I think I'm coming up to speed on what you guys are looking for. Though I'm still not sure exactly where Jadeduck's core issue is.

First, we're fixing the terrible spawns, which should help out the ad hoc PvP.

Second, P. Pete, are you guys moving economic goods into the island, or are you trying to do it entirely via NPC killing?

Jadeduck, there are some reasons we can't adopt your proposals:

1) Increase participants - 25 vs. 25 is what we think a player's PC can reasonably handle. We can handle more on the server, but it's a client side issue. However, as I said earlier, we did entertain the idea of secondary battles that combined into the central battle to allow more people to play. Is that interesting to you?

2) Make ports dramatically easier to flip - We don't want ports to flip that easily, especially to the point where a single guild could easily do it. It's intended to be more of a national activity.

Yes and yes. Our servers had problems today, and for that, I apologize. We have a fix in place, and they're back up now.

And then i completely spazzed out and lost track of this thread.

Blackbeard fell prey to a terrible fight amongst the big brother processes. Essentially, our servers are designed to be extremely fault tolerant. Pull one out of a shelf while running, and the players on that server will be thrown out of the game, but when they try to log back in, their characters will be automatically respawned up on another server. Total down time? 30 seconds.

Cool, right? Except what happens if the process that controls who's allocated to which server goes down? Well, another one spawns up. There's various races to get to see who wins, but one big brother becomes supreme, and we're all good again. The problem is that there was some logging that was causing a forty second delay on the big brother process (which is something we've never seen before) that was delaying each one long enough to be slayed by a rival. Which meant lots of processes were spawning up, and nobody was winning.

Please keep in mind that the following explanation comes second hand via my wife (she has first dibs on the VPN connection) and neither of us are devs. Well, she used to be a dev, and I got through K&R, but that's not who we are, if you catch my drift.

I'm going to have a shower and lie down.

Maybe we shouldn't have tried to liquid cool him?

It's not the server hardware at all. It was a process called serverdir that serves up the server list to everyone. The cumulative load of everyone sent it into hizzy fits. It's entirely a software fix.

Oh, and to those keeping count, entirely our problem, not SOE's. :-)

Jacob, please file a support ticket for this. I suspect a memory leak, but having your support ticket will help us drill down into it.

Gagh! I missed this thread. Hopefully you guys found out Blackbeard's back up.

This isn't, by the way, a problem with the population on Blackbeard. It's a problem with the entire population on the process that serves up the server system.

You know what's really funny? I had a refrigerator delivered from Best Buy this morning. :-)

I'm not sure if I've said this today, but you have a bright future around here, Twigand.

We're planning on allowing huge, structured fights like the port battles that can be created by players. That's the player skirmish system that we're working on.

We've also considered other features to have secondary fights occur along with the main fight, but they've been temporarily shelved in favor of getting the skirmish system out.

Considering there's days of PvP leading to a port fight, I'm not sure where the drought of PvP action is.