Dear SOE...Population

Every MMO thinks it's going to be the new WoW, with exponential growth and massive popularity. I've seen this cycle over and over again. They think "hey, we should be ready with a whole lot of servers, because no doubt we're going to be overloaded with new players!" And especially a F2P game, lots of people will give it a try, there will be an initial surge of interest.

Then those who run the games see this initial surge, and think that they can project this growth trend as constant going forward, and open a whole lot of servers. But as is natural for all games, people decide it's not for them and the population falls off. The game launch attracts a lot of new people, and then the torrent of new players slows down. It's only natural. WoW is pretty much a unique phoenominon which no one has managed to replicate in terms of growth, and yet everyone seems to believe they're going to have WoW-like levels of continual growth. They won't.

So then now they have a large number of servers, just ready for those millions of players to flood in. And they don't. So the server population density becomes too low. Servers become ghost towns. So what do they do? Merge servers? No. Merging servers would be admitting your game isn't the next WoW, and you wouldn't want your investors thinking your game isn't just around the corner from being a wild success. So they sturbbornly refuse to merge.

What makes your game truly great and unique? It's the scale. The massive battles. The fact that you can go anywhere in the world and find a battle going on. It's amazing. This main trait of your game completely relies on population density. You need so many players per server, so many players per continent for this epic scale to happen. This game is especially vulnerable - if people feel that it's a ghost town, most of the appeal of this game is gone.

So what happens to most MMOs? It's a vicious cycle. Some people start seeing that there aren't enough people to play with, and get bored, and leave. Which leaves even fewer people to play with, so other players also get bored and leave, until everything turns into a ghost town. This has happened to dozens of failed MMOs. Instead of matching the number of servers appropriately to the population, their stubborn pride and refusal to see reality causes them to keep a whole lot of ghost town, and they die entirely.

When Planetside 2 launched, there were 2 western US servers and 2 eastern US servers. That seemed reasonable, since thousands of people could play per server. But then it was quickly expanded to 3 servers. That's a 50% expansion, but fine - you were seeing a lot of players initially, great. I personally never saw a queue, even in prime time, and neither have any of my friends, but we'll assume the initial 4 were overloaded. So we have 6. Okay. After all, the initial hype of the release of the game is going to bring in a lot of players.

But then, now I see, if this is correct, you now have 8 US west and 8 US east servers. This is insane. If the intial population explosion at the launch of the game was able to be handled by 4 servers (again, no one I know ever saw a queue), why in the world could you possibly need QUADROUPLE that amount of servers? That level of expansion is far too much. You would've had to have assumed exponential growth from the initially well-hyped game launch, and there's no reason to assume that - it's been proven over and over again that nothing is going to be the next WoW. WoW is a fluke.

So therein lies the problem. I play on the Genudine servers, which is one of the original servers and one of the highest populaton density servers. When you have a double XP weekend, you expect a large surge in players. And yet I often had to struggle to find a big fight. I spent a lot of the weekend capturing empty territory simply because I had a hard time finding other players to fight. I took biolabs on Indar a dozen times with almost no resistance, which should never happen. On a weekend, in primetime, with double XP, the population density was too low to feel like there was fighting all over the world. Or even big fights in the hotspots.

Furthermore, most of that fighting was on Indar. Most of the other two continents have low populaton densities no matter what, even under the best circumstances. Often in the dozens of players. Or less. Higher population density means that these continents might actually see some big battles. And I've heard you have new continents in the works - spreading the thin player base over even more continents when two of your three are barely played as it is is insane.

So what, then, when it's not a double xp weekend, when it's not prime time, and on servers with a lower population than genudine? It becomes a ghost town. If at your absolute peak time - when you should expect the most players on your server - you're getting it to "medium" only, you have dramatically overexpanded your game.

I was watching the server populations over the weekend. In prime time on Saturday and Sunday, most servers were still on low population. A few on medium. Occasionally one on high. The most players you're likely to ever see, the absolute ideal conditions, and there just wasn't nearly enough population density. Which means that under more normal conditions, it's going to be very bad.

You are diluting what is the best aspect of your game, what makes it truly special, and this will fail to attract and retain players. Furthermore, as far as I know, there is no reason to do this except unrealistic expectations of growth that you will never achieve.

I say this lovingly, as I am a huge fan of this game - you must come to terms with a realistic player base and make the game great for them. Give up your dreams of WoW-like growth. That's never going to happen again.

You must immediately merge servers. At the very least, you need to reduce the server count in half for now. Merge the highest populaton US east server with the lowest population one, and the 2nd with the 7th, etc. Same with the west. That will get you the most even spread of population density. Merging is less painful than selective character transfers. With transferring characters, you might have to choose between moving to another server with your outfit, or staying at your current server with the rest of your friends. Merging is almost transparent to the user - all the same people they play with on their current server will be there on their new server - just a whole lot of new people will be too.

You should aim for a satisfying player density for most of the day, even if it means a little bit of overloading at prime time. In fact, it wouldn't shock me if having a few queues at primetime was good for the game - as long as they didn't have to wait long - there's some sort of sense of exclusivity that would make people feel like they were part of a wildly popular thing and make them want in even more. If there are technical issues with the higher density, put a cap/queue on indar specifically and you might actually see a lot of people playing on Esamir and Amerish.

Please, SOE, listen to this. Your player base is dedicated and will stick with you, and this game can be one of the all time greats, but you need to encourage what makes this game unique - the sense of scale. You need higher population densities. You cannot wait, like all other MMOs, for the vicious cycle of ghost town servers causing everyone to quit. You need to merge immediately.

i think merging the servers will help alot would be nice to have a more people to kill lol

This is not a PvE MMO, there are no traders, crafting, quests and all the other stuff to worry about. I would suspect character transfers and server merging would be easy to do once they implement the tech to do it. If servers need to be merged, I'm sure they would do it. It shouldn't be hard, they already are making it so once you have your name, you can't create the same name on other servers. So it's like they already planned for it.

