Idea to change servers and skill gain

[griper 537]

-1

[Druidnature 1,118]

no worries, we are already skilling past 90 remember! plus we are used to angry newcomers with fresh affinities energy

[Rathgar 959]

OP, go home, you are drunk.

[Ecrir 887]

Besides all the obviously bad ideas for this suggestion, which have already been mentioned, let's not forget the history of Wurm already contains an example of why this is a very bad idea. Golden Valley!

 

Once the tutorial server wasn't just a tutorial server, but you could also live on it permanently. Your skills there were capped to 20 even if you had premium. This is what you are suggesting we should turn Xanadu into, correct? Now why does the tutorial server no longer work like that? Well, it turned out that people were hesitant to move on to the main servers after settling down on the tutorial servers. They had made friends there, made a home, etc, and didn't want to leave those friends. So people tended to stay, unless their entire group of friends moved on with them. The skill cap wasn't a big enough reason to move for those people, as one of the main aspects of an MMOG is of course the social side of it and they felt that was more important to them then a set of skills. This caused several issues, one was that it overloaded the tutorial server, but another very important issue was that there were no premium players around on the tutorial server, thus all the big and impressive projects made by those premium players could not be seen by new players. This created less of an incentive for those new players to buy premium and also make such projects. Thus resulting in lesser sales and in a smaller population growth.

 

This is also why the idea suggested in this topic won't work, the social aspect of the game undermines your assumption, that players will naturally progress to the next server once they reach a certain skill level. A much more likely outcome will be that far too many players will simply remain in Xanadu, especially the non-premium players. Since, in your suggestion, skills are also capped quite low on that server, it will lack those really impressive projects. This ends up recreating the same issues that existed with the tutorial server back in the day, overloading the server (more lag, not less) and reducing premium sales and population growth.

 

 

 

Now, as for how to reduce the lag on Xanadu. Well I don't think any of us can really offer suggestions for that as we just don't know where the bottlenecks are. It could very well be the hardware just isn't good enough to handle a server of that size with that many players online, maybe it can handle either, but not both at once? Problem is you can't really do anything about either of those aspects. Well, unless they could somehow seamlessly run Xanadu on multiple servers without the players feeling a difference. But if that is even possible, it certainly would be no small feat for such a small dev team.

One thing that might potentially help is to change the way creatures are simulated. Right now creatures on a server are all actively simulated (as far as we know), even if there are no players within a thousand tiles of a creature. That's probably a waste of resources, thus there might be ways to improve performance in that area, for example through instancing. Spawn creatures in the vicinity of players (but far enough away that they can't notice that these creatures are being spawned), then despawn them once they haven't been near a player for some time (excluding tamed/branded/on-deed/hitched/etc creatures). Despawned creatures could be recycled by re-using them once a creature needs to be spawned. If done right, the players shouldn't notice a difference and will have, on average, the exact same amount of creatures near them, while the actual creature cap on a server could be vastly reduced at the same time. Uniques should probably be excluded, for obvious reasons.

Edited September 15, 2014 by Ecrir

[AlexLong 128]

No, the economy has been wrecked for as long as I've played because they charge to much for silver, you may have seen an increase in people spending for a time on the new server but that was because people spent more real-life money getting setup there.
Wurm will never fix it's economy.

Leave the servers alone and stop making new ones
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[Aeris 3,752]

-1 also I apologize, kind of want to throw up in my mouth from reading this

[Audrel 2,223]

This is how Landmark is and it's rather crappy.

[Argustin 249]

i think ... NO!