Maybe Sieghardt? It's not like our population is high, or even medium.. it's "low", like all the others. It's just less "low". Our politics seem kind of stagnant and it would be fun to make new friends. Also, my understanding is that two of the servers being merged have such anemic populations that, even merged, they will still be too low.
I agree with you, as i said in my post about there needing to be 2 NA servers. Unfortunately instead of listening to there players they will do what they think is best which is somewhat funny considering the NA team did not create the game or develop any content for it so compared to them we as players are for more involved in the game than they are.
There taking the approach it seems to let the game die, and then merge again leading to a slower death overall i think they see this as "safe" in terms of bleeding the money from the game.
Now, by skipping to the 2 server solution (one east, one west) they could inject more people and charge the politics up and get people BACK to the game with the new excitement and have a good shot at 2 healthy fun servers.
Well. the whole light-medium-heavy is misleading.
There was one website floating around that showed the actual number of players on a server.
Also showed that 0-3000 was light, 3000-3800 was medium and 3800+ was heavy
I don't remember what website that was. Probably not allowed to post it anyway, But the light bracket is a lot larger than both the medium and heavy, even put together.
Bartz: ~2500
New Server A (Sieg + Erica): ~1700
New Server B (Kain + Lionna): ~2800
New Server C (Gustin + Hinde): ~2500
Devianne: ~1800
Teon: ~5000
Franz: ~3500
Luna: ~4000
Above is the NCsoft plan. What I'd suggest is more like:
New Server A (Bartz + Sieg): 3200
New Server B (Erica + Kain + Lionna): 3800
New Server C (Gustin + Hinde + Devi): 4300
Teon: ~5000
Franz: ~3500
Luna: ~4000
That gives us 2 West coast, 1 East coast (which ironically is what I think they had at launch) + 3 Euro.
After merge, allow free xfers to New Server A for a week, and you'll have some nicely balanced NA servers.
that's server merges phase two: the end of lineage
if they downsize to 6 servers from 11 it will be tantamount to them saying we dont give a **** about l2 anymore, have no hopes of ever getting a single new subscriber so play there till we get bored and pull the plug on it
if they downsize to 6 servers from 11 it will be tantamount to them saying we dont give a **** about l2 anymore
But really, if one thinks about it, what you've said makes no sense at all. Going from 11 servers to 8 means that NCsoft is paying attention to the needs of its playerbase, but going from 11 to 6 somehow hits some magical tipping point that means they do not care about their subscribers??
Nonsense, really.
NCsoft can show its care for their current subscribers by providing them with the best possible experience. If that means creating a new server, they should do that. If that means merging an old server, they should do that. Simple.
I think they might be trying to create some variety in the servers, some people like low-pop servers. Some don't.
Perhaps, but for some reason I don't think that was on their mind. Devianne is the highest population server on the East coast, and the 2nd highest population for all NA servers. Yet, after these mergers, it will be the lowest population NA server (or tied with the Sieg+Erica one). So, going by your theory, that would be bad, because the people on Devianne prefer a higher population, but will become the lowest when all this is done.
When people post these numbers of alleged populations on different servers, please remember what you are seeing:
You are seeing characters loged in at one point in time.
Since everyone is not logged in at the same time, that is just a small slice of the people who play on that server.
If the login number was taken at noon on a workday, it shows only a small fraction of the people who play that server. Even if it is taken at a high-traffic time, there are a lot of people who were on a picnic, who play on a different schedule, who are on vacation, who are playing euro times, etc. There are others who just play occasionally but who still maintain active toons on that server.
So it is likely that a server showing 2500 players is only showing 10% or 20% of the paying customers on that server.
look at the graph, you can pretty much get a sense of the max/min server population throughout the day ... i pretty much doubt there are 10x active people on these servers that never login, considering you dont see activity spikes neither on holidays or weekends or whatever
Yes, if you look at the graph, you see that it shows you the number logged in over the course of the entire day. So, as Edisson said, you can get a clear sense of how many are on that server at a time. I had to eyeball my numbers and kind of went with peak/average numbers. I could have posted lowpoints or highpoints etc.
TauTau is of course right that more than those 2500 actually playing on Bartz. I don't know if its 10x or what is general industry benchmark. But really what's relavent to your gameplay is how many are typically on at one time. So the numbers I posted answer that question.
