There’s a vocal set of CoX community members that continue to push for consolidation of some of the CoX servers. Enrollment has been in slow decline, and on some servers there’s a sense that tumbleweeds tumbling down the roads of Paragon and the Mercy Islands might be a believable graphic to see,
Unfortunately, the threads — even where they get Dev response — seem to disappear from the servers. I get an RSS feed, so I get those Dev comments, but more than once when I’ve clicked through the thread has been deleted.
So, for example, last week there was this thread about the CoX subscription numbers. The block in italics are from Back Alley Brawler (who’s in charge of Animation and Visual Effects, so it’s not precisely his cuppa):
So, it’s the lowest we’ve been since ’04’s 4Q. Disappointing.
It’s the same pattern every MMO follows. Rapid ascent, peak, steady decline. There are of course exceptions, like WoW.
We’re actually a lot steadier than most MMOs would be at this point in their life cycle. So this is actually better than normal.
Actually, there are a number of MMOs that don’t follow that ‘typical’ pattern. Asides from WoW, there are games like Dofus, EVE Online, Tibia, Second Life, and Runescape. Those may be more a-typical, but it at least provides precedent that it is possible for an MMO to continue to grow its user base long past their launch date.
We’re very optimistic about being able to do the same with CoH/CoV and there are some interesting plans that you guys will be hearing more about soon.
Thread was deleted by the time I got to it.
That was followed up over the weekend by a discussion on server consolidation. Some folks have been pushing for the lower-population servers to be merged together (dealing with the name contention in some fashion) so as to increase the pool of folks to play with in any given instance.
Again, the quote below in italics is from BAB:
Looking at the numbers listed here, we see that the highest concurrent users online during the last quarter was 16,311. Now, figure this was during a 2xp weekend. Be conservative and figure that at regular times, we only get about 80% of that, that’s only about 900 per server…except that all servers aren’t equal. If you account for Freedom and Virtue having many more players than the rest, you can figure that, during peak times, there are only 700 people per server for the rest, and remember that’s lowballing the amount of people that come for 2XP.
Now split those numbers between heroes and villains…say 70/30 and then divide them amongst level ranges and zones. Even if they were divided as evenly as possible, you can see that the potential number of grouping partners is very low, even when you factor in the ability to sidekick up.
The fact is, that even some of the middle population servers need merged and the lower ones definitely do.
Place all rants about how I’m full of [censored] and how you luvz your low population server and how you can find groups just by rolling out of bed in the morning and even when you’re not logged on below.
That number is actually not exactly accurate. The highest concurrent users reported there is only from the last month of the quarter…which in this case did not include the double XP weekend.
Some folks are very reluctant to do the server merge thing because, I think, it smacks of failure. “We’re shrinking — we’re dooooomed!” Failure to act, though, degrades gameplay, which in turn reduces subscriptions.
I have alts across all servers — but, quite honestly, I’ve been avoiding some simply because the characters I have there aren’t soloists, and I simply cannot find anyone to team with except in rare occasions. Whereas in other servers (Freedom and Virtue), I have to beat them off with a stick if I send a LFT broadcast. Which is nice for Lady Zebra, not so much for Miss Crackle.
If I were creating any new alts right now, I’d definitely be doing so on those servers. If server migrations were free, I’d be shifting to them (and I think we’d see a further falling out of some servers).
There’s been regular talk about a “super server” or “server-less” type of arrangement — essentially server consolidation in name, if not in hardware. Is that in the offing?
We’ll see what “interesting plans” BAB is discussing in the hopefully-not-too-distant future.