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What is the purpose of having multiple servers?


ampinquoch

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First off let me say that I am new to MMOs so I'm not sure if having multiple servers is a design choice or a necessity. My thought is that if players were not confined to our server of choice we would have more people to play with and more freedom. Please identify the disadvantages of my single server multiple instances approach below.

 

Here is how I would divide up the instances if it were up to me and it would not hinder performance.

1) During character creation choose your playing style: PVP or PVE. Optionally add support to switch from PVP to PVE at a later time, but not vice-versa.

2) Players can switch instances freely, could see an indicator of how crowded instances are, and if feasible their ping. This would allow players to choose if the wanted to play on a "crowded" instance with more players, or a less populate instance to reduce lag or queue times.

3) For "leveling/questing" instances, players would be confined to instances of their playing style (PVP or PVE). There would still be instances dedicated to role playing, and possibly some international or language/location specific instances.

4) Special trade/social only instances could be accessed by all players.

5) Warzone-type PVP instances could be accessed by all players.

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Some MMOs use only "sharding" (multiple instances of the same area) and never servers. DDO comes to mind.

 

In my opinion, you do not need both servers and sharding. NO idea why both exist in swtor.

 

This is correct. Shards can run on multiple hardware servers. A server as you see it is not just one physical server, its several.

 

OP mentioned PVP/PVE/RP thats also correct - only differences you need is the server config. Also don't forget East Coast / West Coast / Europe differentiations.

 

Otherwise the servers are irrelevant. Only reason I can see why we have them is to make getting character names and guild names easier.

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