Optimized 70 man servers is the most important thing when it comes to launch. I really hope you guys are able to see that. In the end, this is the thing thats gonna make or break this game, when all major exploits are fixed and such.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I cannot stress this enough. 40 man servers are too fragile when it comes to population over time. I draw this conclusion from 2500 hours played on official servers. I’ve seen it over and over; full server after wipe major clans clash defeated clans leaves server loses 25-50% population.
Here here. I think they are trying their hardest to increase the player capacity. On the DevStream, Joel was saying he has Scooper locked at home, working on server optimization. Hopefully our champion pulls through!
I definitely agree that raising the population max. is of huge significance.
I’ve asked about this several times myself, but they never tell me anything about when this will happen. Not sure if it will ever happen. I do remember them saying they were working up to 70 man servers at some point though.
I think there needs to be more resets and fresh starts on servers also because of this, and not just on the private servers.
When I say break, I mean in terms of popularity on officials which should be the main artery to take the pulse of this game. And if you look at it in terms of fragility on a low 40 man servers vs the max of a 70 man, losing say 50% of total population is night and day in comparison.
And it is possible to get a stable optimized 70 man server to work, it just takes time and effort, which is why I’m arguing for spending that time and effort on this instead of adding something new for launch. Its just my two cents.
Of course you would have to make it stable. This game would be a dead game indeed if it was left as a PvE and solo/co-op. Especially in an open sandbox game where other players make up most of the content.
This topic of having more players to keep servers alive was a thing back when we only had the desert biome. Now, we have three times the map size with the same player count. As someone who loves watching the drama between players unfold in an open world sandbox environment, this is very limiting and will lead to dead servers over time.
The only way to refresh life into servers to keep players coming back is to wipe the servers or have some sort of end result that leads to a wipe. I think this has been proven by the privately owned servers that keep population while advertising fresh wipes in their server title. The only way to prolong the amount of time needed between server wipes would be to up the player count to seventy instead of forty. Unless there is another way that I haven’t thought about. Maybe being able to transfer servers, but that leads to whole clans raiding other servers.
For some reason I always thought they would slowly increase the numbers in order to optimize for more players, but it has remained at forty.
The original vision from FunCom when game was announced was regular 30 day wipes. People complained and wipes were canned. Now we see the reason wipes are needed.
When I play Conan PvP server, it’s like a 90 day campaign. The fate of the world is pretty much decided after 3 months, win lose or draw. Stagger the resets of official servers so people who are defeated after 30 days on one server have a fresh server to get into.
I bought in to this game expecting 100, which was mentioned as the “goal” early on. Yet, “blah blah blah tech that works with consoles” I agree that we need stability with at least 70.
I wouldn’t mind server wipes as long as character stats/levels remain intact on official servers, perhaps having server rulesets with 30 day resets and others with longer. As a hardcore pvper whose brought over a dozen more to this game via word of mouth, there needs to be more larger population cap to keep us interested.
I think a 30 day wipe is way too often maybe something like 90 days because wiping every 30 days is going to take away from some of the most fun in building and defending your base.
Other open-world games already cater to these ‘Extinction’ type servers. I would not be surprised if Funcom made a percentage of servers wipe after 60-90 days.
I believe FC tried this with the Blitz servers (or something like that). High multiplier frequent wipes. I could be wrong but I thought that these servers were unpopular so they were repurposed.
They were unpopular because sometimes people don’t join the minority servers that have nobody on them. They were not promoted and because of exploits most people chose private servers that wiped every few months instead. Another reason is because wiping every 30 days is to much, and many do not like the increased experience and gathering that were on Blitz servers. Every 60-90 days would be the sweet spot I think. Nobody will play a hand full of servers that half the player base never even knew existed in the first place. I don’t even consider how they implemented blitz servers as trying this already.
Lol doesn’t Rust have like 300 man servers and even Ark has 150 ish right?
This game is far too small scale, it has so much potential.
They should have went more large scale with this, like a MMO, Camelot Unchained is doing something similar to this with the building and crafting and all.
Not sure what Funcom’s issue is when a brand new / no name / kickstarter type developer can do this with the Unreal Engine 4
"Does Unreal Engine work well with large scale users and MMOs?
Unreal Engine 4 is designed to create small, fully-functional projects right out of the box. Since an MMO is a literal culmination of every extreme in game design, one might, quite understandably, balk at the idea of using UE4 for such a project. Fortunately, UE4 is easily modified at a source code level to allow for custom or extensive divergences from the default, small project functionality. We have identified what we need to change – most notably, the network communication and level loading code – in order to get the gaming experience that is expected of a modern MMO."
Ark uses Unreal Engine 4 as well and have way more players than 40 or even 70, and have flying dinosaur mounts…
Conan has such huge potential, it is just hard having any faith in Funcom…
But it definitely seems like something that can be fixed.
Sorry, but i have almost no faith that Ashes will successfully accomplish their original hype and intention. It’s a bit too ambitious, and we lack the server hardware to run the destructible environment and large scale combat they proposed originally. The same reason that EverQuest Next failed to come into fruition (subsequently one of Ashes’ programmers worked on that title).
I believe one of the Devs for Conan stated on stream that there is nearly 20 times more information in this games models than Ark’s, which would explain the lower population caps.
I have seen private servers that can host 70 people on a server. Again, I’m pretty sure the devs said that private servers may be able to host up to 100 people, though frame rates may suffer.
Never going to happen. A 3 story base with 15-20 thralls and 20 torches will drop your FPS to 3-4 (you can set everything on medium and still get 3-4 FPS 20% of the time). Set up a 8-12 player fight and you will be rubber banding instead of fighting.
major clans clash 
defeated clans leaves 
server loses 25-50% population.