EQ2 and the dangers of expanding

In November 2004 two major MMORPG were released, Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft, and that was widely seen as some sort of head-on battle. Now EQ2 is quite a successful game, having reached as many subscribers as the original Everquest. But of course in direct comparison with World of Warcrafts success, many people regarded EQ2 as a failure. Nevertheless, in one aspect EQ2 is clearly leading, beating WoW 2:0 in released expansion sets. And now this expansion is causing some trouble, which might serve as a warning to WoW.

Basically what happened was that the number of zones in the game nearly doubled, you might call it "Tobold's 40% per expansion rule". :) But while the number of zones grew, the number of players per server staid constant. Thus the average number of players per zone dropped, and the lesser populated servers began to feel empty.

In a producer's letter SOE is now announcing countermeasures. There will be first some free voluntary character transfers, and afterwards some emptier servers will be closed and the characters from them moved to other servers.

World of Warcraft will be expanding its number of zones as well, when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out in the second half of 2006. And with servers being limited to about 3,000 players, adding zones will also dilute the average number of players per zone. In general we can expect older zones to become deserted, while newer zones might be overcrowded at the start. I remember visiting Everquest after some years of inactivity, and finding all the zones that I remembered as being most popular now being totally void of players. While there is little risk of Blizzard adding expansion sets to World of Warcraft too fast, in the long run the thinning out of players per zone is something that will inevitably happen.

Now I believe that 3,000 players per server is a limitation that might be overcome with new hardware. My favorite solution would be to increase the total limit to 4,000, and then introduce separate limits of 2,000 players for Horde and Alliance. Thus the Alliance would experience no change, and the Horde would get some room to grow, for ultimately a better balance between the factions. That would make PvP a lot more viable, and even enable Blizzard to introduce a more interesting DAoC RvR type of PvP. And at the same time adding 33% more players to each server would counteract the dilution of players caused by the addition of new zones.