How Many Servers Should An MMO Launch With?

while guild wars 2 has a good system in place(guesting) they have too many servers imo. at least they better not open up more than another dozen after launch. 96 servers is alot.

Sharding heavily can be just as bad as having separate dedicated servers. Regardless of hype or word of mouth for a product’s initial launch, it is usually best to err on the side of caution and risk queues rather than spread out your population too much.

To answer the asked question first: I think it’s better to have too few at launch than too many (mergers) later on. If I were a Dev, I would *much* rather people complain saying “the game is too popular I can’t log on” than saying “there’s no one around, the game is dying”. Plus like you said, there’s that forgetfulness that comes with time; it’s better to get the pain out of the way when you have the most fervor than delay it to when things have cooled. Of course it’s even better not to suffer it at all :p

Which is why I think Guild Wars 2 is doing it right, and any developer making a MMO would be stupid to do it the “old” way. Temporary/overflow servers is where it’s at. It gives the flexibility to handle the mass of players at launch, while not having empty servers later.

The key is in my view: It’s always easier to add servers later, than remove them. There are a lot more negative connotations with server mergers than with new servers being added.

> The ideal situation is probably to go with a “serverless” system,
> like Guild Wars 2 or The Secret World,

Neither GW2 nor TSW are “serverless” (which makes no sense) nor do they have a “single server” or a “single shard”. 

Both have players divided by multiple shards. If you’re in Kingsmouth or Queensdale in shard “A”, you won’t be able to see the players who are in the same region of shard “B”. 

Those games simply let players transfer their characters whenever they want and, in addition, have the world divided into discrete “regions”, so each region of each shard can effectively be handled as a separate map, and given its own server. On top of that, GW2 will even create secondary servers for each region (the “overflow servers”) if there are too many players in the main one.

The answer to the question (“how many servers should an MMO launch with?”) is:

It depends.

It depends on how many players the game has, how concentrated the characters will be and how well the server and client can handle large numbers of players in close proximity.

It doesn’t make any sense to talk about the “ideal number of servers” (presumably meaning shards – the term “server” is ambiguous) without knowing the total number of players and how spread out across the game world those players will be.. 

In a game like WoW where everyone tends to hang around in a couple of cities, having a lot of players per shard would have a big hit on performance (both network performance, because info about all those players needs to be transferred between them, and rendering performance, because it’s a lot of polygons on-screen at the same time). 

In a game where players are more spread out, the number of players per shard can be bigger (i.e., less shards for the same number of players). Even more so if the game has discrete regions (like GW2, TSW or Eve Online), since each region is effectively like a separate map, which easily can run on a separate (physical) server.

It’s not impossible to go for a “shardless” approach, where every player sees (for example) a maximum of 50 other players in his region, regardless of how many are logged in. The problem is that, in a game like GW2, this could lead to some events being completed by “invisible” players (i.e., players that you don’t see, because there are 100 or 200 actually logged into that region), and the world would change for no apparent reason. Hence the decision to use overflow servers instead (also, it’s simpler to code). The quests in TSW don’t change the world in such visible ways, but you’d still run the risk of seeing some quest-related zombie spawn “out of nowhere” (i.e., triggered by a player who was not on your screen because there were more than 50 in that area).

A more meaningful question would probably be “how many players should be near you to make the world feel alive but not too crowded?”, but that would also depend on the type of game and the exact definition of “near”.

In some areas of the world, seeing 1 or 2 players near you is enough to feel “right”, while in other zones you expect to see at least 30 or 40 people. I’d say anything above 100 characters (PCs + NPCs) gets confusing (even if the performance is acceptable), and anything under 10 doesn’t really feel like an “MMO” (although it might feel “right” for the region).

What the heck, GW2 is not serverless.

GW2 has a tremendous number of servers, which is a strength because you can quickly and easily transfer between servers.

Its far worse to have to shut down servers and force players to switch/worlds/shards/realms/home what ever then it is to have someone swearing over that their choice in game is just that popular that they have to que to log in the first day or two. 

And why the hell bring up Diablo 3? Its a single player with Co-Op that shouldnt be on servers in the first place, (dont argue, it is DRM with the RMAH as an excuse and a smart way to make a buck everytime someone buys someting for money) and thats why it was so extra horrible. Had it been an MMO it would have been standard fair for blizzard with log in problems since that still happens every time there is an expansion in WoW.