The consequences of server transfers vs merging

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by SenorBeef, Jan 9, 2013.

  1. SenorBeef

    This game requires server merges. There are too many low population servers where the gameplay experience is unsatisfying because of the lack of players. I've been trying to convince them that merges are the answer for a while now.

    They appear to have an alternative plan - to offer server transfer tokens, at some real money cost. Let's examine what will most likely happen with this scenario.

    I play on Genudine, US West. Our server is often "low" population at primetime. You can never find a fight anywhere but Indar, and if you aren't playing between 5-11pm pacific, don't even bother. Even then, you may spend a decent amount of time looking for a fight. The server is already severely underpopulated.

    By contrast, Connery is much busier. It almost never reaches high, but it hits medium earlier and lasts later. I have another character on that server and it's clearly a busier place than Genudine. It's not ideally populated, but it's much easier to find big fights.

    So what's going to happen? Assuming the server transfer token cost is reasonable, myself and tens of thousands of other people from Genudine and Helios are going to transfer over to Connery. After all, size and scale are the main things this game have to offer, and playing on anything less than the most populous server in your region is hurting your gaming experience.

    Now Genudine, already critically low on population, loses a significant fraction for people bailing to Connery. So the gameplay experience for those that remain - either because the SC cost of the token is too high, or they want to stay behind with their friends, or they refuse to pay to transfer out of principle - are now faced with even fewer people to play with. The gameplay situation then becomes even worse, a vicious cycle. A number of people become fed up and finally pay to transfer, other people become fed up and quit. Now Genudine has even less population, which cases more people to transfer or quit. Eventually the server is dead, and Connery has a significant percentage of the population that remained. But not all of it. Because many people would rather quit than pay for the transfer.

    The end result is somewhat similar to a merge. One server is dead, one server has more population. Except you lost a lot of players who will not come back in the process of demanding they pay for what should've been free. And some people will be torn between staying with certain friends, or their outfit, depending on who transfers.

    This is a "cash in" strategy - essentially, someone figured out hey, if we give people the ability to transfer, they'll essentially shift the population themselves but they'll pay us for the priviledge of doing it. And it'll work to a degree - you'll get an influx of cash from people to transfer. However, it ignores the consequences - you will be killing off servers, splitting up groups of friends, and making people quit the game out of disgust and frustration. It's a viable strategy if you want a quick cash injection, but you are doing it at the cost of the long term health of the game as you will alienate many, many players.

    So I ask you to do right by the long term interest of your game and your player base. Just merge the servers. The population shift will happen anyway, but by merging the servers you save people from decisions about whether they have to leave their friends, whether it's worth it to them to pay extra just to be on a non-dead server, etc. If you want this game to last for years, as you say you do, you need to do right by your players and not make them quit. Admit that low population is an issue needing a solution, and then give the fairest solution to the player base.
    • Up x 87
  2. Jeslis

    This, please.
    • Up x 3
  3. SenorBeef

    I should add that, down the road, when the low populaton servers are effectively dead, you will probably at that point admit that the servers are non-viable and merge them anyway. But that will be after a lot of people quit, and many of them won't come back. That's yet another reason to just to the merge now - it will be the ultimate result either way, but merging them now is much less painful and will lose you fewer players.
    • Up x 15
  4. ROOR20

    Merge
    • Up x 6
  5. Revorn

    I guess, much is about the cost for tranfering. If the price is low enough (lets say 2-5 Bucks), not to much ppl will be upsett about....maybe. And bouth sides gets a win.
  6. Kreyzy

    There is a far bigger problem with server transfers to merging (unless its controlled transfers). Besides the fact that low populated servers will have transfers, players from servers with an inbalanced faction population will also transfer. Resulting in a major disaster.

    If the transfers are not controlled (like dedicated servers open to transfer per faction) then you end up with TR transferring to TR heavy servers, Vanu to Vanu heavy etc.

    So please, please, control this transfer option or you will create an even bigger problem.
    • Up x 6
  7. Minsc

    One problem with merging servers is which servers to merge such that you don't get significant population imbalances from something the devs did. People would go ballistic if suddenly VS was 60% of the pop after server merges or that all the fights are now happening at vastly different times. Do I think merging needs to happen? Yeah, but carefully.
  8. SenorBeef

    That's a good point that I failed to consider. For some bizarre reason, people don't like to actually have fair fights in this game - they want to outnumber the other side and spawn camp them. So if you have voluntary transfers, there's always the chance that people will transfer to a server with the highest population of their faction so they can steamroll more, furthering the imbalance. I'm not sure how much this is actually a real concern, but it is another example of a problem that paid transfers creates that merges will solve.
    • Up x 2
  9. Tharrn

    Well, in F2P games companies seem to be worried about *retention* of customers less than *acquisition* of new customers. A fresh player needs to spend a lot more cash in the shop than a veteran usually does. I see the same trend in MMORPGs that have gone F2P from a subscription model. There it's even more obvious.

    The Devs don't have to be happy with it, as that's a management decision...
    • Up x 4
  10. beastmode619

    i think it should be one big server anyways until the game grows and NEEDS more servers... (they just keep the others in hibernation until needed)
    • Up x 4
  11. QuantumMechanic

    Players have been crying for server merges for about a month now - and SOE's response is "purchase a server transfer token in 3 weeks".