You can't fault SOE for having too many servers. If you were in their shoes on launch day, when people were crying about 500+ queues, you had no choice but to open up more servers.

I didn't enjoy your threats of violent murder to me in real life via your yell rants last night but I agree with your sentiments about population on servers/continents.

The continent percent bonus is not working because its more efficient to either cap empty bases on a low population continental or to kill farm on a continent dominated by your own faction.

Per my post in another thread, could be addressed by using some of the suggestions below.

1. Make the population bonuses 10 fold - eg 3% becomes 30%.

2. Reduce awarded xp by a percentage on continents dominated or having a population advantage of your own faction - reduce by significant percentages, not just a few percent...

3. Reduce the xp/cert award for capping undefended/poorly defended bases by percentage depending g on proportion of resistance to proportion of attackers...eg if your attacking numbers were 90% higher than defending numbers, then your cap certs/xp should only be 10% of the normal value...

Introducing such systems that are real time event driven will push players to continents/battles where they should be, where they are needed, and the game dynamic will improve as a result.

The worst thing that can happen in such a large scale game is that there is no one to play against or the battles are always one sided...suggestions above may help.....

US servers are all medium to high traffic... stacking servers will increase lag and the amount of tears shed will flood hawaii

I lol'd pretty hard at this man, no offense. PS2 the new WoW? Nobody at SOE thought that at launch. They knew this game wasn't going to be a success. They aren't reducing the number of servers because it would be an overt acknowledgement of the game's rapid decline, and at this point their only goal is to lose as little money on PS2 as possible. Making money on this isn't even on the table anymore.

So the "ghost town" effect you describe isn't even a question: that WILL happen. But until they take the servers offline they're going to maintain the facade that the game is doing well. Nothing else matters, because players do not spend money when they have no faith the game will be around to enjoy their purchases.

If you look at PS2's standing on popular gaming websites, there's no question this is the case. Take GameFAQs as an example. Say what you like about the quality of their community, they get MASSIVE traffic, and their data is pretty convincing. PS2 peaked at #49 on their list right after release based on traffic, and it's now sitting at #96, after 19 days. In other words, it never got very high and it sank incredibly rapidly. Torchlight 2, for comparison, peaked at #8 and is now at #82 after more than 3 times as much time on shelves. And nobody is talking about Torchlight 2 as a massive commercial success.

It's like I've said before, nobody launches a F2P title that essentially does not run on lower end machines with the expectation that it will be a huge hit. This is a dump release. They're minimizing the cost of development by trying to squeeze a few bucks out of this mess before it tanks completely.

Except the dirty secret is that most of the "lag" people report is a result of problems client-side.

shhh dont tell anyone

i beg to differ... i've seen people warp before, and that's not something client side can alter.. not like it's hacking, htey're just lagging their faces off LOL

but from personal experience, at about 110 ping, and you move / jump... the slight variation in time and place you're at will make it seem like you're un-hittable.. you'll still be able to hit things, but you won't trigger hit boxes for people... it's like a magical number, and i have experienced it in many games so far at that 110 ~ 130 ping range

Is there an official way to get the server status of low/med/high? http://www.planetside-universe.com/server_status.php has the information but it's not official. Its data seems plausible, but it may be in error. I do know that, as I described, it was difficult to find a fight at many times over double xp weekend on one of the more popular servers, so it jives with that.

Low/med/high can also be manipulated by the devs if they want to give an appearance of more popularity than there actually here. They could display actual numbers, but all MMO makers hide actual numbers because they want to lie about it. So they could define low as like <100 players and medium as 101-1500 or something for all I know, making it less descriptive. They could also modify those categories to fit whatever message they want to send.

But I'm working with what I have here. If there's better data, I'd love to see it.

Planetside 2 is looking like planetside 1 when it was dieing

tldr; this game released with too many servers

hate to say, but told you so.... during BETA.

made a thread like this a week ago and got no response. SOE is clueless. They need to merge servers. 2 EAST and 2 WEST

Yep. Sucks, definitely too many servers. I think I might have a better chance finding a good fight in PS1..

i stoped reading when you said the wow game in your top sentence,this is planetside this is a fps,and no we dont need to merge servers,stop qqing and play the game.

Lol, did you ever play PS1? PS2 is already more dead in 2 weeks than PS1 was 5 years in. Servers need to be merged - to start.

I've been watching that server status page off and on for 4 hours now. Not a SINGLE server, US or otherwise, has been at "high". This covers prime time for both US east coasters and west coasters.

HALP SOE i need massive fights everywhere. not just on one cont at a tech plant

Gamefaqs example is a poor one. There is little to put into a FAQ right now about Planetside 2, and that information has been the domain of the PS2 Wikia page and youtube videos for some time now.

As someone that did wait in queues on launch day, I think the servers are still fine. During prime time (7-11pm in their respective time zones), most of the servers in each region hit "high" population. Playing on Mattherson, I don't have any complaints about population, and certainly don't expect a full server at 4am eastern time. Eventually server population could be an issue, but we're not there yet.

Can't speak for other servers but there were massive queues in Miller (EU) server last weekend (double exp).

Each cont holds 666 per faction per cont. which is 1998 players per cont 5994 players at one time per server. Each server holds 20-30 thousand players characters. So do you truly believe only 20k people will ever play PS2 at any given time to only have 4 servers?

http://www.soe.com/status/

That data is official. Its pulled from the Data Feed API.

Here I'll even go one step further for you. Here the xml format for the server status http://data.soe.com/xml/status/ps2