In an interview with PC Gamer, Lead Game Designer for Star Wars: The Old Republic Daniel Erickson, replied to a question about the group finder and whether or not it will support cross-server searching at launch. Daniel replied stating, “They will not be cross-server as we are coming up on a huge move to servers with massively higher population caps than we have today.”
Now this is not the first MMO game to merge all their servers into a few. DC Universe Online did this last year when they merged all their servers into four massive ones as the player population fell. So it seems BioWare has the same idea. This is all good and fine, but are mega-servers really anything to be excited about?
Mega-servers do sound like they’d be awesome, ten of thousands of more players all on the same server, I mean, that sounds awesome to me, right? However looking at it logistically, there’ really won’t be any noticeable impact to players. Illum is not all of a sudden going to be able to support thousands of PvP players at the same time. Hell when I was playing, my frames per second dropped to single digits once there were more than 50 players there.
Dungeons in SWTOR are also mainly instanced, so again this has no greater benefit than a cross-server group finder would have. The only conceivable difference I can think of would be that the auction house would have more activity in it and people wouldn’t have to worry about server-transfers to join friends.
On top of that SWTOR is basically an co-op MMORPG at best, so more players really doesn’t make a difference. I soloed the entire game, grouping maybe three times total. For a game like SWTOR that is very single-player oriented, it just doesn’t seem like Mega-Servers would matter at all. But then again, it’ll save BioWare some time from constantly having to merge servers.
“On top of that SWTOR is basically an co-op MMORPG at best, so more players really doesn’t make a difference.”
Glad to meet another fair-minded person, unlike the bafoon at mmorpg.com that scores this corpg as a mmorpg with a 8.7 score no less.
May 24th, 2012 at 5:24 pmQuote
To be fair, Cik… that’s how I *cough* feel about just about everyone at MMORPG.com…
May 25th, 2012 at 2:14 amQuote
I dont see whats wrong with having more people to run into in an open zone. So what if theres instanced dungeons? Youd still run into more players if youre out in the world or even simply chatting. You’d have more people to make friends with. I dont see why thats a bad thing or why you would question it.
I couldnt even join a normal war zone without my fps droppin to single digit, very sad.
May 25th, 2012 at 3:29 amQuote
@germaximus There’s nothing wrong or bad about it, I’m just pointing out that it’s really not going to make much difference for most players.
May 25th, 2012 at 10:02 amQuote
Agree with some of that, but there’s one thing you forgot. One of the biggest benefits to merging is the availability of players to group for flashpoints. This is a problem i run into constantly on our server. I can never seem to form or join a full group for any flashpoint, whether there in the leveling process or end game.
May 29th, 2012 at 10:45 pmQuote