Comments on: Servers, What’s the Point (Part 3) http://procrastinationamplification.com/servers-whats-the-point-part-3/ Punditry on MMOs and games in general. Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:08:03 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: scrusi http://procrastinationamplification.com/servers-whats-the-point-part-3/comment-page-1/#comment-63 scrusi Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:28:21 +0000 http://scrusi.de/pa/wordpress/?p=51#comment-63 Well it depends whether one is talking about the channel system or about a huge world with a spread-out playerbase. In either one you'd have the ability to subdevide the massive playerbase into more fitting parts. By choosing your channels, or channel preferences, you join a subcommunity of players that you can comprehend. The difference to sharding is not so much the amount of people you will deal with but the fact that you choose the kind of people you are dealing with and the ability to play with others in a pinch if you want to. <br /><br />If the game doesn't use channels but a large world instead, subcommunities will (have to) be created through location. The tourist coming to LA will be lost (though there are plenty of guides available -> interaction!) but the native won't be. If the visitor comes to LA as a tourist, her goal is to explore an unknown area. She would be pretty bored if it was a one-square town. If the visitor comes to LA on business, she uses available guiding systems (i.e. a taxi driver) to guide her to her destination. She doesn't care about understanding the town and therefore doesn't have to deal with it.<br /><br />In WoW terms, the explorers (who don't get any content in WoW as I recently pointed out) would have much more to do in a large-scale world while the achievers would still be able to do what they always do. Obviously dropping the newbie off in the middle of LA would be daunting. But if they started out in Berkeley, made their home there then one day moved on to explore San Francisco and maybe eventually LA - would that be so bad?<br /><br />In the channel system newbies could be guided into a community based on their answers to a few simply questions ("I love role playing and hate pvp") without ever having to understand that there is such a system until they understood more of the game. <br /><br />Recent blog:=- <a href="http://procrastinationamplification.blogspot.com/2009/11/servers-whats-point-part-3.html" rel="nofollow"> Servers, What's the Point (Part 3)</a> Well it depends whether one is talking about the channel system or about a huge world with a spread-out playerbase. In either one you'd have the ability to subdevide the massive playerbase into more fitting parts. By choosing your channels, or channel preferences, you join a subcommunity of players that you can comprehend. The difference to sharding is not so much the amount of people you will deal with but the fact that you choose the kind of people you are dealing with and the ability to play with others in a pinch if you want to.

If the game doesn't use channels but a large world instead, subcommunities will (have to) be created through location. The tourist coming to LA will be lost (though there are plenty of guides available -> interaction!) but the native won't be. If the visitor comes to LA as a tourist, her goal is to explore an unknown area. She would be pretty bored if it was a one-square town. If the visitor comes to LA on business, she uses available guiding systems (i.e. a taxi driver) to guide her to her destination. She doesn't care about understanding the town and therefore doesn't have to deal with it.

In WoW terms, the explorers (who don't get any content in WoW as I recently pointed out) would have much more to do in a large-scale world while the achievers would still be able to do what they always do. Obviously dropping the newbie off in the middle of LA would be daunting. But if they started out in Berkeley, made their home there then one day moved on to explore San Francisco and maybe eventually LA – would that be so bad?

In the channel system newbies could be guided into a community based on their answers to a few simply questions ("I love role playing and hate pvp") without ever having to understand that there is such a system until they understood more of the game.

Recent blog:=- Servers, What's the Point (Part 3)

]]> By: scrusi http://procrastinationamplification.com/servers-whats-the-point-part-3/comment-page-1/#comment-62 scrusi Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:44:02 +0000 http://scrusi.de/pa/wordpress/?p=51#comment-62 Don't quite get it. Do you mean that the whole playerbase should be able to be on one "server", thanks to spreading out in different areas and channesl? I think the community may be a bit overwhelming, hard to orient in. Apart from top guilds such as Ensidia I have no idea about any guild on any other server. I care about what's going on at my server. But in such a huge world... How do you get a picture of it? Won't you feel pretty lost.... Come to think of a tourist coming to a huge foreign city such as LA, finding it hard to see any pattern in it just because of the size alone. But maybe I'm missing something in your argumentation. Don't quite get it. Do you mean that the whole playerbase should be able to be on one "server", thanks to spreading out in different areas and channesl? I think the community may be a bit overwhelming, hard to orient in. Apart from top guilds such as Ensidia I have no idea about any guild on any other server. I care about what's going on at my server. But in such a huge world… How do you get a picture of it? Won't you feel pretty lost…. Come to think of a tourist coming to a huge foreign city such as LA, finding it hard to see any pattern in it just because of the size alone. But maybe I'm missing something in your argumentation.

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