Hey! Where Did Everyone Go?

[TheMaxpower]

As time goes by, the population on my server gets smaller and smaller. When it is difficult to find people to run with, I simply don't play.


SSG - Please merge serves so there are a sufficient amount of people to run with. Or at least allow us to merge servers for you, by allowing us to transfer servers free of charge and allowing us to bring all our stuff with us.


Time to think long term and prolong the game as much as possible.

[SpartanKiller13]

As time goes by, the population on my server gets smaller and smaller. When it is difficult to find people to run with, I simply don't play.

Time to think long term and prolong the game as much as possible.

What server/timeframe are you on? If Wayfinder, there's your problem. If odd hours compared to server peak times, that's also an issue.

Cannith is busier than ever, and growing (although it's the current default server).

[HastyPudding]

What server/timeframe are you on? If Wayfinder, there's your problem. If odd hours compared to server peak times, that's also an issue.

Cannith is busier than ever, and growing (although it's the current default server).

Cannith has been the default for far too long. Give another server a chance....

[Epicstorms]

There are always people that claim their server is better, or assume you're in the wrong timezone for your server, etc etc.

Fact is, population is declining (which is normal) over time.
Compared to years ago, the population is really low. Yes that's for every server.

The devs really should do something about this someday.

I also occasionally just stop playing as soloing is boring or I can't find a proper group for higher reaper or whatnot.

[ComicRelief]

"Dormammu, I've come to bargain."

[TedSandyman]

As time goes by, the population on my server gets smaller and smaller. When it is difficult to find people to run with, I simply don't play.


SSG - Please merge serves so there are a sufficient amount of people to run with. Or at least allow us to merge servers for you, by allowing us to transfer servers free of charge and allowing us to bring all our stuff with us.


Time to think long term and prolong the game as much as possible.

Move to a different server.

[Hobgoblin]

"Dormammu, I've come to bargain."

End this! You will never win.
No. But I can lose. Again. And again. And again. And again, forever. That makes you my prisoner.

[AbyssalMage]

As time goes by, the population on my server gets smaller and smaller. When it is difficult to find people to run with, I simply don't play.


SSG - Please merge serves so there are a sufficient amount of people to run with. Or at least allow us to merge servers for you, by allowing us to transfer servers free of charge and allowing us to bring all our stuff with us.


Time to think long term and prolong the game as much as possible.

(A) It is summer time (At least in the Northern Hemisphere) so A LOT of players are doing things with family. Don't expect to "See people back" until late September (When college starts back up).

(B) Turbine/SSG have been draining the player base with their releases. My guess is they were hoping to "Infuse" the player base with people "eager to return" like every other expansion/update. IMO I think (A, above) was a major factor in why that didn't happen. People were planning vacations and trips. I suspect that we will see some "eager to return" players in late September but by then most of the "sheen" of Sharn will have been lost and the returns will be much lower. Players are going to remember why they left in the first place.

(C) Long term, merging the servers will not solve the problem; it just delays the inevitable. There needs to be a complete change in philosophy. DDO's success was blazing their own path and doing what "couldn't be done." Then they started mimicking other MMO producers and find themselves with depleting players (and the summer doesn't make it any easier).

[PsychoBlonde]

I'd love to know where people are getting their population numbers from. Your "feelings" are not numbers.

If you actually look at the Who list on Thelanis, the place is booming. People have simply migrated away from posting LFM's. So while there are a HUGE number of people logged in, there are very few LFM's posted.

[Yamani]

(A) It is summer time (At least in the Northern Hemisphere) so A LOT of players are doing things with family. Don't expect to "See people back" until late September (When college starts back up).

(B) Turbine/SSG have been draining the player base with their releases. My guess is they were hoping to "Infuse" the player base with people "eager to return" like every other expansion/update. IMO I think (A, above) was a major factor in why that didn't happen. People were planning vacations and trips. I suspect that we will see some "eager to return" players in late September but by then most of the "sheen" of Sharn will have been lost and the returns will be much lower. Players are going to remember why they left in the first place.

(C) Long term, merging the servers will not solve the problem; it just delays the inevitable. There needs to be a complete change in philosophy. DDO's success was blazing their own path and doing what "couldn't be done." Then they started mimicking other MMO producers and find themselves with depleting players (and the summer doesn't make it any easier).

[Ab]Not only is it the summer but also the week of the 4th of July.

[TedSandyman]

A sever merge doesn't have to be complicated. Trying to completely automate it would cause problems but it doesn't have to be as complicated as some make out.

Designate server X as the server that is getting shut down and server Y as the destination server. Inform all of the players on server X that they have to move and give everyone a free account move to server Y.

