The popularity of Aradune and the sheer amount of players was obviously unexpected. I have (in my opinion) one of the best suggestions for a solution for the queue times. Sure, it will cost a bit of money, but the owners of the game have to be losing both money and players due to the absurdly long queue times so this would actually generate income in the long run. 1. Create another TLP server with the Truebox rule set. Same as Aradune. 2. Offer free complete transfers to this new server. Possibly even provide a small incentive to transfer. You may find entire guilds may move. 3. You can then stop the transfer offer once balance has been achieved. This should effectively cut the population roughly in half and should greatly reduce queue times.. if not eliminate them. You would then have a much more happy player base!
Might work, but it seems DPG can't even get one server right...I don't think they could get a 2nd server up and running competenty .....yep I have that much faith in them and their abilities
It can't be that hard to spin one up. They must have a copy/clone of an initial server set. After all, it is what they would have had to use in the first place to start Aradune. If they use anything virtual such as VMWare/Hyper-V then it should be even more simple.
Lemme stop you right here. Cause this is where you are wrong. They ain't losing money. They are making it hand over fist right now. They have all the numbers. If the expense was worth what they'd gain, it'd already be done. So its either not feasible to do, or not cost efficient. But you are out of your mind if you dont think kronos sales are through the roof right now. $$$
I respectfully disagree. I think that is possibly a bit shortsighted. Sure, they are making money right now, but there are many who are very serious about quitting and stopping subscription due to this issue. The numbers could easily rapidly grow if the problem continues. So I stand by my statement, but probably should have worded it that they will lose money if this continues. The problem will eventually resolve itself by enough players quitting.. and thereby reducing the population. But is that the way that DPG wants to resolve the issue? Losing customers should never be the strategy to resolving any issue!
Yes. Exactly. From a player PoV another server is a great idea. From a business PoV where they want to make money they have to look at all sides. If it made sense financially it would have been done already.
Again, if that is the way they are looking at it.. in my humble it's the wrong way to view it. It's shortsighted. As a business, you should always strike when the iron is hot. If you have people wanting to play and are willing to pay for it, you make sure that they can play. If they can't play, they will leave. You can always combine the two servers together later if the population subsides. But make sure you can accommodate the players that are here today. Don't lose them.
Let's say there is 200 people in the queue at any given time. 200 * 15 = $3000. If a new server costs $4000/month is that still short sighted to not open it? Do you have a reasonable expectation that by NOT having a queue that more than the 200 will then come play? There must be some magical cut off where its viable, I have no idea where it is, only DBG does.
Yes I understand what you are saying, but you act like they dont have people who's job it is to think of stuff like that. They have a financial department with all the numbers. They know what is financially feasible etc. If they thought it would make them more money in the long run, it would already be done. But they know no matter how poorly these start, people will show up for the next one. They have been for newr 10 years now. And all of that assumes its feasible in the first place. Just because they'd like to, doesnt mean they can with their allocated budget. They are a tiny fraction of a much larger company, higher ups have to approve funds towards things like that, and the person making those decisions probably doesnt even know what EQ is. To him it's just some 20yr old game making them .2% of their profit, asking for a bigger budget.
I totally agree with you. But the number has to be far greater than 200 - Heck, you could easily have more than 200 in instances of Unrest or LGuk alone. I work for one of the major providers of Cloud services and the servers needed to run EQ can't be all that demanding by today's standards.. but yes. It probably isn't cheap. But the loss of loyal customers is a big deal. They are not easy to come by.. and they may never come back. It's unfortunate, but a lot of software companies have management that at times can actually see customer service and/or support as a loss. I have been in the customer service/support side of the business for a very long time and I see the results that are not obvious. You may be right.. and I don't know the numbers either. But if the numbers are even close, the intangibles that good customer service brings should be considered. And considering how precious customers are with all the competition out there.. it would be foolish not to consider it.
I have provided support and consulting for a lot of Fortune 500 companies for over 25 years, and you might be surprised how much actually doesn't get thought of. You would think that it does, and maybe it has. But nothing wrong with a suggestion. Sure, I don't have all the facts and numbers.. and maybe it isn't feasible. The reasons would never get explained anyway. Especially if the reasons are not good ones! *chuckle*
Worst idea ever to add another TLP. DPG knows the TLP player base has 0 loyalty to the game and bails in a couple months.
Even P99 was able do this with the launch of the new Green server. They made another server Teal and allowed transfers for a period of time. Once the population numbers came down to a reasonable number they merged the 2 back into Green. This all form people that DO NOT charge a sub fee to play on.
200 was just a random number that was large enough to potentially be the total amount in the queue (would be about 5% of total server pop is max cap is 4k). By the forum posts it's likely more than 10 but if the queue was 1000 people large I'm guessing we'd have a 2nd server by now. Yes, losing loyal customers is detrimental long term but when upper management (the management that over sees more than just a game and are likely not involved in the game in any way) looks at a yearly subscription graph or server capacity graph and see that Mangler was the busiest server last year and Aradune is even busier they probably don't think they are losing anyone, the numbers just keep going up!
Did you read any of the replies in this thread? Yes it would work, but is it a viable decision financially? Would appear that the answer is no, ergo, it won't work (for DBG).
I just have to disagree. This just is not how the industry functions. There are no loyal customers to such a business like DPG. A subsidiary of a sister company of a section of a larger corporation of a larger corporation. EQ is just a number in a boardroom that gets maybe 7 seconds of mention before moving on. You have some good mom and pop shop advice I must admit. But DPG and past iterations of it haven't had this idea about players in a very very very long time (if ever tbh). Tweakfour17 mentions it above...the powers that be just see numbers trending up or down.
Building a server can be expensive. Especially if using intel hardware, ryzen hardware can cut that cost by a lot. Renting a server to host is pretty inexpensive. For example: Ark Survival Evolved. 250 player servers rent for 75$/month.
If only they had done exactly this on the server that required the queue to be created in the first place. If only there was some concrete, exact case of this happening that we could point to as an example of why this is a terrible idea that will not work, even a little. If only we could know that for certain by having done it before.
Ya all obviously didn’t see the problems LJ and RF had once the server populations died off. We had similar login problems until they spawned LJ. In theory, if people pay for subs and you’re at 140% of capacity on this server, you’re still making money off that 140% irrelevant if they can access the server or not. The only real equation changer is in potential Krono sales that are redirects from the in game link and the volume of hits / sales KRI on the Krono page itself. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the slow response is partially aligned to let Krono armies use up some of their inventory. I mean... ya gotta have the folks buying Krono to trade for the things your army farms or you’ll eventually run out of subscription time, hit critical mass and the box army accounts expire. I mean... there aren’t many lifetime F2P accounts left after the last cleanup they did... Or, they could legitimately have internal issues and let go of the folks who knew how to fix them...
