MMORPG article: SotA - Full STEAM Ahead

MMORPG has another article up giving an overview of the state of the game:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/935/feature/9090/Full-STEAM-Ahead.html

It's a decent overview, so check it out and discuss below

 

132,000 45k backers in one world. That's roughly 6-8 times that of what a World of Warcraft server has. I'm glad the game will feel as populated as a WoW server from the beginning. I hate reading the comments on that site. They always make me think twice about investing so heavily. Then I remember those people are WoW fanboys that think endgame means raiding. I think I'm getting old. I keep wanting to say "Back in my day..."


edit: 45k backers roughly 6-8x the population of a world of warcraft server atm.

 

the article is a bit wrong, we have only 45k backers but 132k people in forum

 

Yeah, they definitely need to use these statistics. Total "New Britannians" is not the same as "Total Backers".

 

"So it will be another wannabe sandbox crafting heavy pvp based game with no endgame raiding and hence a server merge after 1 month.

Get the end game right. And you will have a successful MMO as it's not a cartoon for a start.

Don't just do another pvp MMO. It will fail"

Obviously these people didn't read the article or even attempt to play the game. They are just your standard comment thread trolls. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

 

@Licemeat, Agreed , The hard time I have is People that play online games now a days (not all ) are Tainted by Wow because of its success but its success is not based off of quality but Timing . Wow was released when Computers finally caught on and Most people started Needing them for one thing or another or they actually had a second one kits could play on with out fear of loss of data ... But I do truly believe that after release the game will catch on when it starts generating real income it will take off , I know Richard,Starr and the rest of the Gang have 5 x the ability they are creating right now but they just cant say hey one Million more and we can do twice as good .or 5,6,7 Million . what ever it might be ...... I just hope my contribution can help them on the path to a income that will allow them to design like artists with a much larger canvas.

 

I hope this world will feel populated. Because in these pre-release tests, it is pretty lifeless. Even with the 8000+ players on average per Release weekend (not simultaneous -- no idea what that peak number is), every scene I enter is pretty empty. A dozen players every now and then does not give me a populated world feeling. And I'm talking about towns, not wilderness scenes.

Chris previously said that there were usually two instances of Owl's Head or Braemar during R11...if that's the case, perhaps the player caps on instancing is too low (at 64 currently?). I've argued before it should be in the hundreds, with a town design that creates interesting areas to enable a more balanced distribution of hot spots.

Community events will always be popular because well, they're events. If there aren't any, the experience I'm getting currently is that of a world devoid of avatars. And there certainly aren't enough NPCs, yet.

Note that I'm only referring to the OPO / Multiplayer experience here. The single player offline mode is different...and yet to be defined it seems.

 

As long as the cities feel populated i'll be happy. I never really cared about seeing other people out in the world especially when they were cuttin' in my hunting action. My dream would be a nonlaggy Brit bank type deal. Come to town...repair armor by an actual person at the smithshop....meet some people at the bank....go hunting. I don't think I've seen 64 people at once in game or anything near that number yet. Possibly 30-40 at a starting zone. I know the game isn't set up for or will ever be one big map like current mmos....but it should would solve a bunch of stuff.

 

I completely agree. The majority of towns and cities I visited were ghost towns. I ran around Ardoris for about 30 minutes and did not run into another Avatar. I was saddened by this.

 

This is probably too late; but does the magical gate have to be on the outskirts of town? (why could it not be smack center mass) and is there a reason why the crafting station in really close to the bar which leads to the jail -

to me it feels empty because there is a high traffic area and the rest simply not ... the housing is spread out and in terms of foot traffic / its somewhat lopsided ... but no design ever works 100% as intended so who knows

As in terms of more players - maybe reducing player housing in some towns and adding NPC's might help the situation as opposed to adding more people that impacts performance ... unless they have a solution for that

 

Very good point about crafting pavilion being so close to the tavern. That is likely by design though, since they do want NPC services to be centrally located so that the houses immediately within their proximity have higher location value. This is true for Owl's Head with both locations of NPC services centrally located around high-value housing lots. The ones on the outskirts don't get any NPC services but that doesn't mean we can't make them hotspots.

So I propose that they add interesting content to housing neighborhoods and that content doesn't have to be NPC services. Maybe add a few more fountains or statues or memorable objects that players can congregate around at each major housing area. How about a garden or park or hedge maze or whatever in various locations around player housing neighborhoods. This helps with giving neighborhoods their own local identity. And it also goes to the design issue of how to tell other players where you are besides just the town name.

Perhaps they're doing this in Ardoris (only been there in /classicmode, so I can't really see things), but I'd like to see more interesting "content" around player housing.

 

what?
WoW servers cap at 6000 players each.
Dont spread nonsense.

 

I like all of these suggestions - but adding a park does not necessarily mean people will use it or encourage player patronage ... if the park had a chessboard / or there is near by pond with seats seats for fishing ... if there was a dart board or some sort of field game ... something to do then maybe people will stick around and always give off the vibe of it being "used" ...

 

Ahhh... I see. I was using https://realmpop.com/us.html. I see those aren't accounts but characters now. So we are at 6-8x population of WoW server already. Even better news.

 

I was originally divided on the issue of centralising NPC services/features versus spreading it out throughout the city. On the one hand (using Ardoris as the example), we have all NPC buildings crunched right in the middle of the city. Players will naturally gravitate towards that part of the city and want to have all their housing as close as possible to core of all activities, this then causes the edges of the city to become a lot more quiet (and/or less desirable) to players to be incentivised to visit them.

While this makes it convenient for players to congregate at one place, I personally prefer that they spread activity throughout the city (I was sort of involved in city planning in real life, so I'm biased ) For example, they could:

• Create concentrated Districts for different parts of the city: Merchants Area, Crafters Area, Banking Area, Parks Area
• And then put one or two cross buildings in each of the districts, like having a park in the merchants area, or a merchant in the banking area, etc
• Distribute more tailor-made NPC buildings (that have unique NPCs living in them) throughout the city

I also lament the quietness of the cities, but I think that has to do with the way the server assigns players to the instance - hopefully they will fix this.

 

Yeah, and the best part is the player sorting - something Wow will probably never have.

I feel like once people learn how Shrouds multiplayer works everyone will love it.