Dec 27 2008
Managing Your Game Population
MMOs are all about community and playing with (or around) other players. This means population management is vitally important. If the game is too crowded, because get sick of not being able to do things. If the game is too empty, the game is no fun because they cannot find people to play with, group with, team with, or compete against. This is an extremely delicate balancing act. This was hard enough in the old days of MUDs when everyone played on the same server. Then, the only thing you had to worry about was spreading people too thin around the world. But now, with the exception of a small handful of games, all MMOs have tons of servers. Companies that run multi-server (or multi-shard) MMOs have that issue to deal with on top of the matter of figuring out ways to keep players geographically close to each other inside the game.
Geographical Population
This is the type of population problem MUDs and one-shared MMOs deal with. They need to make sure the do not design their game universe in a manner that spreads people out too much. On Threshold, I accomplished this by only having ONE major city with shopkeepers, training halls, and a tavern. As a result, everyone naturally concentrated in a single place between adventures. It was not until the game had grown significantly that I added another major city with shops and taverns.
Server Population
This is a new problem that modern, large MMOs have to deal with. This is a particularly serious problem because most graphical MMOs these days waste so much of their content. The overwhelming majority of their world is total throw away. People blaze through entire zones in an hour or two and will never visit it again. With content being consumed so fast, it needs to be readily available to a lot of people. Thus, a server cannot support more than a few hundred players (or a few thousand tops) all playing at the same time.
This is a particularly serious issue for PvP related games. If you do not have other players to fight against, this entire type of content is rendered moot. This is one of the issues Warhammer Online is currently struggling with. They released with too many servers, they are drastically in need of consolidation, but they don’t do it because they are too afraid of the PR hit from server merger. In the meantime, their players (and subscriptions) suffer.
Your Experiences with Popluation Issues
So as I so like to do, I leave you players (and devs) reading this with a question. What type of population issues have you experienced in games? What have the developers done to solve the problems, and were they successful?
I think that there is two forces that are at odds here. First, there’s the network effect. More people interacting with each other means a lot more opportunities. But there’s also the increased performance demands that suggest that spreading the population around is the most sustainable solution.
WoW is balancing between the two. The lack of auction houses in “secondary” capital cities meant that Ironforge and Orgrimmar were packed to the brim with people, and loading lag combined with timeouts prevented people with low-end computers from even logging on. In addition, PvP in Hillsbrad was a lagfest at best, and could even cause server timeouts. The solution to both of those problems was decentralization: Battlegrounds were introduced to divide the PvPing population into manageable chunks, and auction houses were introduced in all capital cities. The latter worked quite well on Horde side, especially when revamped Silithus provided ample traffic to Thunder Bluff and Quel’Danas provided traffic to Silvermoon.
The battlegrounds were less of a success at first. While fighting people on your realm did inspire some camadadrie and even friendly rivalries, not all servers had the population (or the population balance) to form new battleground instances at a steady rate. When Blizzard fixed this, the camadaderie was lost. Because you were unlikely to see your comrades-in-arms (or enemies) ever again, antisocial behavior raised it’s ugly head. But at least you got into a battle in a predictable time.
Blizzard also went to the other direction with the introduction of Shattrath City, Dalaran and Lake Wintergrasp. Now the server hardware could handle centralized locations, but personally I felt that Shattrath was a bit too spacious, and Dalaran is a bit too crowded, with narrow streets and even-larger mounts. I haven’t been to Wintergrasp, so I don’t know whether it could handle a certain percentage of the server population showing up all at once.
EvE has taken a slightly different approach. The shardless design and the distribution of valuable resources and mission agents (read: questgivers) ensures that the population is somewhat evenly spread out around the galaxy.. most of the time. Jita, the #1 market hub is running on a dedicated server, but because items need to be physically transported, secondary and tertiary market hubs have emerged, providing ample opportunities for traders such as myself. In the more traditional PvP side, there are several ongoing hotspots around the galaxy, large player alliances can reserve dedicated servers for large-scale (1000+) fleet engagements. So far, so good.
