I agree with Balls in saying this has a lot of valid points. Making a drastic change will not only confuse players but can discourage them and make them want to leave since it will lose it's "feel."Brotherhood wrote:Haven't played in the 70 realm but trust me "if something works just let stay it like it is now".
Maybe people who joins and see how much people is in the mall the first thing they think is "hey! this server seems populated! level 70 wow is not dead yet! lets play here!" so moving to other places may have negative effects.
An alternative mall in each main faction cities for those who want better fps which can be accesed from the main mall may be enought, remember that maybe people appearing there and seen how crowded is the main mall (in case it is) may be the thing which is causing them a good impression too. So that's my idea, an optional one for those who manually want to go there for better fps/lag whatever.
I also completely agree about the "hey this is a populated server!" because when you see lots of players it will give you that feeling. However, today if you were online you noticed a big lag spike around 2:30EST. The server did not crash but did send some people offline disconnecting. This has been happening the past few weeks however the server normally crashes. Why it was crashing is because I've had a freeze-detector on (which I now took off) which if the server becomes unresponsive it will kill itself so it can restart. I realized today why it was doing this and why we have had crashes everyday usually. We had ~397 players online when that big freeze happened. Why did it happen? Because we're cramming far too many people in one central location.
If you played Wintergrasp, or played Molten-WoW's PvP server when it first opened, why was there so much lag? Because the game and server cannot handle hundreds of players in one location all moving around. Each time a player moves it communitcates with the server their new X, Y, Z coordinates those coordinates are then send out to every nearby standing player so their game client can see the player move. When you have 100+ players all moving around that's 100 singles going in, updating locations and 1000 signals going back out to EVERY player for everyone who moved. What this results in is overloading of the server, practically DDoSing itself.
So while I completely agree with the keep things the same we HAVE to spread players out someway.