    ...

    Not a good move for your customers (and leeches, too. They actually matter in this game), SOE.

    Fortunately for me I made my main on Connery on day one, and the day they allowed different faction characters on the same server I deleted and re-rolled my VS and NC characters on Connery.

    But I'm still stuck with an unplayable server for at least 3 weeks. I usually don't start gaming until 11 or 11:30 PM.. and lately that's when Connery goes from medium to low population.
  12. WUNDER8AR

    good post! needs more attention
  13. BadHabitz

    A server merge would in effect be the same as a free transfer. So they will allow paid transfers first. After a while, once the players on the low population servers who are willing to pay get their chance, that's when they will do a server merge. So the question is whether or not you're willing to pay right away or wait indefinitely until merges happen.
  14. DrBashir

    Agreed

    I play on Helios and I've played way more than i'd care to admit.

    Aside from the first day Indar has remained Uncapped & Neutral. Esamir and Amerish flip to all 3 factions depending on pop surges.

    I would like to see Helios and Genudine merged. Helios pop and gameplay has been rather balanced UNTIL tobususcus' first video. Seananner effect on the NC pop is not as significant as Tobuscus' effect on VS pop. Seananners certainly isn't leading a single thing for the NC on Helios. Connery seems fine.
    NC is getting more organized, the outfits are working together. TDRB / C4T / TLR / CASH (and anyone else I miss)

    VS pop is very high but the mass influx of BR 1 - 10 player getting slaughtered hasn't allowed them to cap indar.

    Terran seems to have abandoned ship with super low pops yet they have the majority of rocket pod farmers all at the tops of server wide leaderboards such as terrex and friends. TR can hold their ground and push back when they get warpgated with low pops.
    • Up x 1
  15. KodiakBlack

    Whilst Merging seems straightforward from a user perspective, and don't get me wrong, whilst my server does ok pop wise I get that a lot of the other servers are suffering and I agree that they should merge, in fact its really not that straightforward from SOEs perspective.

    Servers aren't just running on the devs desktops, they are large pieces of expensive hardware.

    What the player reads -"That's yet another reason to just to the merge now"

    What SOE reads - "That's yet another reason to massively rejig our server setup, potentially invalidating massive amounts of expensive equipment/mess with our contractual server provision arrangements (depending on whether or not they own & run the server hardware themselves or if its third party), redirect a lot of developer man hours to figuring out how to effect the merge from a tech standpoint ( the same Dev hours that could be better used getting us our Goram 3 man buggies), its really not just copy and paste, and in the process start the 'SERVERS MERGING AFTER 2 MONTHS, OMFG, GAME IZ DIE!' news stories and discussions, the last kind of publicity SOE wants"

    I see the game growing into its server capacity over the next year, a view SOE probably shares, and whilst I agree with every point you've made SenorBeef unfortunately I think you may have to lump it in the interim.
    • Up x 2
  16. QuantumMechanic

    Yeah I've noticed this too. And what bothered me was that SOE went live with PS2 on Steam from day 1. That's an ace that they should have kept up their sleeve and waited until the game was... more well-rounded.

    Being on the front page of Steam every day for a week will net you a ton of players. It's possibly the biggest marketing impact you can have - you are preaching to the choir - advertising to gamers who LOVE free **** to play. It's not like putting up a TV ad or even a youtube ad where most viewers don't give a ****e.
  17. SenorBeef

    I understand what you're saying, but even by their own low/med/high/very high system, the highest servers generally never exceed medium - rarely they will get into high. This suggests to me that they know how much their servers can take, but their current populaton distribution doesn't even come near it. There's plenty of room for merging because most servers aren't even half full, by their own standards, in primetime.
  18. QuantumMechanic

    But SOE does MMOs. That's all they do. And every single MMO has a lifecycle, and server merges are *always* a part of that.

    To think that SOE built Planetside 2 without supporting server transfers and merges in mind to me is bonkers. They simply aren't that dumb.

    Edit: case in point, character names. Planetside 1 was not actually prepared for the inevitable server merges. Character names were unique per server, not unique across ALL servers. So when the servers eventually merged, they actually modified characters names and appended "-E" for east or "-W" for west to them.

    In Planetside 2, characters names are unique across all servers. So the problem that happened above won't be an issue with server transfers or merges in PS2.
  19. KodiakBlack

    I dont think its a question of they know their servers can handle y number of players but they know their only getting x/y.
    Its that they have probably signed contracts/bought hardware to support however many servers and merging servers represents hardware capacity being shut down and stored/sold only to be re-bought & set up as the game demand picks up, I bet pennys to pounds they've done the maths and figure its cheaper just to leave the setup as it is and let the playerbase grow into it if at all possible.
  20. LordMondando

    This in my humble opinion is one of the stupidest mistakes there making, I can see why their doing it (Obviously there is some effort in moving characters from server to server) but none the less with the state of the player base as it is. Maintaining a 'critical mass' of players on most servers is now becoming a critical problem.

    However the one thing that makes me question the actual 'difficulty' of this is two factors.

    1) you can have people in your friends list in other servers
    2) each game name is unique to the entire game space not simply a server.

    Characters should, unfortunately for them at their cost. Be completely transferable across servers. Problem is magically solved. Also then turns empty servers in space capacity.