I Control The Sun
When I'm not composing songs to touch your heart, I like to play games, and occasionally read and write about them. And while I don't play their game, it's always fun to watch Blizzard cater to the least common denominator.
We have reduced the cooldown period for characters that have already undergone a paid character transfer from six months to one month. This will allow players who have already transferred their characters to then move to a different realm after one month if they so choose, to meet up with friends, or just join a different realm community. If you have transferred your character already and are past the one month mark you can now transfer it again if you choose to do so through the Account Management page.
Raster says it best:
Want to steal a guild bank? Scam people out of their gold in Ironforge? How about getting into a guild and doing your best to ninja those phat purples before guildremoving? Worry not, your reputation will not follow you for long! You’re now free to move about the country (and do whatever shitty thing you want without fear of lasting consequences).
I really have nothing more to add.
But it did make me ask myself a question in a Seinfeld voice: What's the deal with servers?
Why do we need servers/realms/shards/whatever the hell you want to call them? I know back in the day, when they ran Ultima Online on Commodore 64's, it was necessary. But certainly technology and programmer know-how has moved along far enough that we should be casting off this outdated notion that although you and I play in the same world, it's not really the same world.
The biggest reason developers like segmenting is that it allows easy expandability. If your game becomes an overnight sensation, just add a couple more shards. And when people stop playing your game, just merge servers. As a designer, you've managed to turn your software problem into a hardware problem, and that's another guy's problem. Truly, I can get behind this line of thought, because it's pretty much the way I live my life. For example, as far as my cow-orkers are concerned, when it comes to heavy lifting I either have a bad back, rickets, a heart condition, or am pregnant again.
But this mentality (multiple servers and pretending you are pregnant) causes more problems than it solves. If it's not a special rules server or breaking into a new market, new servers are always hard to get rolling, and the population is sporadic. Mythic had this problem when they introduced first 2 "classic" servers, and when those servers were overwhelmed, a third. But the novelty wore off quickly and Mythic were forced to "cluster" (a slightly better alternative to merging) all 3 servers. In Everquest 2, a server merge usually entails someone getting an "x" tacked onto the end of their name. I know people (because I'm one of them) who specifically bought the game on release day so they could get the name they wanted. Server merges ruin the persona players have so carefully crafted.
Probably the best example of a single-world implementation is EVE. I'm sure someone can quote chapter and verse on why it works for EVE but it couldn't work for more traditional fantasy-based games. La-la-la-la not liiiiistening! Make it happen, dammit!
EDIT: Well crap. I had a nice closing paragraph that appears to have been eaten by Wordpress. I'm too pregnant to try to remember what it said, so just pretend it really ties the whole post together mmkay?
October 19th, 2006 at 11:34 am
“But certainly technology and programmer know-how has moved along far enough”
No, not really. You can do it, and you could back when UO has in development too. But it puts some ugly limitations on you that are much worse than the “problems” that go with running multiple seperate worlds.
First, you need to be able to add to and remove from your world willy nilly. This is easy enough when your “world” is a mostly empty area of space, and you can just expand it and throw in some more randomly generated star systems. Not so easy in a typical fantasy mmog.
Second, you have to have slow, boring combat like eve does. Because if everyone is playing on the same world, you really need to remove latency as a factor in combat. Multiple worlds allows people in different parts of the world to play on servers near them, where they will get decent latency, which allows for more fast paced combat.
And of course, there’s no real problem with the typical multiple worlds multiple servers setup. Why do you want to have 150,000 people all on the same world? You aren’t going to actually be playing with any more or less people, you just end up with a bigger world, and the people spread out to the same population density. Merging servers isn’t a big deal, just quit enforcing unique names so it doesn’t matter what your name is, it won’t change when servers merge.
“I’m too pregnant”
Uh oh, time to skip town.
October 19th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Love the conclusion paragraph here, it really ties things together. All the stuff before it is questionable, I mean you’re not talking about politics, religion, or Hello Kitty (Thousand Island Adventure Salad Dressing). I’d say stick to what you’re good at, but you’ve been pregnant enough already!
ZING!
October 19th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Bob will be so happy to have a little miss Amber Sagat running around. The pitter-patter of little feet and all that.
Umm what were we talking about? WoW alliance being the bottom of the evolutionary ladder or something like that?
For the Horde!
October 19th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Ohhh…nicely done sir! Nicely done. You’re going into the camps of course, but nicely done all the same.
@BugHunter: I think you forget who you’re talking to. As a Granola First Class in the Liberal Liberation Army, I’m required to have a third trimester abortion as soon as I feel the first contraction.
October 20th, 2006 at 11:03 am
Yes, we can do single worlds, but that’s not the only answer. Having multiple servers/shards is easier to manage, in general. I mean, we developers fuck up gameplay often enough, now you want us to add more challenge to the mix by doing something technologically difficult?
Seriously, though, shards also give you the ability to have different server types. PvP vs. RP vs. “normal” servers, for example. Or, doing what Mythic did and have some major alternate rule set like a “classic” server. You can’t do this as easily on a single-world setup.
Oh, and save the veal… er, I mean, fetus for later. Just like mom used to cook….
My thoughts,
October 20th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Now, you’re not being quite fair to Everquest II. During the only round of server merges to date, characters were given almost a month’s notice and instructions on how to change their name with a simple /movelog command.
October 28th, 2006 at 12:01 am
When you do not create a single server or shard or what ever your marketing team wants to call it. You will not get to experience the ‘cry of a million souls’ throughout the galaxy either.
While it would be a greater experience for the player to have ‘more’ people in which to interact with, the designers can’t seem to build worlds big enough to allow this kind of play in a ‘fantasy’ genre, talking non- Sci-Fi where you can just fill hundreds of zones or land-patches with empty space for the most part. It still would be nice to more choice of players to interact with than pretty much the very limiting nature of the multiple server or shard setup we have these days.
Sorry to Obi-Wan for the poor use of his line in Star Wars (the movie).
October 28th, 2006 at 12:08 am
In response to why Blizzard may have done such an activity. Heck, is 6+ million subscribers enough monthly income? Is not it the American way to earn even more than the month before, they day before, or even the second before. I mean look at Exxon-Mobile as an example of Corporate American line of thinking.
Why should blizzard limit their income potential by only allowing transfers every 6 months when they could make money possibly monthly off of these types of people who either can’t make up their mind as to which server they want to be on, or worse, for those types of players at the second person eludes too. Heck, it also helps keep the community from creating an uprising, as bad players or those who do what the second person mentioned will ‘move on’ to wreck some other players experience.
Think of Customer Services responses to these issues.
All that buloney mumbo-jumbo about how sorry the company is about this or that issue that you get to make the customer really feel like the company cares about them…
Then you will hear this…
“Sorry there is nothing we can do about Player X stealing your guilds gold, as they are not found on the server. Are you sure you have the correct name of the person or that they didn’t delete their account?”