64 player cap = dead towns

Ok, so I think this "many dozens" vision for an instance is sort of flawed, especially in regards to social spaces like towns. I honestly don't think 64 players will make this game feel "alive" -- even in a tiny village like Braemar.

Social events will of course make any one spot in that town seem filled with people, but while everyone was busy socializing with the Devs, I ran around outside and it was dead. As small as that town was, it felt totally empty. These special events are drawing crowds but once the game goes live and the players settle into their "schedules" and daily routines of adventuring and whatnot, the crowds will disperse for the most part and with this current cap, the towns will look as dead as an abandoned UO shard.

I propose that we continue to crank that player cap up into the "many hundreds" instead. And this can be play tested and tweaked per POI. Smaller spaces, lower limits. Large spaces, higher limits. The more player housing in that town, higher limits.

Braemar could easily handle 256 people all going about their business, doing their thing. And again, that's a small village.

 

I doubt there are many players yet. And also I found there to be quite a lot of players in the city as well as in the countryside. Not like a big MMO but still as crowded as I would expect in a medieval city or town.

 

Actually we did hit the cap in some instances, and it was still empty. I'm not expecting to add people just to make each POI dense, but wherever there are interesting social spaces within each POI, we should play test that to find the right balance. I just felt 64 was too low, even in Braemer and even with not very much to do in that town.

 

I didn't have this issue. I thought every instance, minus the overflow ones with just a couple people, felt populated.

 

I thought it was well populated. I didn't know what to expect, but after seeing it myself I thought there were plenty of people in the towns.

 

Yeah I saw people all over the place. I do think it would be a good idea though to raise the caps for the future. But they need to be careful and make sure the game will run well with a increased cap. Right now even on a decent system on the lowest settings I was getting terrible lag.

 

The lag you're seeing is on the client side, which has barely been optimized as stated in the Release notes. The servers are barely peaking at 10% load, as mentioned during the Dev Hangout earlier this afternoon. I'm sure there's still some bugs server side or in the network communication that also could be causing it but based on what they said in the hangout, they aren't seeing it manifest on the backend yet. They also did say they'll be increasing the cap to 128 in the next patch.

 

Server load aside they also need to think about performance. There is a not insignificant number of people who can't run the game in a playable state as of now, I can only imagine what R4 will be like if there's 128 people running around especially during combat.

 

I wonder if they can have a smart scaler for the client. As FPS drops, the client starts turning off visual quality features to maintain a constant rate. Turn off AO, shadows, object fade distance, LOD, etc. If it recovers again, turns them back on for you. When I played, I was at a fairly consistent 18 fps regardless if there was 1 player or 50 players on screen, so I was being capped for some other reason.

 

Yeah if they don't fix the performance issues they have right now r4 will be a disaster.

 

I noticed too that environment matters a lot more for FPS than players on screen.

I wouldn't mind a "visible players" option that stopped rendering players after a certain # for slower machines.

 

I couldn't really play. too laggy and choppy.

Also, Owl's head seemed CROWDED to me. Like claustrophobic. I had to get out of there.

 

Why would there be 100's of people in a small village to begin with? Also, the limitation is a hardware one in addition to a design one. the entire networking premise would have to change, introducing large server(s) operational costs.

 

Yeah it definitely was. I wonder if I lot of people are like me though and are stuck there because they crash trying to get anywhere else haha!

 

I'm not advocating there be 100's of NPCs in Braemar. I'm proposing that the town allow up to hundreds of players into that space vs imposing artificial caps. And no, I don't think it would require such underlying changes since the devs stated the network / bandwidth utilization wasn't anywhere near what they could manage, let alone server utilization either which peaked at 10%. With existing infrastructure they could increase that on the backend quite substantially. It's the client that needs the most optimization, which I agree with.

 

Owl's Head, while a small town, isn't exactly tiny either. If all 64 people were trying to cram into FireLotus Tavern, then sure, it can feel crowded at that spot. But the rest of the town would then be empty. During my playthrough, Owl's Head felt even emptier except where everyone tried to crowd around the Devs. So crowded events are crowded?

It really boils down to having interesting spaces within each village, town, or city to better distribute the players and where they occupy most of their time. The Devs have heat maps of this stuff and will tweak accordingly. Just wait until we actually step into Brittany, the largest city in Novia and we'll see if 64 players will be enough.

 

considering a lot of people are having performance problems, maybe focus on that instead of worrying about cranking up how many players can be there.

I saw enough players today

 

Noooooo! to many people is a nightmare, Did any of you play the Beta for ESO?, Often i was running a dungeon with 50 other people it was a fricken joke, really put me off the game, No challenge at all cause joe bloggs and his mate had already killed the damn Daedra before I got to it!
Keep it low for the love of Mara please.

 

They should obviously scale the number of players with the settlement size, not specifically to fill up the space with players, but because larger cities are naturally busier with travelers than are small, quiet towns.

Yes, but on the other hand, it was nice seeing a crowd of players on the ship at the dock -- that made sense. You have to scale the number of players for each area based on what feels right in the area. I think most dungeons should have no other players brought in unless you have a party or know a friend playing in that hex.

 

Yes, but on the other hand, it was nice seeing a crowd of players on the ship at the dock -- that made sense. You have to scale the number of players for each area based on what feels right in the area. I think most dungeons should have no other players brought in unless you have a party or know a friend playing in that hex.[/quote]

Agree but just friends you invite, and the more people are in a dungeon then it should scale its difficulty automatically.