Low population official servers and new patch

[sabeath]

Hello. Joined the forums just to write this. I play with my clan on official EU server #1147. It started out as a decent sized server when the full game launched, whereas our old server was impossible to log into at the time. However, for months now the server has been dead, rarely reaching a peak of 10 players online, recently not even that. Since we don’t want to move and level all the way up, and we can’t transfer our buildings (and we’ve built up a LOT) we wanted to suggest ways to help stimulate new players coming onto low population servers like ours (and there is quite a few of them now). I realize most of these suggestions have been posted already, but since there is a big new update in the works now might be the time to do some of these updates and help save these servers, as there will also be an influx of new players.

1. Week long or more double XP bonus - one of the worst prospects about moving to a new server or starting out fresh in the game is the leveling. This would help stimulate people who want to leave a high pop server that might be too crowded or completely new ones to come onto this lower pop server.

2. Week long or more yield increase - second worst prospect is building up again or for the first time. Some servers have 1x yield and some have 2x yield. It would stimulate players towards low pop servers if this were increased for a week or more. Just resources though, not boss drops or religious items.

Either of these might work, or both, but that might be overkill. And just to reiterate: the suggestion for these stimulations to be applied to low pop servers only, not all of them.

Hopefully this will reach the good devs of this game and help get these servers going again because a lot of servers share this same problem and it’s not making the game fun to play, especially on PVP servers.

[Ballard]

If you want incentive for new players, how about getting the bugs fixed?

I know, a radical idea.

[Enyo]

That solution is too obvious. We need to think outside of the box. Like limiting what you’re allowed to do, by making you farm food for your mast… err… slaves… Maybe cutting down thousands of weeds before you can farm a basket of fish or a stack of honey. Yes! Micromanagement will bring in lots of new players.

Honestly though, they need to shut down a lot of really low pop servers so that people can congregate into more populated fields. There were extras opened at launch, and we knew a large number of people wouldn’t stick around. It’s no fun playing on a multiplayer server alone, so they need to be consolidated.

[sabeath]

I don’t think shutting down is a good solution. My clan has built a whole lot on our server, so it getting shut down and us losing all our stuff would basically result in us quitting the game. I think it’s the same with many others in the same situation. Since you can’t transfer progress unto other servers, it’s not a good way to solve the issue.

[Enyo]

Yes, I can definitely see your point. I am a wandering vagabond with no server to call home. Aimlessly meandering about the Exiled Lands, looking for a place to settle down. There’s no easy way to see what each server has to offer, how populated they are, the attitudes of the people playing there, or if it’ll be around for long.

Anything we could do to spark interest in lower populated servers with a solid following of regular players would help immensely. My idea for shutting down servers was more aimed at those who had not had any activity in the past 6 days, and everything has decayed anyway. Those need to go.