If you look at the total population across all NA servers for the last year and half which is how long l2stat has been running you will see that it's pretty much frozen in the 22k-23k connections.
Even when they launched luna there was no change in the totals, Luna pretty much canibalized 1500 from Franz / 800 from teon and a couple of hundred off each of the NA homed servers.
My opinion 2-3 NA / 3 Euro servers with maybe free transfers from NA to Euro for those that live in Europe would be the optimum but it would also be an admission that lineage 2 is no longer a marketable product
Well considering it has been around for like 4 years and has managed to keep 20k people loyal to it then yeah at some point it was a marketable product ... But if you want my opinion it would have fared much better had we gotten a type of South East Asia deal (independent company selling the game / running the servers with a degree of freedom of customizing the content for the local market) instead of the NCsoft subsidiary situation we ve had
Well, not many games are still pulling in mass populations when they are four years old. Maybe WoW will be the first; we'll see. These things (hopefully) reach an equilibrium where they are pulling in a few new players and losing a few. Stable at 25k logged in isn't bad at all for an old game. But I don't see any sense in pretending that the population is going to double over the next year or two.
Most likely it won't. And hey, if it does? That's a great problem to have. We'll add another server. =)
Has it ever been? With all the fuss (irony here) NCSoft made about it ...
You must not have been here at launch. This was *THE* mmorpg. It was so crowded that people had to wait hours just to log into their server. And once they logged in, they'd head to Cruma, where each and every room in the entire dungeon would not only be camped, but would have people sitting, waiting in line, to be the next to use it. The inner lobby of Cruma looked like Giran today - dozens of people just sitting, chatting, wondering if the big clans would come in for PvP, and hoping they could get a coveted spot in a group.
Every dungeon was like this.
Multi-game guilds from across the world converged on L2, mostly on Sieghardt, for one of the most anticipated PvP contests in the past decade. These are guilds that have been around, with stable leadership, for 5-10 years. The kind of guilds developers actually reach out to for advice and testing.
L2 was THE game, and nobody had any question about it.
Why things went wrong? Eh. No game keeps its subscribers forever - most stop playing within 3-6 months. But in L2's case in particular, there were a few factors. First, the servers were just WAY too crowded. People couldn't even log in for the first month or two, so many gave up and moved on. Second, botting was rampant. And NCsoft would not draw a hard line on behalf of their playerbase. Instead, they often pandered to the botters or made excuses for not pursuing more decisive action. And they paid dearly for this. And third, the PvP rules were absolutely brutal and unplayable. Many players quit because of the item-dropping rules - having played hardcore for 5 months, only to have 100% of your effort lost in an instant, because you died to a mob and someone was there to pickup your weapon? Yeah - they just quit. And who can blame them? It was absurd.
To question whether this game was ever marketable is just really silly.
Yeah. I twisted my new clannies' arms and begged them to go xp there with me. But it's just not the same when you are the only one there (aside from a team of botters that has probably been reported a few dozen times over the past two years but nevertheless enjoys a terrific career farming plated leather pieces.. and no i'm not bitter about it).
I think they might be trying to create some variety in the servers, some people like low-pop servers. Some don't.
Perhaps, but for some reason I don't think that was on their mind. Devianne is the highest population server on the East coast, and the 2nd highest population for all NA servers. Yet, after these mergers, it will be the lowest population NA server (or tied with the Sieg+Erica one). So, going by your theory, that would be bad, because the people on Devianne prefer a higher population, but will become the lowest when all this is done.
Now I don't follow your logic.
If they aren't merging with anyone, then their playing experience will be completely unaltered, they will play the exact same game as before.
They might not be the biggest anymore. but that's only in relation to the other servers. They will still be the exact same size.
Just depends on which perspective you want to use. Now you are using my perspective. But in my previous post, I was using yours. =)
Part of my point is that nobody's playing experience is really being altered through these mergers. Some politics will be shaken up, and there will (FINALLY) be some fresh competition. Some people may have naming conflicts and that is a legitimate and frustrating thing, I admit. But beyond that, they will be playing the exact same game, with the exact same friends and clan, etc.
So all that is changing really is their relation to other servers.