions about where to direct you. If only my GPS did that.
• As the blog post mentions, we’ll be monitoring this very closely to make sure that the end result is positive.

Thanks for all your feedback. I look forward to tomorrow’s blog post and answering more of your questions.

#2000 - May 29, 2014, 11:14 a.m.

Hello all,

Just a quick note to let you know that we still have a dedicated team working on improving the megaserver issues.