Sleepless in Altdorf

We’re all aware that there’s something significant missing in Warhammer today: the other two capital cities for both Order and Destruction. I was reading Haeretic’s 2009 WAR wish list post over at PlayerQuest (it went up just before Christmas) and noticed his top hope for the year is that the other racial pairings’ capital cities make it back into the game. As cool as that sounds, I can’t help but wonder: how good this would actually be for the game?

I’m sure this has already been debated to hell and back on the forums, but I have a hard time believing that Mythic left four major cities out of the game at launch just because they weren’t ready for prime time. Granted, if the other cities are anything like Altdorf and the Inevitable City, thery’ll host a variety of quests and probably a couple of end-game instances, along with a lowbie instance in each (guesswork on my part, but it seems a reasonable assumption based on what we’ve already seen.) At the culmination of each city’s siege scenario, I would also bet on some kind of scripted events involving their kings, which seems to be the case for our existing cities as well (although I’ve never seen them.)

I have a feeling it has more to do with the fact that it would water down the player base in each of the main cities so much that one of the following would occur:

1. The alternate capitals would rarely see use by players, and everyone would stick to the existing hubs of activity.
2. The population would be split evenly between these capital hubs, and the player population would thin out in the existing cities.

Neither of these scenarios sounds particularly appealing to me.

Bigger isn’t always better

Aside from missing some potentially cool end-game content, I think I’d prefer to hang on to the status quo. Having three major cities per side, as awesome and imposing as it sounds and as much as it ties in to the lore, is probably not what a game like WAR needs right now. When you’re already facing server cloning (or merges), or voluntary character transfers, and a surprisingly low server population with a significant dropoff after the first handful of overly busy servers, adding features that will spread players out further geographically seems counterproductive. Not to mention that while you probably have too many physical servers to accommodate the population (doesn’t Mythic think anyone else notices “low” across most of the servers on the login screen?), you’re still getting zone crashes during fortress sieges, which is supposed to be a major part of what WAR’s end-game is all about. Funny that such a huge landmass still craps out due to choke points like fortresses that are in the game by-design, and artificial limits need to be imposed to avoid going over-capacity in one region when other areas of the game are completely deserted.

Hell, even in that other game, the alternate capitals didn’t see much action at launch. Now that two new continents have been added via expansion packs, along with new capital cities in each of these regions, I’d hate to see the state of Thunder Bluff or Darnassus.

The problem here is even with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of subscribers playing your game, physical server hardware can only handle so much simultaneous load. This places a hard limit on the number of people you’ll ever see in the game at once. As much as I’d love to see more of those 26,000+ characters that supposedly live on Skull Throne (how many accounts is that, anyhow? ~3,000 - 5,000, assuming everyone has a bunch of alts?), there are rarely more than a few hundred accounts connected to a server at any one point in time. From my experience, having 10% of your registered accounts on simultaneously is usually peak volume — anything more than that is a rarity reserved for game or expansion pack release days and, sometimes, major patches.

Alternatives to server merges

Games like Guild Wars (among others) have used other methods to shield players from the physical separation between servers, basically sharing all instances in a pool and allowing them to hop between instances at their leisure, but never really letting them become a community on a single server. This wouldn’t work so well for WAR because although cities, zones, dungeons and scenarios are instanced, they’re still server specific. And it really doesn’t help if you’re trying to build a true realm-versus-realm war; if people can hop between servers at any time, there would be no WAR, just a series of skirmishes until someone got tired and jumped their warband to another server’s RvR lake.

Darkfall Online’s promised (err, vaporware?) no-levels, no-classes approach may alleviate the problem altogether, since without a level/gear progression (since it allows for full looting of PvP kills), there should be less segregation between geographical regions and player tiers/levels. At least, if the game manages to launch… and isn’t unplayable. But I’ll discuss this one at a later point.

World of Warcraft has (at least, it did when I played) pooled battlegrounds, which works quite well if you’re looking for instanced, timed group fighting, and that could easily be applied to WAR’s scenario population (and, to be honest, I’m not sure why it wasn’t that way from the get-go.)

However, major cities and the RvR lakes in WAR wouldn’t be able to take the pooled approach easily. Watering individual server populations down further by adding even more physical locations to congregate in may have a negative effect on the existing population and new players alike. Imagine walking into Altdorf six months after launch, and seeing less than a dozen people in what should be a heavily populated area. That doesn’t inspire confidence. Low-level content being abandoned by existing players well after a game’s release is pretty commonplace in MMOs, and when a new player starts six months after launch, it’s something they’d normally expect to see. But having a major hub of activity being empty as well doesn’t bode well for player retention.

If an Orc falls in the forest…

On a lark, I logged into Ostermark the other night and rolled a Black Orc alt to talk to an old guildie who was playing there with some friends; I was surprised to see no one in the Tier 1 Destruction zones at all during my entire time there. Curious, I did a /who 40 and found a total of 9 level 40 Destruction players online. It was rather late, around 1am Pacific time, but I was shocked to see so few people online. I had just done a quick check on Skull Thone before logging out prior to my Ostermark adventure, and Reikland alone there had 12 level 40s on from the Order side. Having an entire server desolate of players is probably a good sign that something needs to change. Imagine what adding two new capital cities would do in that realm…

Throw in possible features like player and guild housing on top of this, and you start running into major problems for your community.

I’m wondering what the best solution would be, here. Obviously, brighter minds than mine have already discussed this at length, but if Mythic wants to deliver 100% on their promised “complete” RvR experience, including properly working fortress attacks and — eventually — full-scale city sieges with hundreds of players, they’re going to have to find a better way of centralizing player population in physical regions and better balancing low-population servers. Tacking on additional landmass will simply aggravate the problem. As much as I’d love to see new city content, I can’t see it doing anything other than hurting the game in its current state.