Reason why GT launches new servers

killawatt

If half of your players ante up to $15, the ones that don’t ante up are resigned to losing. Those that do ante up are betting that no one will ante higher, but someone always does. This triggers the “ante game” and it ends fairly quickly with someone buying the win and the others deciding they can not afford to match. Once a winning ante has been decided, players quickly lose interest in the game.

This game no longer produces significant revenue.

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The providers of ante games will then start a new server, which is the equivalent of starting a new hand of poker.

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They can do this every few weeks and play a series of ante games. The quality of the game really is of little consequence because this is not the game actually being played, it is the ante game. Having a higher quality game might make more people ante up once, but once the ante game starts, those that recognize it will fold.

http://gameful.org/group/games-for-change/forum/topics/how-pay-to-win-works

Same guy who wrote the other article i usually link to

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eolsunder

        Good theory, but incorrect. Most people who play the game aren\'t trying to pay the most money and become number 1, they are playing to have fun. Only a select few people get that ante fever and start throwing out money like crazy. 99% don\'t.

        Smart players play the game a month or so to see if they actually like it enough to stay around. To learn a bit. Maybe if they like it they will start spending money at that point, and they sure as heck won\'t start completely over on a new server when they already put a month or so of work into their character.

        So, sorry. This game is not even close to the poker ante theory you are talking about. Since you don\'t HAVE to pay to play this game, the ante theory is null and void.

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killawatt

Reply 1# jamesfriel06@comcast.net

        #1 this game, and all games exist to make money.
        #2 this game and others like it aren\'t making money from people spending $15 a month over 5 years. That\'s because most people quit over silly prices or boredom from lazy game design.
        #3 I can say #2 because at some point, all these games will start merging dead servers. *if people were loyal to the game consistently the servers would stay full and merging would be unheard of*
        #4 the MONEY from this game comes from people ante-ing up, big time. it\'s about catching whales and trying to turn normal people into mini-whales.

        if they didn\'t care about ante\'s, and acted responsibly, you\'d see a lot of $20 items and maybe 3 or 4 servers, designed to keep nice, full, loyal populations. like pretty much every other major download game out there.

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viper28k

               Reply 1# jamesfriel06@comcast.net
       
                        #1 this game, and all games exist to make money.       
                        #2 this game and others like it aren\'t making money from people spending $15 a month over 5 years. That\'s because most people quit over silly prices or boredom from lazy game design.       
                        #3 I can say #2 because at some point, all these games will start merging dead servers. *if people were loyal to the game consistently the servers would stay full and merging would be unheard of*       
                        #4 the MONEY from this game comes from people ante-ing up, big time. it\'s about catching whales and trying to turn normal people into mini-whales.       
       
                        if they didn\'t care about ante\'s, and acted responsibly, you\'d see a lot of $20 items and maybe 3 or 4 servers, designed to keep nice, full, loyal populations. like pretty much every other major download game out there.       
    killawatt posted on 2014-01-29 11:31:03     
        agreed.  they keep creating the ante and everything by making new servers.
        new players automatically keep going to new server after new server, while the first 10 servers just die off more and more because of no new players replenishing the servers and keeping them going since they are redirected to the new server.

        even after you have played the game awhile and have your my servers group, it is still the recommended servers that come up first.  recommended is supposed to be for people who don\'t have a server yet and supposed to go away once you settle on one you want to play on, but no it stays there getting in the way of getting to your own server constantly nagging you trying to get you to move to a new server.

        where are these games that are responsible and have lots of 20 dollar items by the way? when I search for games to play only ones I keep finding are these mmos trying to fleece people from their income.

        would be nice to find a normal game eventually.

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killawatt

        Responsible games? I call them \'download games\' since you have to download a big client (usually 5GB or so) to play them.
        Some top ones are:

                        Blade and Soul China*                                                        Continent of the Ninth                       

        Vindictus
        Rusty Hearts
        Elseworld
        DC Universe Online
        Marvel Heroes
        Tera

        Those games are hosted by larger companies that host other games. The common theme is, the vast majority of items are $20 or less. Some of them are starting to get corrupt with random events like we just had, but still you can do a lot and have a very strong character in each of those games for a reasonable monthly price ($20 or less).
       

        DC Universe probably has the most business-savvy monthly vip program I\'ve ever seen.

        *Blade and Soul China is a chinese game with no IP block. But there\'s dedicated English communities that make English patches and explain a lot of stuff so non-natives can enjoy it. You really don\'t need to know Chinese, just click the shiny stuff and go, standard mmo stuff. It\'s my current main game besides my sad daily curiosity about this one.

