GW2 servers

A brief thought came upon me the other day as I was thinking about how certain magazine articles (and other forum goers) had been talking about how the server setup would be in GW2. The talk of having multiple GW's set up, with the mists between them and World pvp brought a question to my mind: Why are they doing it that way?

Rather than split up the same world be split into 3 simultaneous versions, why not split it along different lines? Why not have different realms/continents/etc set up on different servers?
Ex:
Let's say we have the current GW world set up. Let's stick Tyria on one server(persistent rather than in its current form), Cantha on another, and Elona on the last. To be able to travel through the docks to another continent you have to be able to reach a certain point (the docks) and afterwards you can always just hit the map travel button to get to the boat. If they really wanted to they could require ascension or something before server/continent switch was allowed.

The reason this seems like a good way to do it is this: a large complaint/problem/whatever with a multiple copy persistent world is playing with all the same people and not having to choose a server to be able to play with certain friends. Each 'realm' would be its own persistent world, and each continent would be no more divided than currently.

If you want to add another continent/ realm, simply attach it to another continent which doesn't fully use its server or put it on a new server(so you can independently test it before release). Putting it on a new server means you only have to worry about integrating it on the docks with options, rather than uploading a huge download for the entire continent.

Now I understand this would probably up the traffic between servers (don't know how that would affect the game), but why not do it this way rather than have the multiple worlds? In my mind it would be an interesting way to get away from one of the downsides of a persistent world. As a game grew, you would eventually need more copies of a server, but it would up the population limit involved in each copy, so it would only work up to a certain level (I suppose).
What do you guys think?

Oh, and if this hadn't been thought of before, I hereby claim it as my intellectual property( ) though I find the thought highly unlikely.

But that's just my two cents

I concur. I'd like to be able to experience play with everyone in the world, not just people who happen to fall into the same server as me. What would be the difference from now? They split euro, asian,a nd american servers anyway to combat lag, but we're still able to cross-link in the international districts, and now with the change in servers we can actually cross over to the euro and asian servers without having to change it in the game options.

Making multiple servers with the same stuff on them is just stupid. just up your bandwidth allowance to let everyone onto all the servers.

But this is how WoW and others work already and although they have 9million subscribers or whatever, i can't play with friends on outland with my character on Ravenholdt...

The beauty of Guild Wars is that all my guildies can play together, whenever and where ever they want to and now on any district thanks to the recent update

Um....you dont have a clue about network design, load balancing and traffic balancing/shaping, I would have to surmise.

Making multiple servers which have the same stuff on them is the best way to go especially if you can have multiple server farms in several locations with the same stuff on them.

Arenanet has a much better and smarter IT design then most other online games I've seen and they've clearly improved it as well considering there's no region switching necessary anymore.

Oh...GW or for that matter any MMO does not run on one server.

There are very hard limits to how much can run on a single cluster (server).

They common limit for MMOs is 3000-5000 concurrent. EvE is record breaking in this aspect, since it typically runs 50,000 concurrent users.

GW supports ~100 players per zone (which, in this respect, is considered a single server).

So the problem isn't really bandwidth, but some really hard scalability limits, solutions to which still do not exist today. But simply put, with very advanced architecture, and advanced hardware, a single logical unit (zone, region, planet, continent, instance....) can support thousands of concurrent users.

The developer must now find a way to break the world apart in such way, that these limits will never be reached.

Second reasons however is more practical. Imagine 9 million players (1 million concurrent) all sharing the single same WoW world. You wouldn't be able to move.... When you enter an outpost, you now see 100 people. If there were only one server, you'd see 5000 people.

Even in GW, districts can get pretty crowded. Just think back to events, where you have 200+ districts. There can be 10,000 or more players in same city. How would that look if you had single server.

Yes, IMHO partitioning sucks, and I like what GW enabled through instancing. But perhaps the instancing will remain, except the world will be much larger and not so strictly instanced.

My impression is that the "realms" would be like what Runescape is doing. I think it will be fine to have it like that.

And what is Runescape doing?

The impression I get from the article on it was that the "Wolds" in GW2 would be setup much the same way "districts" are setup currently in GW1.

For example, currently we have a North America, Europe, Japan, ect districts. Since the recent change you can move between them freely. GW2 "Worlds" would work much the same way. Have world A, B, C, ect. but you are able to travel between them freely.

Maybe I misinterpreted the article though, only time will tell.

I remember they had worlds to share player load, but there were no instances and players could interact freely in combat zones. In other words, the entire server population could be in one area and that'd work alright...

You didn't misinterpret anything. That is how it has been stated it will work. You will be asigned a "world" so that you don't have thousands of people all trying to do the same quest at the same time. If you're friend is in a different world, you can easily switch to that world to play with him, just like changing districts in a town to group or trade with someone.

If they let us freely move between worlds, and when we zone default assign us to the lowest current load world, that would be a ground breaking move for a persistent world MMO.

The biggest complaint that seems to be shared across all of the current persistent world MMOs out there is that you have to pick a server on character creation and then you're stuck with it. When your friends join the game later, if they pick wrong, you're out of luck - or if you get a new friend and you both have long played characters on different servers, you're out of luck.

Allowing free and constant world flipping, with a system like GW:1 had to default assign to low load worlds would solve that issue without creating an issue of underused worlds.

That alone would make GW:2 worth the price of admission for players of other MMOs.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it how GW2's servers supposed to be laid out? Character database servers separate from the realms which lets you log into any realm without being bound to one server?

Atleast, that's how I thought that they explained it.

My apologies for not responding to everyone sooner, but I've been unexpectedly kept from the internet for several days.
My initial thoughts from the article were that it would be set up more like WoW(from my limited knowledge of Wow), where the primary complaints I had heard were having to pick a particular server before you even began. While I understand that even now GW is not set up as a single server, the seamless integration allowed the sense that you could play with anyone(and free switching meant that you could if you wanted to).

If GW2 is set up so that we aren't bound to the server we begin on, if that seamless integration is there, than I will be completely happy. The illusion of division between groups of players simply disconcerts me. I'd find it rather annoying to have to switch servers to play with one friend, and then back to play with another.

If some version of the international districts still survives, I guess that would be how they'd do the World pvp idea while maintaining an easy way to play with someone from another server. Unless someone has some more insight on this from an article, etc., I suppose I'll simply have to wait and see how they do this. It would be a pity to not have the freedom to switch around like we do today, and it would seem odd to abandon an idea that works so well.

But that's just my two cents

The regional server setup has already gone from GW, I see absolutely no reason for them to bring it back. This isn WoW or LoTRO where you are charged for moving chars across servers.

They might keep International districts and I'm pretty sure that districts themselves will stay too as for the rest, this is not an actual technical server issue but a gamedesign issue

Nope, I have a life outside computers. Thanks for being a condescending asshat.