If you are a guild leader, the guild will follow you wherever you move to. No one else will stay in you guild. Simply inform your guild of your impending move and make sure to inform the guildies that they can rejoin on the new server once their account is moved. If the name is already taken on the new serve you will have to change the name of the guild. It sucks. But you will have to get over it. If your character name is taken, append a _2 to the end as they did for the European server a while back.

You may possibly be allowed to stay on server X, but no new accounts will be allowed on server X. Or server X will be shutdown after some appropriate time to give everyone a chance to log in and transfer.

The developers may be forced to keep the server running or at least save the user data, so that people logging in a year from now will be informed of the situation and will be given the opportunity to move. People logging into the server will be told what to do to get their accounts activated on server Y.

[Yamani]

A sever merge doesn't have to be complicated. Trying to completely automate it would cause problems but it doesn't have to be as complicated as some make out.

Designate server X as the server that is getting shut down and server Y as the destination server. Inform all of the players on server X that they have to move and give everyone a free account move to server Y.

If you are a guild leader, the guild will follow you wherever you move to. No one else will stay in you guild. Simply inform your guild of your impending move and make sure to inform the guildies that they can rejoin on the new server once their account is moved. If the name is already taken on the new serve you will have to change the name of the guild. It sucks. But you will have to get over it. If your character name is taken, append a _2 to the end as they did for the European server a while back.

You may possibly be allowed to stay on server X, but no new accounts will be allowed on server X. Or server X will be shutdown after some appropriate time to give everyone a chance to log in and transfer.

The developers may be forced to keep the server running or at least save the user data, so that people logging in a year from now will be informed of the situation and will be given the opportunity to move. People logging into the server will be told what to do to get their accounts activated on server Y.

Here is a list of things that don't transfer:
Your Friends list
Your /Ignore list
Your Guild name, level, airship, amenities, membership ranks, or other guild-related benefits. You will appear in the new world guildless.
Items in your True Reincarnation Cache
Items bid on or posted to the Auction Houses
In-game mail
Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage items
Your Astral Shard balance
Your Creature Companion Stable

Thinking something is easy, might not actually be the case just cause you think it is. To merge servers it would cause massive losses to the players on the server that is shutting down. While also causing an influx of players on a server that probably cant handle said amount of players. Which also doesn't fix the core issue of players grouping with others.

[Thrudh]

Where did everyone go?

I don't know about everyone, but I was out riding my jetski at the lake last weekend.

I'll be back more when winter comes around.

[Propane]

Summer time --> firepits (cleaning up trees downed by storms), yard work, etc... my playing time is about 1/2 in the summer...

[Sho-sa]

G-land, EST, late afternoon to evening; mid-week through Saturday. NEVER more than five people on in my level range, 9-12, for those nights. Based off the Who List.

Just adding some numbers to the conversation.

No, a server merge is not the answer as SSG cannot handle that and we would lose the game.

What we need is better marketing and customer retention.

Maybe time to rename the default server?

To be fair, I don't play as much as I used to. Too many friends don't play at all anymore, way too much player split with Heroic/Epic and 13 difficulty levels.

[Gemini-Dragon357]

A sever merge doesn't have to be complicated. Trying to completely automate it would cause problems but it doesn't have to be as complicated as some make out.

If it was easy they would have merged the servers already. They automated character transfer awhile back and a bunch of things don’t transfer over. There is obviously a huge issue on their end merging/moving non-character server specific things. I’m sure they know it is in their longterm interest to merge servers. Awhile back I remember reading on the forums that they tried to contact people who were involved with the server merge in 2007, I guess looking for advice, but it didn’t pan out.

Also, some people are really attached to their character and guild name. They wouldn’t be very happy with a -1 or being forced to change it.

[Zeleron]

G-land, EST, late afternoon to evening; mid-week through Saturday. NEVER more than five people on in my level range, 9-12, for those nights. Based off the Who List.

Just adding some numbers to the conversation.

No, a server merge is not the answer as SSG cannot handle that and we would lose the game.

What we need is better marketing and customer retention.

Maybe time to rename the default server?

To be fair, I don't play as much as I used to. Too many friends don't play at all anymore, way too much player split with Heroic/Epic and 13 difficulty levels.

Make sure you have all the classes at the top selected, and your who list fully populated.

[Maldorin]

Here is a list of things that don't transfer:
Your Friends list
Your /Ignore list
Your Guild name, level, airship, amenities, membership ranks, or other guild-related benefits. You will appear in the new world guildless.
Items in your True Reincarnation Cache
Items bid on or posted to the Auction Houses
In-game mail
Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage items
Your Astral Shard balance
Your Creature Companion Stable

Thinking something is easy, might not actually be the case just cause you think it is. To merge servers it would cause massive losses to the players on the server that is shutting down. While also causing an influx of players on a server that probably cant handle said amount of players. Which also doesn't fix the core issue of players grouping with others.