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varthaki_s15

        New servers are created because more people play the game. If there weren\'t new servers, everyone would be using the same computer, and the game would run slow.

        But because there are features in the game - the Arena, Gardening, Wyrm Race, and Clash of Might, where players on the same server compete against each other - and players go up in level over time, a new player is going to be outclassed on an older server. So players are strongly encouraged to get on the latest server for their own interest in the game, not just to balance load.

        This is true even if nobody buys gems. Of course they give some advantage, and this encourages people to do so, because all the computer capacity to let people play costs money to provide. I don\'t think it makes sense to complain about this fact of life.

        But players who have been active each day, doing all their loop quests, and who have been playing for a month, are going to beat new players even without having bought gems, so the need for new servers exists without the ante mechanism.

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princesstara

                                      New servers are created because more people play the game. If there weren\'t new servers, everyone would be using the same computer, and the game would run slow.        
       
                        But because there are features in the game - the Arena, Gardening, Wyrm Race, and Clash of Might, where players on the same server compete against each other - and players go up in level over time, a new player is going to be outclassed on an older server. So players are strongly encouraged to get on the latest server for their own interest in the game, not just to balance load.       
       
                        This is true even if nobody buys gems. Of course they give some advantage, and this encourages people to do so, because all the computer capacity to let people play costs money to provide. I don\'t think it makes sense to complain about this fact of life.       
       
                        But players who have been active each day, doing all their loop quests, and who have been playing for a month, are going to beat new players even without having bought gems, so the need for new servers exists without the ante mechanism.       
    quadibloc@gmail.com posted on 2014-01-29 21:08:37     

        Ok, That statement is not true, there is not a huge influx of people playing the game, most people seem to leave a server and just start on a different on or play 2-3 servers at the same time even... I\'ve seen S3 go from over 500 people  down to maybe 200 which is where it is at. Believe it or not, although I\'m not 100% sure, they actually run the game on the same servers for about 8-9 general servers, they game is split in the database but the data like clash of might and garden seem to be executed solely on one or maybe two servers maximum. The game servers are only on maybe 2 servers currently (I can\'t speak of the PT server either). MySQL servers could likely hold a game with 500 players, maybe 40-50 servers simultaneously at minimum(of course depending on the hardware involved), its not a lot of memory usage and the CPU processing is not much for one server.
        However, the new PT and GMT server maybe in a different country, however since latency doesn\'t really matter in browser based games I don\'t think they\'ll actually exist in the timezone, just merely timing the events different which would also allow them to store their game and database in one location to reduce leaks of code or whatever else people might try to do to it.

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killawatt

        How about I take a real world example of responsible gaming - Blade and Soul China
        1)They have tons of servers. Yes, having lots of servers reduces lag. BUT. they do NOT spawn a new server every week or every day. The create as necessary to keep servers full but not lag too much. I don\'t think they\'ve made a new server in 2 or 3 months.

        2)About pvp \'fairness\' within the game. Only these little browser games set up these little crucibles to help spur on the ante game. Creating an atmosphere for the ante game is the whole design of the game. Real games have a lot of other things for you to do in that have nothing to do with \'getting to the top\' first. Ranking lists are popular in all games, but only ante games have $100 items sitting there waiting for you to buy them to get better. Real games, like a Street Fighter, for instance, leave it up to a player\'s skill and skill alone to climb those pvp rankings, no buffs allowed...no buffs in that game at all actually.

        2b)Download clients have existed for decades with players lvl 1 through level 100 pvp ing on the same server. They could do things like standardize the pvp arena so it\'s like a traditional fighting game, no outside stats allowed. They can have level brackets like they already do for Cross Server. the current in-server pvp ranking crucibles create the ante game.

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princesstara

        1) Servers cost money to host, although they should be making tons with how things are priced in this game.

        2) They would actually need a proper development team to  handle the many imbalance issues, I\'ve tested over100 different games, this game is the worst of all of them.

        2b) download clients would do 2 things. I you cant play it anywhere everywhere.... I can load this on my phone and sign in and be rather decently able to play it... clientization would prevent this.
        The benefit of this is they could attempt to scan for malicious programs while it s running so the botters and cheaters that do exist would be stopped or prevented form running their tools.

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hexabyss

What happens killawatt when a responsible game goes free-to-play and inherits their own micro transaction system and implementing a store. I play a MMO that has been around for 10 years and I have a character their that is literally 9 years old. For 8 of those years you paid $15/month to play and then they went free to play and introduced a store. Everyone needs to start adapting and getting used to this idea of micro transactions in games. That is the reason it works. People can easily rationalize spending small amount at a time over time without the consequence of really seeing the bigger picture if they haven\'t actually thought of it before hand.

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