Question: If EU had +5million active players...

[Turnsleft]

No worries the Swedes would still top the ATH/HOF/Most uber items dropped list

[Valand]

MA and their servers cant even handle 500 people playing at the same time ...

HAVEADEPOSIT!!!

Valand

[Staffas]

Originally Posted by Turnsleft

No worries the Swedes would still top the ATH/HOF/Most uber items dropped list

lol, you claim that while ahving an 50k ATH in your signature and it says you are from uk.
Nice ATH by the way

[Turnsleft]

True but I was in Sweden at the time, MA got confused ;-)

[Elfie]

Originally Posted by Jorael

Say for some reason the world discovers EU and by next week the game has 5 million active players, trying to get in and play. Suppose MA gets enough servers to hold all that traffic...

How would this game be like? What would happen? Would it be much different then what we know now, in your opinion?

How would MA manage bots, scam cases, server connections, etc...?

What about economy? Would it explode? Talk about loot balancing nightmare...

Just some food for thought and discussion...

Let us know ur opinion

I would assume various mathematical formulas are used for loot balancing, so the loot % would just need adjusting to the player base. It would work if there were lots and lots of new continents otherwise as has been said, it'll get kinda busy everywhere

[Auktuma]

Originally Posted by Jorael

Say for some reason the world discovers EU and by next week the game has 5 million active players, trying to get in and play. Suppose MA gets enough servers to hold all that traffic...

How would this game be like? What would happen? Would it be much different then what we know now, in your opinion?

How would MA manage bots, scam cases, server connections, etc...?

What about economy? Would it explode? Talk about loot balancing nightmare...

Just some food for thought and discussion...

Let us know ur opinion

sadely atm is too low variety for even 100k active players - they wont have breath (I cant imagine 1k crafters on ghosts ). System will need to have many thematic servers with AI active to define and kill harassment. Should exist very good information board ingame on what's going on, where, when, what ppl take action and so on (but not that - "go and read EF, pewiki .... ... ..."). Rating, voting, poll systems on all what's going on (events I mean). More information should be available openly about avatars in game - when joined, activity of playing, areas of activity, chating activity, reputation and more. Info should be objective, not that what avatars could edit themselve.
Examples:
Info on Auktuma: usualy Auktuma spends: 70% of time on crafting, 15% - on chating, 5% - on ... ;
Info on XXX: usualy XXX spends: 99% of time on browsing auction, 1% on trading avatars

If 5mln players we could have alot more stable market. At the moment 1-2 trickers could kill what we have if no control from side. Or that: Auktuma not playing --> % on ores droping down, Auktuma is on and spamming --> miners are happy, % on ores will grow...

scamms - MA aren't/shouldnt be babysitters. Nothing to do with it unless we will have virtual EU police, lawcourts what sounds bad to me and will make EU less attractive. I wanna run away from what I have in real life. Scamms happen due to lack of information - that part i've already mentioned.

bots - if economy will be healthy and ballanced bots could happen as autoinvestors Will that be so bad if someone invested 10k USD and by using boting software got 6k USD worth skills according to EU market? That's 4k USD for us and MA.


Variety for activity should be proportional to quantity of active players. If ratio will be poor - we will have much competition. That's nooooooo fun.
No fun = low mood = aggresivness = poor owner of internet cafe = EU uninstalled there

[Number of active players captured by system] = [constant] x Sum{[objects for interaction]x[methods of interaction]}
Excess of players will leave. Vacuum sooner or later will be filled (will depend on activity of current players and MA on advertising the media).

object = exarosaur young
methods = kill (killing methods: mellee (methods), ranged (ranged methods), ...]; let do damage (on stay or on run) and use healing (healing methods); tame; methods when tamed; .....

object = other avatars
methods = chat (chat methods); trade; hunt them (policy on choosing victim)in pvp zones (categories of pvp zones); ....

Variety variety variety plus differentiation and integration options available. Question is just what people MA wanna to attract and what features on people to boost. No doubt we should work on making our real life more rich (I mean not material part or it isnt main)

[Wormie]

If you wanted to play on summer holidays, you should have started login procedure a month ago....

[Fin]

Actually there would be no more people hunting and mining than now, because everyone would be spending nearly all their time keeping up with posts here

[AlphaGeek]

Originally Posted by Jorael

Say for some reason the world discovers EU and by next week the game has 5 million active players, trying to get in and play. Suppose MA gets enough servers to hold all that traffic...

How would this game be like? What would happen? Would it be much different then what we know now, in your opinion?

That really depends on how many of those imaginary 5 million deposit funds into the game, now doesn't it?

If 4.25 million avowed non-depositors were magically dropped in tomorrow to compliment the "over 700 thousand" accounts now in existance, MA would go broke in no time. There'd be no money for anything but supporting bandwidth, and maybe not enough for that... no development, no loot, no nothin'

If the same number of regularly depositing players showed up, Marco would be fat and happy on the beach someplace. Who knows, maybe MAs server farm would have a dedicated OC-48 connection and the inter-server LAN would be OC-12 or something speedy like that. Lag? A thing of the past!

From a game culture standpoint, if that many people joined at once the fabric of the civilization we've built in-game so far would likely be destroyed. How many of you remember when AOL turned on their online services gateway to the internet without the first thought of indoctrinateing theit users to the cultures of usenet, IRC, etc? They unleashed the great unwashed masses onto "us".


If you're talking about a steady state of growth to that number of lusers, then it might be interesting indeed. I'd almost kill to see Hadesheim as a vibrant, active city.

I suspect that some self-imposed segregation might begin, as people tend to migrate to areas where they see more of their native tongue. I know English is the official language of Calypso, but I also regognize that my native tongue isn't the easiest to master, nor does everyone learn it.

I have no idea what the in-game economy might do. So many people are shortsided now and only pay attention to daily average prices that the market on anything could become volatile at the drop of a chirpy.

In any case, increasting the playerbase by anything over a factor of 2 would change the nature of the game in ways we could never imagine. Some might be good, some might be bad. I think we could count on Marco to say it would be dynamic.

AG



AG

[Jorael]

Some great developments

Indeed many things would change and all it would take to bring the game down would be having a shitload of nondepositors consuming all the bandwith like Alphageek said.

Its interesting to see that while MA might want a big database of players, they have to meet certain conditions, otherwise it might mean bankrupcy - having the servers for all those non depositors, f.ex.

Also like auktuma said, content and things to do would have to be deeply revised. EU has no quests, therefore it could get boring really fast for many players.

The market would also be flooded with crafters fighting for single peds to earn a living.

So far, i think some very clever answers

Personally i think that with all those players, the game would probably sink all together, economy wise.

MA would have to make instances of the areas in different servers, much like WoW does it to keep up with all that traffic. That means the populations would never reach high levels in a single server. So Hadesheim would still be empty.

Also, in some servers you would have high end items, on others you wouldn't. Who would want to play in a shit server? Can't imagine mod faps dropping in each individual server.

Balancing loot would also probably become a nightmare, to keep track of everything and not allowing any "leaking ped holes".

And so much more...

Perhaps EU is not tailored for a mass public, but for a selected thousand. The efforts required to maintain such a demanding database of players would probably be too much for MA to handle, with the current game setting they have right now.