16 Reasons Why the PVP Server Merge Won’t Happen

[St0nkingByte]

I’ve been spending way too much time thinking about the question of merging the EU & US PVP servers. Here are my thoughts on why I think a PVP server merge won't happen. I’ll start with technical/operational reasons…

1.  Server load, login times – In the past there were issues with server load and long login times when the game was more heavily played, by having multiple servers available the team avoids this issue and gives players an instantly available alternative if trouble strikes again. The pain of those previous problems, which sometimes seem trivial to players, often hits the team supporting the servers hard and gets burned into their DNA, they don’t want to repeat the debacles of the past so they keep a second server, even if unpopular, online.
    
2. Perception of Latency and Bad Reviews – When the game releases having a single server is going to look bad. Really bad. People who won’t put the time into the game to realize it is less lag sensitive than your average shooter are going to post reviews saying this game sucks, they couldn’t find a server with less than 100 ping, why even play?
   

3. Ping Does Matter - Some players actually do have practical/real issues with lag, we see it with ships that can’t be tagged in the open world and other issues. The devs know some of this must be lag related and don’t want to increase the risk profile. Don’t like the lag of the EU server? Well you can always try PVP2. Take that away and you have a problem that is not easily solved. Devs don’t want the pain of that either way. Also some users legitimately have internet service that is just not as good as the norm, add their lag on top of a very long distance to the server and its unplayable for some and they may be vocal about it. Some say move the server to the US but then our Russian and Eastern EU friends will suffer, there's no good solution with a single server.
    
4. Servers are just not that expensive anymore – Server hosting is hyper competitive and costs are always going down. The cost of running a fairly beefy server just isn’t what it used to be and cost shouldn’t be a significant factor when considering merging servers.
   
   

5. Running Multiple Servers is Not Hard – Or at least it shouldn’t be. What you don’t see, as a player, is that typically dev teams have server setups something along the lines of personal test instances -> development server -> test/QA server -> production server(s). You are only seeing the production servers. Most dev teams have a high technical bar for themselves and their operations so they will have scripts or deployment processes that make it easy to deploy and update multiple server instances and even if they don’t have this in place they aspire to be slick like that so they likely won’t use the workload of managing/deploying/updating multiple instances as a reason not to have multiple instances.
   
   

6. Running Multiple Servers is a Required Discipline – Being able to run multiple instances in production is also a required discipline for the dev team. Even if they have only one production instance they still need to be able to quickly deploy a new one because what if the single production instance crashes or fails? They need to recover quickly so as to not lose their player-base. Again this ability means having multiple instances shouldn’t be hard or a significant issue or a reason not to do it.
   
   

7. Merges Are a Pain – While I’m assuming the dev team has great operations and can handle multiple server instances no problem I’m guessing that server merges are a huge manual pain in the ass and they don’t want to do it again because it really detracts from their ability to focus on dev work while upsetting a bunch of people and creating a huge support burden. For this reason as long as there is hope that PVP2 is needed in the future they will be inclined to put off merging the two simply to avoid the work and pain.
   
   And now some fluffier reasons why I think they might not merge PVP servers…
    
8. They Aim High – The dev team is aiming high, they want their game to be successful and they don’t want to take the morale hit of minimizing themselves by dropping to just one server. This game should be bigger than it is now, it will be bigger than it is now, that will require at least two PVP servers, why get rid of it, and why completely eliminate the player base that will be there to startup the server at release.
    
9. Real World Time vs Internet Time – The dev team is working hard, they are churning out features, solving bugs, and are super passionate about the game they are building. However, they are working in the real world where 3-4 months flies by while you are working hard and we are living on internet time where if they are a week late with a patch it seems like the end of the world and everyone is ready to quit. So from their perspective the multiple servers are still freshly useful and active in their mind, the current state is a temporary lull that they are too busy to even notice.
    
10. You Are Always One Patch Away from the Fix – Great teams are generally very optimistic, they usually believe that even if things are going poorly that the next patch, the next release will be the one that turns things around. Often they are right, or at least they see a short term spike in activity. They usually expect it, we saw this when they released the Endymion and Indefatigable content (among other things) they expected it to be awesome and the forums are just full of complaints in spite of arguably great new content. Still they are always on the verge of the next great thing and they want the second server around for when that happens to handle the load.
     
