Oh, I'm happy to have you on my new server... It's just that while history as shown it's a really GOOD idea for devs to play their own game it's also shown that it's a really BAD idea for them to reveal which characters are theirs. So I'm just going to keep my character (and server) anonymous.


Joe

I'm staying up so I'll be around through the downtime and the first few transfers. Tonight will be short.

(And it's frozen thin mints, not krispy Kremes. )


Joe

Maybe you do, maybe you don't. I'll never tell.

(And you'll notice I didn't tell you which server I transferred TO. )


Joe

I'm saying that if you want to be guaranteed that you can continue to play together with everyone else from your server you should transfer soon. Right now the caps are wide open. The entire population of Bonny would fit on Rackham, Blackbeard, or Antigua, and probably even on Roberts. As the month wears on space will start to get tight on the servers a lot of people are moving to, which will limit everyone's options.

We don't want to split people up, but we also don't want one massively overloaded server and three empty servers.


Joe

Good point. Let me try to provide that information now.

The US servers hit their peak between 6pm and 8pm Pacific time. All US servers peak in that period, so Rackham, Blackbeard, and Antigua are all included in that. All nations on those servers peak at the same time.

The EU servers hit their peak 6 hours earlier between noon at 2pm Pacific time. They also peak all at the same time regardless of which server or nation you're talking about. Roberts is the highest population server overall, and has been since launch. Its low point is about half the population of the high point for some of the US servers, which is why some of its players describe Roberts as a "24 hour" server. It's definitely an EU server, though, and has a curve that's in line with the other EU servers.

When the transfers are complete we expect the peak concurrency on Blackbeard, Rackham, and Antigua to about double and the peak concurrency on Roberts to increase by about 50%. The servers will likely not be exactly the same population when this process is complete, but it's our intention to set the caps so that they are all roughly in the same range. Ideally the top server will only be 20% or so more populated than the bottom server.

Right now the nation balance between the different servers is roughly equivalent. On all servers England and Pirate are close to each other in the top two (which one is on top varies by server.) On all servers France and Spain are number 3 and 4 population-wise and also close enough to switch off between them for most populous on the server. Hornigold (the French language server) is an exception to all this. On Hornigold it's France and Pirate in the top two with England a distant 3rd place and Spain in 4th.

Does that help?


Joe

We have caps in place to limit how many people of each nation can go to each server. When a bit more than 25% of the characters of a nation transfer to a server we turn off transfers for that nation to that server. When we are approaching the cap a warning begins to appear to let people know they're getting close to the cap and that they should consider another server if they have a large guild to transfer.

And in addition to all of that we stay in constant communication with the community so everyone knows what server/nation combinations are still open, which ones need more people, and which ones are getting full. If societies end up split or a main get split from his alts we help people out. We aren't throwing this out there and making you fend for yourselves, we're going to be here the whole way through the process, helping in any way we can.


Joe

The server merges won't have any effect on the go-live date for 1.3. We have a new build coming to testbed tomorrow. If all goes well that build will go live next Tuesday morning during the maintenance window.


Joe

Yes, we're capping all four nations. The caps are in proportion to the character population in the all four nations, so the ratios between nations will remain roughly the same. I say "roughly" because there's some room for minor differences in there. What we aren't going to allow is an "all british" server or an "all french" server.


Joe

Players from all four nations are going to spread out as part of this process, including France. Roughly equal numbers of French characters will end up moving to each of the remaining servers. This is exactly what the per-nation-per-server transfer caps are meant to cause.

France will still be a lower-population nation after the transfers are complete, but it will have roughly the same percentage of each server that it has now. What the transfers will accomplish is that France's population will rise above the minimum threshold for a viable nation on every server. It will have a viable economy. There will be other French characters to group with. It will be able to field fleet for port battles. These are all things that merging the servers accomplish even though they don't change the ratio of French players to players of other nations.


Joe

That's not going to happen. We've been working on this day for more than a month now, and have carefully evaluated server loads, populations, nation balance, etc. When this process is over your new server will have significantly more players on at one time than your current server (or any current server) but it will still be below the limits of what the server can handle.


Joe