I posted this over on the OF (if you've been reading General Discussion you might notice me banging my drum over there quite loudly), but I think it's worth posting here as well.
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Tagged for wall of text and big imageNamely, the "World Selection" thingy at the character creation screen when you first make a character.
![[Image: cc4feac607.jpg]](http://puu.sh/wwraL/cc4feac607.jpg)
This screen is hugely inadequate and gives absolutely zero information.
Let's go back in time a bit to 2014, when Balmung was closed except for 2 AM character creation windows and transfers.
You're a new player, perhaps even a roleplayer, and you want to play on a relatively large and active server.
From this window alone, how do you know what server to pick to best suit what you want?
And the answer is you don't. You have absolutely no information as to a server's population or what kind of community it might have. World of Warcraft has "PVE", "PVP", "RP", "RP-PVP" labels on it, and very rough population indicators of "Low", "Medium", "High", and "Full".
And if you scroll down, you'll notice Balmung and Gilgamesh are closed to character creation, because they're full. You're bummed out because those servers definitely have the largest and therefore most active communities, but you can't get on there. No other indication exists as to whether a server has what a player wants, but Balmung and Gilgamesh have so many active people that they're full! So if I want to play on the largest community, I'd have to play on Balmung or Gilgamesh!
And then along the line, you hear that Balmung and Gilgamesh are open to transfers. So of course, since you want to play on an active community, you transfer.
Anyway, my point with all of this is that in addition to a new RP server, the World Selection screen needs better information so players have an idea of what they're getting when they're going to that world. Perhaps not total population because that's imprecise, but something like "Average Active Connections" or something.
Will that stop people from gravitating towards the largest servers and most active communities? Well, no. The only way to stop that is with something like the Balmung transfer restriction.
But people would be willing to play on other servers if there was some indication or guarantee that the server wasn't a ghost town. If Balmung is closed because it has 25k active connections at a given time, then a new player would be more inclined to play on a lesser populated server if they have a rough idea of what that population is. They might want to be on Balmung, but hey, Exodus has, say, 15k active connections! That's not as large, but it's still pretty large, so I will still have an active community! Or Cactaur has 12k active connections, that's still a LOT of people!
But still, the fact that players--especially new players--have to rely on stuff like unofficial censuses based on Lodestone sweeps is just a tiny bit ridiculous.
This screen is hugely inadequate and gives absolutely zero information.
Let's go back in time a bit to 2014, when Balmung was closed except for 2 AM character creation windows and transfers.
You're a new player, perhaps even a roleplayer, and you want to play on a relatively large and active server.
From this window alone, how do you know what server to pick to best suit what you want?
And the answer is you don't. You have absolutely no information as to a server's population or what kind of community it might have. World of Warcraft has "PVE", "PVP", "RP", "RP-PVP" labels on it, and very rough population indicators of "Low", "Medium", "High", and "Full".
And if you scroll down, you'll notice Balmung and Gilgamesh are closed to character creation, because they're full. You're bummed out because those servers definitely have the largest and therefore most active communities, but you can't get on there. No other indication exists as to whether a server has what a player wants, but Balmung and Gilgamesh have so many active people that they're full! So if I want to play on the largest community, I'd have to play on Balmung or Gilgamesh!
And then along the line, you hear that Balmung and Gilgamesh are open to transfers. So of course, since you want to play on an active community, you transfer.
Anyway, my point with all of this is that in addition to a new RP server, the World Selection screen needs better information so players have an idea of what they're getting when they're going to that world. Perhaps not total population because that's imprecise, but something like "Average Active Connections" or something.
Will that stop people from gravitating towards the largest servers and most active communities? Well, no. The only way to stop that is with something like the Balmung transfer restriction.
But people would be willing to play on other servers if there was some indication or guarantee that the server wasn't a ghost town. If Balmung is closed because it has 25k active connections at a given time, then a new player would be more inclined to play on a lesser populated server if they have a rough idea of what that population is. They might want to be on Balmung, but hey, Exodus has, say, 15k active connections! That's not as large, but it's still pretty large, so I will still have an active community! Or Cactaur has 12k active connections, that's still a LOT of people!
But still, the fact that players--especially new players--have to rely on stuff like unofficial censuses based on Lodestone sweeps is just a tiny bit ridiculous.