Blizzard probably did the most experiments with geographical population related measures. Silvermoon City was build to have two major hubs of interest, two banks and 1 or 2 auction houses. There was also a tavern where you could pass through between the two plaza. They mentioned this idea of player “flow” through cities in their TBC promotion while introducing Silvermoon. Ironforge is the other extreme, AH, Bank, Mail in one spot - all players crowded there and near the battlemaster or the portal. Shattrath and Dalaran have Alliance/Horde and Aldor/Scryer Tiers, but ultimately all then meet in the middle near the questgivers, and both banks are very close to each other. So why all the fuss about the design of Silvermoon, it became abandoned the moment the new blood elf players levelled out of the low level content. So they went on to crowd Orgrimmar and Undercity just as if the city did not exist at all…^^
WoW can now manage such a mass of players better than ever, but the player needs a better system, too: My old 1 GB laptop had disconnections and huge fps decrease and lags in Dalaran. My new one should handle it much better, but I quit and deinstalled WotlK, so I cannot test it.
As Alliance player getting to the Dark Portal to get back to Outland was so much easier than with a Horde char, I think they should have worked on this.
But WoW’s MAJOR geo pop issue is that 98% of the old content in WoW becomes totally meaningless. And it cannot be improved by fancy city layouts! They need to get rid of the levels and zones concept, but unfortunately this game is build on the levelquest principle of Everquest. This leads to the funny fact that each expansion makes your gaming world smaller. Solution: There is NONE, only bandaids. It is a flaw of the system!
Server population:
WoW has almost empty, 95% to 5% faction ratio, very few balanced medium size servers and some overcrowded and balanced servers. I played on Frostwolf-EU, German server. Together with Azshara the german #1/#2 pop server, often 30-60 minutes till you can log in. But these servers are brimming with life. And people do not kill on sight there, TBC and WOTLK basically always had an unspoken non-aggression agreement between Horde and Alliance. On Taerar, heavily dominated by the Horde, my alliance char could level without seeing another player for hours. But if I met one, it always ended in combat, even high levels could not resist to kill the “rare alliance player”…^^ Other players noticed the same pattern on Azshara as on Frostwolf, and on low pop servers usually the same as on Taerar. Very interesting!
New servers are meant to provide people a “pioneer” experience, a fresh new world to explore. Sadly, most of them die quickly and become just one more ghost server. I think people like them if they are miners or herbalists, hardly anyone there stealing your nodes…^^
Offering free server transfers to the ghost servers does not help: I know a lot of people who then had to pay the fee to come back or transfer to a medium sized server… especially if you are used to full party search windows, full auction houses and stuff like that, the new and low pop servers will disappoint people. Besides that levelling has become a lonely experience even on high pop servers nowadays. In fact people speak of levelling through old content quickly to get to the “real game”. Another flaw of the system that can hardly be fixed at all.
GUILD WARS… makes extensive use of instances/sharding. EVE is actually not different despite claiming to be one server for 32.000+ players, the “instances” are just different planetary systems. Guild Wars 2 is going to offer larger instances that are more open for people to join, and different “worlds” that can fight against each other. You will be able to travel between worlds and instances.
The server population issue is not given in this system, as long as the game has enough players in general. OK, there are major hubs, asia, europe and america, but more because of ping/connection issues than max server capacity issues. The larger instances of GW2 are meant to remedy a problem: Outposts are ghost towns, the major cities always filled to the max number of players in an instance. It is hard to meet people in GW, especially outside the city in your very own instance it is impossible. GW2 seems to try to solve this problem with “large” instances that people can join. Dungeons still seem to be party-instanced, as in WoW. Age of Conan already presents a bit more open instance system than GW. The whole world is in fact instanced, too, they just never mentioned it explicitly to the public.
WoW is limited by server architecture and the game mechanics of “levelquest” style games in general. GW does not have these limitations, but suffers from the limitations of extreme sharding/instancing. EVE is basically heavily instanced, too, but does so in a very elegant way. The key is that other players can join the instance/solar system anytime, but try to do the same in a connected fantasy world…
I think the MMO of the future will feature instancing, but very open instances that can easily be accessed by anyone. Let’s see if Guild Wars 2 manages to do that and be a good game besides that as well.
I am really enjoying these comments.
Longasc: You are so right that WoW basically makes 98% of their game world obsolete, and each expansion doesn’t truly grow the world at all. They make as much space obsolete as they add to the game. It is definitely a broken system that they maintain by simply continually pushing things forward.
Instancing is nice, but not when overdone. Too many developers are looking at instancing as the solution to population issues when it can create its own problems of ghost zones and an empty feeling world.