Why the different servers?

[thegrindre]

Hi all,
Why is it that there are a number of servers to choose from?
What's the purpose of so many?

Thanks,

[Eladiun]

You can only attach so many hamster wheels to an individual server with heat problems from friction.

[munificence]

It does seem odd that a game so heavily instanced needs so many servers.

[Esserbe]

The practice of "sharding", or having many different realms or "servers" is a practice that's been used for a long time in online games to handle capacity, latency and crowding issues. There's a few games that run "single shard", like EVE Online, but their set-up is quite different from that of DDO or even EverQuest.

[thegrindre]

You can only attach so many hamster wheels to an individual server with heat problems from friction.
ROTFLMAO... Good one. :-)

[Astraghal]

It's because they have no idea what is causing all the lag or how to fix it, other than capping the player limit per server. It would make a lot more sense to have fewer but better quality servers (or maybe it's the game code, I'm not an expert but SOMETHING is wrong), where we can have bigger busier hubs of activity. But ya, I suspect that they know how many people the game can handle at once and adjust the server numbers accordingly. :)

[Hambo]

When the game first started we had between 12 and 15 servers (can't remember them all, only played on Argo at the time). Sometime in the second year we were whittled down to the originals we have left... Argonessen, Khyber, Ghallanda, Thelanis and Sarlona, with an occasional appearance by Risia (test).

About 6 months before F2P was introduced we got Cannith, and Risia was rebuilt into Lamannia.

Orien came in with F2P, along with server upgrades for all the other servers.

Wayfarer is our newest addition, about two months ago.

Basically each server can support a fixed number of players... we don't have specific numbers. With the introduction of Wayfarer we have the first server "dedicated" to a specific language group (German) although anyone can play there... English speakers, such as myself, only have the same disadvantages that other language speakers have had for 5+ years on the older servers.

I'm hoping we continue to see more "international flavor" servers in the future. There are people in the world that would give the game a shot if it weren't for being shy about not speaking the prevalent language, and each new server is an indication that the game is growing.

[thegrindre]

Thanks Hambo... :-)