So for the past couple weeks now, we long-time players on Official #1502 have been encountering a very frustrating situation every night during purge hours:
For some reason, in spite of this being a game type where people want to build big beautiful castles, all of the newbies want to try and pack onto the most crowded server. As a result, those of us who have fostered the friendly, pay-it-forward ethic on this server are stuck refreshing the server browser for sometimes up to an hour before we can get in to fight our purges, catch up with our friends, and play the game we’ve been supporting for the past 2 years.
For those of us who have limited time to play due to jobs, families, etc. having to spend 45+ minutes refreshing the server browser is extremely frustrating. And now, during the 1-2 week span where many of us would have time to indulge, we’re instead locked out of the game by new players who (unlike us) have no investment in the server but just flock there on a whim because packed server must equal fun in their minds.
So yeah, last year we couldn’t play because the server was constantly crashed out, and this year we can’t play because the server is constantly full during purge hours.
What we really need is for the server browser to default to hiding servers that the player doesn’t have a character on if the server is over about 60% full – at least with the Official servers anyway. I’d like to say that this should be as simple as setting the drop-down box for Server Population to Low or Moderate, but unfortunately it displays the same results no matter what option is chosen.
As it stands now, the Display Full Servers option is only marginally useful since showing a server that’s at 39/40 to prospective players just leads to the insanity we’re currently experiencing.