Honestly, it went like this. Aether came upstairs and said 'do you know anything about changing how we show server populations?' and I said 'Yes?' and there was a pause while that ticked over in my head. Aether is asking me about this. That means it's live, out there in the world, and we've totally failed to tell anyone about it.

I dunno if it's me, or Joe, or Aether, or Ops who dropped the ball. The meetings where we talked about doing this were a while ago. So, since I can't remember, I'll just claim responsibility for it, and offer a whiny 'but I've been so busy' excuse.

Compared to who? We're doing a significant patch a month.

Correct. We are (roughly) doubling the amount of loot you get at level 50 from sinking NPC ships.

We agree that current the supply of doubloons is too tight at high level. We are addressing this in the short term by increasing NPC loot drops. Additionally, the changes to Blockade and Patrol mean that there is now a repeatable (once every 20 hours) mission, that will give you at least some doubloon income. I'm not convinced this is going to completely solve the problem, but it should, at least, help.

If we did this players would park a ship load of unrest bundles in the port, push it into PvP, then turn them in for profit. We've talked about doing something similar to this, but with various restrictions to avoid that problem. It's certainly something we will consider, but those restrictions take time to implement.

Yes, we want to add a reward to port battles. It is something we are planning on doing.

Really? I see Taelorn, Isildur and Rusty post in here.

So what you're seeing is a change to the way we decide what population level a server has. It used to be instantaneous: how many people are logged on right at that moment? But it turns out that's not the most useful piece of information.

Population basically affects two major systems: the economy and conquest. In both cases -- though more so for the economy -- the important thing to know is not 'how active is this system right this moment?' but rather 'how active is this system overall on this server?'

So what we're showing you now is a high water mark. Actually, we've always been showing you a high water mark, but the time period over which we check for high water has gotten longer. Before it was a rolling 20 minute window, and we'd show you the highest population over that 20 minutes. Now it's one week, which catches weekend-only players, evening-only players, and most casual players.

This allows you to look at a server's overall population rather than a snapshot, and find out if the server is going to have enough PvP for you -- or perhaps has too much PvP for you. It will tell you how likely it is that an item will be in the auction house, and how much competition you're going to face for your rope industry. It also gives you a better sense of how active the other nations on your server are -- if all the English on your server are west coast Americans, and you're in Europe, you'll have an explanation for why England used to show 'Moderate' and yet all your ports are being attacked in the middle of the night by the English.

About 5 people. The forums are a very small subset of the community. I think it's a good communication tool for us, but like all MMOs, there's a dramatically larger population that's playing and not posting.

Here's what's up:

1) Why did we put out so many servers?
Originally, I wanted to put out 9, but there was a push for creating individual language versions for Europe. Based on how the numbers worked, that wound up with 2 extra servers.

2) What the heck happened to Bellamy?
Bellamy was intended to be our Spanish population server. You know what helps with a Spanish population server? Launching in Spain, which we apparently did not. There's a line of subcontracting here, so I'm untangling the thread to find out what the heck happened, and how we're going to fix it, but essentially we predicted a number bsaed on Spain being a reasonable market. Without launching there, that didn't materialize. Considering that we also spent a significant amount of money to localize in Spanish, it's something that's really quite aggravating.

Either Spain launches, or we're going to have to fix Bellamy via a merge. And my apologies for the brave souls out on Bellamy right now. We're not going to abandon you there.

3) What about the rest of the servers?
When we were estimating the server population, we never got a chance to really see concurrency at a high level. Our Ops guys, being naturallly cautious about load, pushed us to estimate for lower concurrencies. During the beta, we had relatively high percentage play (which is understandable, because these are the hard core people). Based upon their play, we came up with our sweet spot number, but having watched the load and spikes, and how more casual players play, we think the best number would 1.5 times that, which is whoppingly off from the number we used to estimate the servers.

What that also means is that our low number estimates of good server population turns out to be too low because of nation imbalance.

We're testing this assumption, by the way, with Australia. We have a lot of disks getting ready to come out which is going to create a deluge of users, but we've only rolled out one server because we want to make sure it goes right up to the top end of our estimated number we roll out additional servers. Before we make any signfiicant changes to the servers, we're going to vet this number.

4) What are you doing right now?
Based on forum feedback, everybody and their friends have left about three times over. As you may expect, our numbers show a different story. We continue to add subscribers faster than we're losing them on a daily basis, but we've just passed essentially the first re-up, which is always a spike of people leaving. We've caught up with that, but we're building back to where we were.

We have a two fold strategy. First, we're continuing to build onto the game to make it better. The reason we're currently selling so well is because of word of mouth, so while our doom is regularly proclaimed on the forums, there are a lot of people playing the game, enjoying it, and telling their friends about it. And we've had some advanced notice that some big weight reviews are coming out and will be quite positive about the game, which also helps sales.

But let's assume that our sales continue on their trajectory, and population builds up and passes where it was. Without a Spanish launch, we're still going to have to merge Bellamy, so now that we're done with 1.2, we're working on planning for the next milestones, and we'll be putting a spot for the merge code there. Even if it's only used for one server (and that, of course, is my preference!) we're not going to leave paying customers to twist in the wind.

Once we get that code ready, we'll re-evaluate where the servers are, based upon the Australian experience, and make final decisions based on that.

5) Aren't you worried about bad press?

Honestly, no. The reasons for that are that the best press you can get is people playing the game and enjoying it. We've got a LOT of people currently enjoying the game. When we release 1.2, they're going to like it even more, and realize just how fast our development is, and how committed we are to improving things. If we merge some servers, it because we think it'll make the game better, and people will like it even more and will say more positive things about the game. There's nothing more powerful than that word of mouth.

6) What about the launches in the rest of the world?
As I said above, we’re still working on figuring out the Spanish issue. Australia has technically launched (the digital download is available) but the big thrust is with all the disks, which just went to replication. So it’ll be around two weeks before we see them show up, and then probably a week or so after that before we load up the first server to capacity and start rolling out additional servers. After that, we have a major upcoming launch in Russia, which we’re still putting server hardware into place for. It’ll be pretty exciting, both because we’ve got a great marketing campaign ready to go, and because I get to go visit Russia for the launch! And finally, things in Asia are going quite well, and in addition to buying more server hardware for Russia, that will be a big roll out (it uses a different business model which results in a lot more users than here) which means we’ll have to refigure all of this out again! :-)

This is already in place.

File a support ticket and a GM can assist. Only toons created before the last patch can get a party crate.

Has anyone had problems with this in the latest build with normal heavy round shot? All of the live tests we ran with players who had this problem went favorably.