player base

[Cynycal]

so you guys think that your game is gonna have a larger playber base than u first expected, i mean i'm seeing alot more people on the message boards than when i first started to post back on ur old message boards...

[Rolfe]

Well, we still want to keep it to a few thousand I think. That's the ideal number at release. If it goes beyond that, then new people will have to get on a waiting list or something. I'm not sure how we'd handle it, but we wouldn't be able to instantaneously expand the world to accomodate all those extra people. The extra traffic is from the interview at Vaultnetwork.com (on our links page), and a post at MPOGD.com. RPGPlanet.com is supposed to do a spot on us very shortly also, so we might see even MORE people here.

One thing we could do is to set up another shard of the world temporarily and then merge them together as we expanded the world.

[Uncle Dukey]

The temporary thing would be nice. Seperate worlds would really suck in my opinion. Diablo2 is a good example.. If you have a friend that's playing on USEast, and you're on USWest you're completely out of luck. If everyone's playing on the same page it's much nicer. Plus it allows the game to feel more like a whole world that's actually populated.

[Lordosis]

Dukey, that's exactly why we aren't going to have 20 copies of the world like other games. That always bugged me. I want the opportunity to meet every other player in the world. Even if I don't actually do it, I want the possiblity to be there.

I'd be surprised if we had more than a few thousand players at release. Surprised, but not caught off guard. I am programming the Arcanity servers to handle much more. If it turns out we have more players than we expected, we'll run down to the local store and buy some servers, come home and plug them in, then get to work expanding the actual world. We'd probably just start a waiting list and then work around the clock to get it done. I don't really want to think about coding up a server merge right now :)

[Slitherrr]

More people=more money=more food for the progammers. Hopefully it'll be nice and small... EQ is getting crazily overcrowded, and they have multiple servers! Also, the less people there are, the more hardcore those people are, which means better for most of us, and besides, I like elbow room. All the better if it's a huge world, exploration = cool (and it's also the only thing that kept me interested in EQ as long as I was, that and the fact that I wanted my fifty bucks worth...)

[Lordosis]

Well, I can't say I'd be dissapointed of we programmers got more food :) But that brings up another point. Even if we only had 1000 players, we still would continue to expand the world for variety, although at a much slower rate than if we had 10,000 players I'd wager.