Guild Wars and their 'districts' (servers; cheaper than running larger servers?)

I came up with an idea for a type of MMO. What if each different zone/region/city/town would have districts of up to 200 people or so, kind of like Guild Wars districts. Would that be alot cheaper than running larger 20,000 man servers constantly? I'd assume so?

How much is the capacity per district in, say Lion's Arch? Anyone know?

So yeah basically the idea was if an MMO would utilize the district concept, but instead of each town, use this for each region and zone in the game. This way, perhaps a monthly fee could be avoided for players, making the game more likely to sell?


There are also good sides to this. Consider this. A certain region in a certain MMO on a 20,000 man server may be empty or desolate, but if the entire world can share districts, the first ordered districts (dis. 1,2,3, etc.) would bunch alot more people in, that way it would never be desolate had you gotten on those higher population districts... Get what I'm saying? I'm a little off the ball today and it's hard to try to explain that.

^^example: Guild Wars has 20,000 capacity servers. The high pop servers would have more people able to roam Lions Arch. Lower pop servers have a desolate Lions Arch. However with districts (as we already have in GW), the game bunches up the most it can in the first districts.

It's called GW2, sorta, I think.

There are some benefits to the older model - you don't have as much of a wall of anonymnity - if the game is focused on world/zone domination PvP, that lets more guilds stand out on each server - and the model just isn't compatable with a seamless, zone-free game world. But population balance has always been an issue in these games.

Guild Wars 2.

F2P MMO games already do this. Draw whatever conclusions from that you want.

that GW2 will continue to have no monthly fees? If there's another inference from the above statement, it escapes me (perhaps that this is the 'cheap' way to do things?)

That sounds like what Tabula Rasa did, to a point. Even though they had separate shards, each zone within the shard was divided up into regions and each region basically had districts, with new districts opening up as they filled up.

I don't know how many MMOs out there actually have the larger 20k servers you're referring to except EVE Online. Most of them (WoW included) only support around 2000 players or so per server Even those servers are really broken up somewhat into mega-instances, such as an instance per continent. Tabula Rasa was a good example of shared districts of wildernesses though.

I have to ask why they would do this when they've already said they can do a fully persistent game (like GW2) for about the same costs as a fully instanced game. If anything, this seems like it would be more complicated to code.

What brought this up?

We don't know if GW2 will be full-persistant or half-persistant with multiple instances of the same 'persistant' area on the same server (like in AoC)

Anet said they wouldnt charge monthly fees for GW2 so making the game cheaper for them doesnt affect us at all