Don't care
Don't care
Devs could take care of a lot of this with some compensation and coupons given to guild leaders. Guild could quickly reform.
TR cache has to be emptied every TR not really a big deal
Don't bid on anything. Don't post anything. For like 3 days
Check your mail
Coupons for Max inventory bags for every character transferring. Coupons for shared bank storage on new server.
Spend before moving (convert into items of value and place in inventory)
Don't care

Is it inconvenient? Yes. Is it impossible? Of course not.

I guess it just depends on what side of the merger issue you fall on. I used to care, now I don't. I'd be fine if they designated a server as the "primary" one. I only play 2 characters now. Easy to transfer.

I say this as someone having transferred from Orien to Cannith to Ghallanda back to Cannith. I don't see a merger in principle as much different at all.

Other than potentially lag I cannot understand how it can be seen than anything other than good for the game to have more people able to group together.

Every level cap increase, every new TR incentive (like new races), every difficulty addition (I'm looking at you reaper) fractures the player base. Then there's flagging. Content owned.

I'm in a big guild. It's still often times not easy to group. People are scattered across 30 levels and fewer people want to play alts now.

But merge or not merge I don't care anymore. I'll just play with my very small group of friends until the game dies. I think mergers would have been better had they happened years ago

[HungarianRhapsody]

A sever merge doesn't have to be complicated.

This is the most incorrect statement that has been written on the Forums this entire year.

[SiliconScout]

... If you actually look at the Who list on Thelanis, the place is booming. People have simply migrated away from posting LFM's. So while there are a HUGE number of people logged in, there are very few LFM's posted.

I could not disagree with this statement more and I mean that literally with the exception of people migrating away from LFM's. Though I would say that there were probably the same number of people in the private channels / discords it's just that with the population decline they have gone from a minority to a majority.

Seriously, when is the last time, outside of an event, that you or any of us saw more than one instance of an area? When's the last time you saw more than 3? I remember in late 2000's up to right around when MOTU dropped there would ROUTINELY be 3+ instances of the marketplace, sometimes as many as 9. The harbour, same thing. Hell there would be 50 - 100 people in the Lobster alone most nights, with a third or more of them being RPers (a dead breed for a long time alas). In fact I remember often having to change instances to meet up with guildies for a run. I mean, this literally happened daily back then.

And when you think about it, instanced public areas has nothing to do with LFM traffic, at all, it is purely about how many bodies are on the server. I pretty much play on Thelanis exclusively, always have. If by Huge number you mean 500 (which would be a **** good day in T-land) you and I have VERY different meanings of that word. I would say most days Thelanis has, at best, about 300-400 players online spread over 30 levels and dozens of areas. This isn't a feeling it's counting the WHO panel. Right this moment that number is 348 and I would say it "feels" average.

Even if they all showed up in the market place it would maybe be enough to open a second instance. Frankly, these are NOT huge numbers. Maybe multiply them by 10 and you get a "Huge" number, maybe though I would argue you probably need to multiply it by 100 to be truly huge. I don't know that DDO ever had 30,000+ players on at one time, certainly never on a single server at once. Even at the simple 3,500 number though I doubt there are that many people playing DDO at one time outside of weekends on all servers combined, and maybe not even then.

Free server transfers could go a long way to rectifying the populations, but a server merge is probably the "best" option. That said, working with Data all day, I can tell you that the prospect of merging all this server data is an absolute bear of a mountain and almost guaranteed to go wrong. Given the history I would guess that each server has its own completely separate database which means a lot of the "unique" identifiers and keys are going to no longer be unique and it's not the sort of problem you can get around with a couple of sprocks and some complicated data views. You are going to need to merge the data.

Honestly I believe the best idea would be to create a new server and merge several other servers into that one. You get the advantage of being able to run that offline several times until you feel you have it right and then you just giver, knowing there WILL be issues. But how you handle guilds is going to be a bear because you will have people that paid "shards" for guild ships and amenities on multiple servers who will feel "ripped off", etc, etc, etc ad nauseum. I expect that if they hadn't virtualized the servers and each of them were physical boxes we would have seen them shutter the doors and windows quite some time ago.

Long and short of it is server merges are an absolute nuclear last resort option and populations are down, way down but seem to be stabilizing somewhat, albeit they are doing so at very low levels.

It sucks but there you have it.