' Wrote:I was thinking that when you're alone in Kusari or Bretonia, you have a better chance of finding people to RP with when the server's hovering around 80 because now Gallic players can enter the Taus.
There's an interesting discussion all its own about player densities to be had here.
Given a hypothetical gameworld I'm calling Vanilla, with 80 possible players and, say, seventy systems, you're forced to have interactions between players: at least twenty players overlap. Add more systems without increasing players, your minimum possible interactions falls, by two interacting people, one basic interaction, per additional system. Increasing the playercount works in the opposite manner, adding one more interaction. Unfortunately, additional players may be exposed to already interacting players, so there's a loss of efficiency in adding playerbase to combat player dispersion. In this model, the best way to encourage player interactions is to squeeze them as tightly together as possible
Thats math, and a reasonably unsophisticated model. It tends to assume people like to spread out, while in fact, they like to clump.
In that they clump, opening Gallia up to the rest of sirius is good, because it will allow the Gallics to -leave- Gallia, and interact with more people. In that sense, 86 is good. However, they need to leave Gallia because Gallia is empty, and in that sense, the addition of Gallia, and the subsequent necessary extra systems of Bretonia, only serve to dissipate the interactions. Still, not a great model, but it holds more water.
So, in that 86 is a repair to one of the main problems of Gallia, its good. In that the repair shouldn't have been necessary, not so good, and as it continues to add systems, its an addition to the problem.
Additionally, looking at it from another perspective, since the Gallics can now come into the Taus (but not much farther) it will tend to draw players away from Kusari, Gallia, and Bretonia, into the Taus, creating another area of high density, at the expense of many other systems.
In the other communities which we're told we have to consider, this problem has to be rampant, when the players online rarely reaches fifty. Entire regions must be empty, steeply curtailing the amount of player freedom: If you want to interact (and that's RP or PVP, more or less the foundation of multiplayer), you have to be where the people are, and if there aren't people everywhere, you can't go anywhere.
TL;DR:
You know the maps on Halo, the massive ass ones with tanks and ghosts, banshees and everything else?
You know how they suck when you haven't paid your live subscription, and can only get three people in them?
Exactly.
Humorous Addendum: Why did I feel it necessary to quote the entirety of the post immediately above mine?
