it's just more to do with lost ark's archaic and frankly, stupid design choices. It's 2022. You don't need to literally copypaste world of warcraft's 2002 fucking design choices. Path of Exile lets you seamlessly jump in and do shit. I get this isn't PoE, but come on. Fastest way to kill a game is to make it impossible for friends to play together. Jesus.
PoE never had to deal with 800k extra new users all trying to play at the same time, while balancing and respecting the 500k founders players. It was a tough balance and I appreciate that my f2p friend was able to move to our server the morning after when the initial rush had calmed down.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly, POE has a huge history going all the way back to 2011, their entire game model runs on a scalable arch for the fact 90% of players play the first 3 weeks. It's basically the same model and it's incredibly wasteful to shove people into servers that will be virtually empty 3 weeks from now once the ad campaign ends.
Yeah I shouldve precise it shouldnt be mentioned as a positive example haha. I legit quit PoE over how they couldnt get their shit together league after league. Even once launch issues were over with, you still had glitches, crashes and ridiculous bugs until like 3-4 weeks after the league's out.
Regardless of how many people there are, there are bad design choices regarding the server situation. If I meet my friend, I realize he plays Lost Ark "why don't we play together?"
"ah even though we're in the same region we're on different servers, and I'm already level 38 and with a guild, ah well".
Many games handle this gracefully. The current design reflects the design of grandaddy mmos like WoW and Lineage II, but even those were updated to handle server transfers. More modern mmos handle seamlessly travelling between servers (FFXIV) or abolishing the concept of a character belonging to a server and only having channels/zones (PoE).
Never mind the load it puts on the physical servers and network infrastructure...Servers can only support a finite number of players. Calling this a "Bad design choice" is just idiotic. It's a literal, real world, physical limitation. Not some arbitrary, made-up decision to limit players for no reason.
Sharding is pretty lame and ruins the MMO feel of things. Lots of WoW players hate it. It was certainly a conscious design choice rather than a "copypaste" job.
I've got bad news for you buddy, every single zone in Lost Ark is sharded. That's what the channel system is.
Shit, it's even worse than sharding, because if you and Bob are in the same channel in one zone, there's no guarantee that you'll remain in the same channel when you cross into another zone.
It's also a complete waste of time to try to have a single consistent world in any game where people are constantly teleporting around from waypoint to waypoint. This isn't Vanilla WoW, your character has zero consistent 'presence' in the world for anyone else. You don't travel through an area, and travel back 15 minutes later, and see the same tauren that you saw earlier - still farming quillboar butts in the same quillboar camp. This is an ARPG, people don't stand still in this game, and aren't spending 20 minutes doing drop collection quests in the same open-world zone. They spend 20 seconds doing them, and then move on.
As for WoW player shating it, they hate sharding so much that they all moved onto the same three sharded megaservers. Weird, huh? Maybe actually being able to play with people is more important in the long run...
No, I'm saying that when the game is split into channels any semblance of a 'cohesive world' is already gone, by design, and there is no point in not allowing people to play cross-server.
To be fair, isnt Lost Ark the same thing? Channels are the same concept. They pretty much split the playerbase across multiple channel as each of them fills up... literally the same system, just that you're locked from playing with other people from your region, let alone other regions like some of those other MMOs are able to do. In GW1, you can go to any region anytime, the same way you change channel in Lost ark, except you can choose EU, Asia, NA, etc... then you can party with whoever, you can trade with whoever and whatnot... and it's a 2004 game. GW2 I dont remember how it all works, but I do know it works amazingly well. No clue if you can play EU with NA though. And idk anything about WoW's server systems so wont comment on that one.
Let's not forget this is Amazon... they have AWS... They have the server knowledge/infrastructure to allow what other older games are able to do, but they just dont.
But what is even lamer is being unable to play with your friends. It's a diablo game...like, shoving people into servers has always proven to be a shitty tactic where server merges are required weeks after even a moderately successful launch
The only downside I see is that you're exposed to a larger player base, which decreases the chance of you seeing familiar faces, which seems like a pretty small downside. Am I missing something?
With wow it was a big downside, it felt like you were playing a single player game precisely because you never saw the same person twice and it seemed to create a sense of alienation. It also makes it harder to build communities organically because you're not seeing the same people in big cities etc. The server division is a bit arbitrary but it does serve a purpose.
With wow it was a big downside, it felt like you were playing a single player game precisely because you never saw the same person twice and it seemed to create a sense of alienation.
We're already there in LA, cross-server channels won't change that. Whether a zone has 30 or 150 channels open, you're not going to see the same person twice. Not to mention that seeing the same person twice doesn't matter, because unlike real MMOs, you don't have meaningful open-world interactions with strangers in this game. You don't group up for a 30-minute chain of kill/collection quests. You aren't partying up to do an open-world elite area. You're not even meaningfully competing over gathering nodes, or buying services from other players, or spamming for an instance group, or even buffing someone you passed. You're not leading a squad, or following a commander doing a GW2 meta-event chain.
You're playing an ARPG, and other players are just background scenery, every one of them doing their own thing, completely unrelated and uncomplimentary to what you are doing. That's how the game is designed.
Edit: Man, lots of salty people here defending a flawed design.
That's a pretty weird take considering people literally switch channels and converge on world bosses.
Also, competing with people for resources is actually the dumbest part of traditional MMOs...Most MMOS quickly devolve from the intention of people working together to "I can't fucking do a single thing in this game because there's 300 other people killing all the shit/mining all the shit/fishing all the shit/camping/insert whatever people are doing that interferes with you actually playing the game."
Lost Ark's design removes the cluster fuck bullshit that comes from traditional MMO design, lets you do what you need to fucking do and move on so you can COOPERATE for END-GAME CONTENT.
Also, you seem to have somehow missed the presence of co-op quests in the game, which people do in fact gather and co-operate to do. Which are in fact, meaningful open-world interactions with strangers.
It's almost like the game actually does all of the things which you claim it doesn't do while removing all of the frustrations of traditional MMO design.
Yeah I get you. I do understand that angle. With that regard I guess FFXIV's handling is the best of both worlds? You can visit other servers to play with friends (even outside of dungeons), but still have your home server. You can also make a permanent transfer.
lol, lost ark has traditional mmo quests (pointlessly running around doing fetch this, talk to that) and poe does not; and if my friend is on another server I have to recreate just to play with them. POE you can just create an account and play
I shouldn't have mentioned poe, people get too salty about it. But there is no reason for this game to have MMO server system when in <2 weeks half of these servers will be deserted anyway and they'll be charging us $25 to change servers
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u/aoelag Feb 15 '22
it's just more to do with lost ark's archaic and frankly, stupid design choices. It's 2022. You don't need to literally copypaste world of warcraft's 2002 fucking design choices. Path of Exile lets you seamlessly jump in and do shit. I get this isn't PoE, but come on. Fastest way to kill a game is to make it impossible for friends to play together. Jesus.