just a poll to see if you would like to see a single server (ala eve) or multiple servers (like most mmo's). ive seen alot of discussion on it and i know the devs said they would decide based on beta, but id just like to see based off a poll what people would prefer

this poll is based off ideal conditions (ie; for a single server the world is large enough, can handle the load, etc)


(May 11: Changed topic name to incorporate the nature of the discussion better. ~ m.)

From the Log Vom dev chat: The island of Enterra is massive, and while some railroading will be available to ensure that players don't lose themselves in its scope, players will be able to travel hundreds of square miles of terrain.

so pretty large, compared to eve i dont know, but hundreds of square miles is probably big enough for some decent wars, if done right enough for a single server

agreed on the unknown factors part, but i think ill change my op a bit to say under ideal conditions.

my preference for a single server is that everybody who has played the game knows the story. if you mention band of brothers to an eve player you are pretty much going to get a long response from them on the war (good times, pity it has turned into a cold war lately) and how ccp gave em plans or how goonfleet is a menace to the game and bob is the only way to stop them. unity like that has made that game stand out in my mind, it just feels so epic

I don't doubt that one server would make the game feel more epic, but in a perfect world many things would be that awesome.

EVE has the advantage of being set in space. Space is effectively infinite for the purposes of a game, so no matter how many subscribers they ever get there is room for them all.  That's not the case in a world with finite boundaries. What must also be considered beyond just the finite boundaries is the finite resources. Competition for resources is good; total overpopulation and player saturation beyond what the world can support would be very bad. So my question is this; in a world of finite boundaries and resources, how do you balance for an uncapped number of players?

Do crafters get to build the transporters for their guilds? If so, I'll /sign for this idea in a heartbeat.

Yes hovercrafts are also player made, same goes for transport and combat mechs.

Yeah I know that, I got the impression that Xyleya was talking about an additional long-distance transport structure.

One just has to consider the fact that while EVE may be one big world, the gameplay supports it being one big world. With any other type of gameplay however, and especially with FPS type games, latency plays a big part. In EVE, you click target, click whatever weapon you want to use, and it does it all server-side. Doesn't work like that in Earthrise unfortunately.


However - and this, I suppose, is a big however - if Masthead went and acquired, say, a priority 10GbE connection between USA and Europe, and somehow developed a server cluster infrastructure that was optimized in a way that allowed European players to log on a European node, and American players to log on an American node, and all the nodes then internally communicated via this fancy priority connection, and thus cutting the latency down a bit across the Atlantic, ... Then we might be talking.

... But that would be sort of expensive...

And as such, it'll always be "unfair" for whoever is on the wrong side of the lake, because they'll suffer from much higher latency. As for server hosting location... I don't think I've read anything official on this yet. Honest to all things holy, I hope they host the servers themselves, but if not, I do hope they don't host them in either Germany, Netherlands or USA. Talk about the worst places ever to put servers... -_-