WAR: Population Caps

A lot of great info from Waaagh today from Games Day 2008 in Baltimore. One major tidbit was:

"Servers will have population caps on each side to keep them balanced between Order and Destruction. Most MMOs have server population caps; WAR will have realm caps (i.e. two separate caps per server)."

At first this had me pretty concerned. There seem to be a lot of pitfalls with capping the population. The devs made a post on the Warhammer Alliance forums explaining more:

"- We are not capping the amount of accounts/characters that can be created on a server. We want friends to play with each other, it's important, we know that

- Most every game has a server cap, those who played World of Warcraft in the earlier years probably remember waiting in queues for a spot on the server. The only difference is that ours is based on realm to help maintain balance when we have a very high population on a server.

- This number is yet to be determined, I see 3000 being tossed around a lot, please realize that it just an example and by no means should be taken as "the law"

- The blanket caveat of "It's Beta" applies. If we try something out, find out it doesn't work in practice, most likely we won't keep it. It's important to us though that we provide the best experience for everyone.

With that said about providing the best experience having servers capped at max with queues definitely doesn't accomplish that. We hope that if queuing becomes a necessity that it doesn't continue for extended periods of time. You guys getting in and playing the game is definitely important."

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Posted in: WAR