Newsletter Discussion: Crowd Control

This week, Flying Lab Software announced the closure of seven of their 11 game servers for Pirates of the Burning Sea in order to achieve a more optimal number of players on the remaining servers. We want to know:

Has server under-/over-population ever hurt your enjoyment of an MMO?

From my experience, a low server population has as many advantages as disadvantages. What do you think?

Permalink

4 servers with max pop of 2500 ?? = tens of thousands subs at best. I bet "chicken little" is busy in that game :P

Chicken Little has been around the forums since beta. I admit to being a little worried myself, but it's still doing far better than AA did with it's one light population server, which probably only had a few hundred.

I've been playing Pirates for a few weeks now on Blackbeard and things appeared to be normal, aside from the brits having the dominating presence. The economy is about the same as I remember it from beta.

I like to get in the game and be able to get things done and not spend hours searching for a free spot to play for a short amount of time. So, I prefer my pop on the lighter side, but not so light I can barely find enough people to do certain activities. It depends on the game and its use of zones. In some games, like EQ, it's meant that certain zones become crowded and it's nearly impossible to find anything to do because everyone has their little groups. High pop also means some zones are going to be a real pain to get through, lag-wise, even with instancing.

To answer your question: Yes... even though the MMOs ive played so far are crappy freeones like Runescpae or Archlord, I have experianced Lag, Limited resorses, flooded text and just plain crowded areas because of over population. But if you dont have enough people on it makes thing very boring.

To answer your question: Yes... even though the MMOs ive played so far are crappy freeones like Runescpae or Archlord, I have experianced Lag, Limited resorses, flooded text and just plain crowded areas because of over population. But if you dont have enough people on it makes thing very boring.

I'd prefer over to underpopulation

as long as its well balanced , in a pvp style mmorpg many people can be quite amusing :p

It really depends on the area. Cities should be populated. Wilderness? Not so much. In fact I'd rather have instancing in most areas outside of cities, because other players can interrupt my fun at times.