A little more in depth explanation:
One of the things that’s great about working on an MMO is the ability to go back and fix mistakes. Now that we’ve had a chance to catch our breath, we’ve gone back and done a little post-mortem analysis so that we can learn from our mistakes. Some mistakes arise from a single source, some have many mothers.
As you may have noticed, one particular mistake that had many, many mothers is concurrency. When we were looking at the number of servers to roll out, we had a lot of different criteria to look at. Some worked out just like we’d expected, and some we were just wrong on. Let me introduce you to them:
Server capacity
We were very cautious about what our servers could support. Too cautious, in fact. Performance issues that we’ve seen have always been code, by which I mean that the servers weren’t being stressed, but the code was hitting problems by having too many users and would choke. As it turns out, our servers can handle a LOT more people than what we’d been assuming, in part because people in the beta had very different play styles than people on the live servers.
Play style
This is how players move in the game and where they congregate, which can create choke points. As I noted above, it turned out they spent more time in the choke points in the beta than in the live release. Of course we knew there’d be differences pre-release versus post, but you go with the data that you have.
Game systems
Pirates’ gameplay is very organic and the different systems feed into one another. On a PvE-only game, with just a lot of content, this isn’t a big deal, but in Pirates, we have systems that require a minimum number of players to function, such as the economy.
Player time
This is a measurement of how much time in a day the average player is in the game. It was extremely high in the beta, which lead to a higher concurrency in general, and then lowers for release once the rush and newness is over.
There are other factors, of course, but we guessed right on them. It was the items above that screwed us over. Plus, what we didn’t really consider, but should have, was Nation Balance. When the national populations are imbalanced (as we knew they’d be), it’s not really that big of a deal except if you go for a lower level concurrency, at which point it becomes a real problem.
So, we guessed right on some things, we guessed wrong on others, and now we have a lower concurrency than we think is healthy for the game. Pirates is a much better experience with a high density of player, and so we’re going to merge some of the server populations together to get that high density. It’ll spice up the PvP, do wonderous things for the economy, and give you more friends to go grouping with. Which is kind of what an MMO is all about!