11. Perceptions are Screwed Up – The people that post on the forum certainly do not represent the totality of the player experience and opinions in Naval Action. The devs have data, we see them use it over and over again, they know exactly how much PVP is happening, they know exactly how many ships are being crafted and at what quality, etc.  They may see value in PVP2 that we don’t see (more on that later).
     
12. PVP2 is Big Enough – While everyone constantly harps on how PVP2 is so lame and small, how population is constantly dropping below 100 and when EU people login during their day to check on how lame it is they only see ~30-40 people online I suspect that PVP2 is big enough to be useful. Most evenings in my timezone (Pacific) there are around 100 players and while it’s not the glory days of 1,000 plus I suspect it is enough for beta testing purposes.
     
13. Stuff Happens on PVP2 – Similar to the above, while PVP1 gets the glory in the forums with all the massive 25v25 multi fleet actions and big port battles these things do happen on PVP2. Maybe they happen less often, maybe they happen in smaller numbers, but they happen. This suggests PVP2 is still useful which flows right into my next point…
     
14. Test Twice as Much – For the most part all new features do get fully tested on PVP2 same as they do on PVP1. Some are large and server wide like Alliances. With PVP2 up and running everything that is server wide gets tested twice as much. Double the feedback and double the amount of different situations and variation. This helps the dev team move more quickly with twice as much data and results to work with and makes PVP2 useful.
     
15. PVP2 May Be Significantly Different – This is more of a stretch, but let’s remember the devs have access to data and there may be something about PVP2 that is significantly different than PVP1 that we don’t see.That difference may give them information and data-points they wouldn’t otherwise have. There also may be something different about PVP2 players, maybe they are crafting differently, maybe they use ship types that are not typically seen on PVP1, maybe they, on a per capita basis, press F11 more often than PVP1 players? There may be something useful or unique about PVP2 that would make the devs want to keep it around.
     
16. People Are Still Playing on It – OK so maybe PVP2 is a ‘ghost town’, 100 connected users at peak is a lot less than 400+ seen on PVP1 but people are still playing on it, they are still coming back every day and if its working for some large number of people, whatever 100 active users equates to maybe 400 to 1,000 people?  Why take it down and upset them? This is similar to the bad reviews by people with 1,000+ hours in the game, everyone says PVP2 needs to be merged but the data says it’s still being used and maybe used a lot in the aggregate. If that’s the case, why kill it?

If you read this far, thanks for listening to my ramblings. If you have thoughts of your own I’d love to hear them.

 

[Sir Texas Sir]

And no one is talking about game releases. It's just as easy to add servers back later. Like if the populatoin dictates it put multi servers back on line when the go Beta and well do a wipe which they need to do any way.  Than folks that want to join one server or the other can choose so cause they aren't tied to resources.

 

That and stop making our labor hours tied to all three servers. I'll be honest with you I would play on both EU and US server if I didn't have to share my labor hours between three servers.  This pretty much forces folks that want to play on both to buy new alt accounts to run so they can craft on either servers.

[St0nkingByte]

2 hours ago, Sir Texas SIr said:

That and stop making our labor hours tied to all three servers. I'll be honest with you I would play on both EU and US server if I didn't have to share my labor hours between three servers.  This pretty much forces folks that want to play on both to buy new alt accounts to run so they can craft on either servers.

I've wondered about that, I've created characters on PVE and PVP1 but its kind of hard to make progress without basically pressing pause on my PVP2 character so end up just not playing on those. I guess if the point was to get you to buy another copy of the game it worked...

[Guest]

The best reason for a server merge is the dwindling population on both servers. The merge will however NOT solve the underlying problem - that the servers are depopulating. The real danger of a server merge is that it might create the illusion that things are improving and gloss over the fact that the servers playerbase is dwindling and getting to an untenable low lvl..

[BallsOfSteel]

Setup a server in Australia and see what lag and packet loss is really like.

[IndianaGeoff]

Population is in a decline until release.  People are ready for the real game.  Testing needs to wind down quickly with the final wipe soon.