Who knew?
The Project 1999 Green Server was so popular it was sitting at 2500 characters at launch, and well into week two. Keep in mind that is around 250 players per starting area. (Of course, not as neatly broken down that way, more like 500 in Gfay and 150 in Innoruk, but still. Get the picture).
I am hoping some EQ elder statesmen come by and remind me what EQ servers had back in the day – was it 1000 players per server? Something of that nature?
The solution is to launch a second server, which will merge into the first when (or if) the population drops off. Whether it be 3 weeks or 3 years. This is getting interesting.
I am not playing Green (or the new Teal) ever since they announced they still weren’t sure what they were going to do at the end of it all. Originally Green was supposed to run the gamut and then merge into Blue. Now they aren’t so sure, and it may stand alone. That eventual merging was something that was encouraging me to play int he first place, knowing someday all of my characters would be back together again.
Knowing they won’t (or may not) be makes me not want to pout the effort in to have a splintered server. I’ll wait and see. The only thing really waiting on Green is harsher XP penalties, less content, and a couple items you can’t get anymore on Blue (manastones, anyone?). Otherwise players are just going backwards to play a worse version of the game.
The upside is major cash camps are open and I have turned into that guy. I haven’t leveled in forever (on purpose, I did off of cash camp mobs) but have over 40,000 plat to my name and another 20,000 on jboots MQs corpsed in the commons. That camp used to have lineups for hours and hours, and now it’s often completely free. I am getting a ring or two a day and selling an equal amount. I can’t even stop if I want to, if the camp is open I feel compelled to grind it out. Who knows how much longer the server will have this freedom.
All in all, sometimes it feels like I am not gaming, I’m just going to that other place I hang out in and help people move around the server, hit some goals, and get some gear. My enchanter is 55 and my druid is 48. I am in no rush, but thoroughly enjoying myself.
How the populations even out or change over the servers, over time, will be very interesting. Looking forward to seeing how that shakes out.
I can’t remember how many players a server would hold back then but I do remember that it was reckoned there were two people loggerd out for every person logged in, meaning each server ran at a potential three times capacity. I seem to recall a figure somewhere around 5k-6k per server in total but I have no evidence to back that memory up. I also remember there were no queues so if something was going on and more people than usual logged in to see it the server would attempt to hold all of them, then lag, then crash. Or the login server would break.
For a while the login screen actually showed the number of players logged in so someone probably has screen shots to prove how many players were in the world at one time. Unfortunately I can’t find my screenshots from before about 2005 so that person is not me.