Age of Conan

Saw a thread on the official forums where it looks like NA servers may be merged  down to 4. Set, Dagoth, Tyranny, Cimmeria. That can only mean good things for the players, but  some players feel like that wil be too few and think that three PvE and 3 PvP would be bettter.

the thread

forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php

4 is definitely too few.  Those 4 servers all have good populations and will probably be kept 'as is'.  The rest of the servers will probably be merged into 2-4 other servers.  Players have basically already 'merged' themselves anyway.  Funcom probably put the 'recommended' tag next to those servers just to prevent new players from chosing anything else and then have to merged later.

That thread is just someones assumption, it's an understandable assumption but is far from being fact. I think it would be a massive shame if they do as Azrile has just suggested though and leave these 4 alone. These 4 servers have acceptable populations but they are far from good. For the seige endgame to work well there needs to be far more powerful guilds than battlekeep spots otherwise there is little conflict.

I think the reason these 4 are recommended is so that when new people join the game they don't think WoW this place is a ghost town, this is no fun and quit. It's the right thing for funcom to have done.

Personally I'd go with 6 NA servers or if they are planning to give everyone a free trial in the near future I'd go with 8.

Depends what the servers can handle though because of isntanceing you can't really have too many people so they should have as few servers as possible without comprimising server performance on a weekend when pops are at their highest.

Lets try a different approach:

At Launch they said that servers are ready for 650.000 subscribers within 1st month they added quite few new servers so let "assume" for 800.000 players.

Atm Age of Conan have 49 servers in EU/US

800.0000 players / 49 servers   = 16.326 subscribers per server ( not concurrent players )
The amount of players per server would be something similar to WoW server.

In August they said 415.000 thats 8.000 per server.
The population in August was still decent on most or all servers.

Well lets assume Age of Conan have now 150.000 subscriber (they can have 200.000 or 50.000 just change numbers accordingly) and that to satisfy healthy population they need at least 8.000 subscribers per server ... they would need 18 / 19 servers.

If they have 8 PvP servers in NA they should be merged into 3 etc...

There gonna paint a pretty picture for the end of the year report to there stockholders and try to spin it so as to keep them giving money. Its bottom line time for all companys and Funcom is not doing to well.

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

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The fact is that Funcom has added the 'recommended' tag to those 4 servers.  Those are also the 4 servers that most people say has a decent population.  It's a good thing that Funcom did this as new players are more likely to have better gameplay on those servers... making assumptions about them as 'the' servers after the mergers is just guessing, but that's mostly what we do on these forums anyway :)

I don't think it's fair to compare LOTRO to AOC.   Lotro is a casual pve game that is focused mainly on questing (solo for the most part).     AOC is focused more on pvp, and group pvp at that.   The number of players 'needed' on an AOC server to make gameplay fun is much higher than a game like Lotro or WOW.  Lotro and WOW are far less likely to feel the need to merge servers because of this.

 Warhammer has it even worse than AOC since pvp is realm based.  Warhammer needs almost double as many players per server as AOC does to make it fun ( or else there is nobody to fight).

lol age of conan has pve no game is forcused on any thin it all about having fun on what you want to play want pvp go pvp severs want pve go on pve severs it has it all, its all about fun on how they want to play

4 is a good number to start with. Once FC gets everyone onto those 4 servers then Im sure they will reassess the situation a few weeks after the merge and if they need to bring on 1 or 2 more servers then they will. Once(if) the new servers are up and running then they will most likely open up free transfers to these servers.
FC screwed up the first time by launching too many servers for the amount of subscribers to AoC. IMO they will do the opposite and try to underguess the needed servers instead of overguessing.

They really shouldn't need to guess, they should have the numbers they need to make an informed decision.

Something like add up the primetime population on sunday night across all servers, decide how many people they want max per server, divide one by the other to get the number of servers. If they plan a big marketing/freetime/comeback trials in the next 3 months add an extra server or two, if not go with the first number.

I said earlier in the thread 6 but I'm thinking 5 is better, that would be 2000 people online primetime per server if they currently get 10000 people primetime on sunday night.