Full launch is still quite a while away (2 years?), but I've been thinking about communities in online games. Individual servers are a bit of a fossil, spawned from a time of limited bandwidth to separate players into manageable chunks. There were many downsides, such as the full and complete isolation from players and friends who happened to be on a different server. The requirement to fully restart if someone wanted to change servers, while paid services would eventually smooth this over, it was not without additional detriments, namely cost to the player.
Individual servers do have some upsides though, namely built communities. I'm sure everyone can think back to Atlas Park or any main city in other games with servers, it was distinctive. There were regulars. There were the same mentors there, the same super groups promoting and hosting costume contests, the same chat trolls, there was a familiarity. I think this is something important to games.
The so called 'mega server' is newer architecture type where the entire playerbase is pooled together. There are definite positives to such a structure. The world is more likely to be populated, the economy tends to be more stable (outside exploits) and the game can certainly feel more alive. There's a downside though, a big one. It's not as conductive to building or feeling as if part of a community. Everyday, the faces are new, the guilds and super groups are new, you are much less likely to ever run into the same people again and you never gain that familiarity with the playerbase. It's much harder for any player, group, mentor or troll to be known, and it suffers from near constant anonymity.
Is either worth the trade off? Do we segregate the player base for community or do we fall to mass anonymity for populace?
An idea falls to mind for a middle ground, or 'virtual servers'. It's a terrible name and any dev is welcome to explain how the name doesn't fit what I'm about to describe. In essence, we take a megaserver, and make connected servers within it called dimensions. When you make a character, you can choose Dimension A, 1, Prime or Alpha (because none are second). Maps are filled out with players from the same dimension, if a map is under populated it can choose to bring dimensions together. In a way, WoW has this in server groups. When people go to the main hang out area, I think they *should* see familiar faces and allow themselves to build what is/was a server community/pride. The feeling that they're proud of Dimension 1 and Dimension Alpha can suck it. But the economy should be shared, any future version of Auction House or Wentworth's should be shared. Any form of party finder should be shared. Friends lists should cross server bounds, because it's all technically within 'the mega server'. Allow the playerbase to found 'the unofficial RP or PVP server', and with a mid level quest, allow characters to change their home dimension. (In CoH this would have been at Portal Corp for sure.) Which in essence, just changes a flag for where to shard them. Allow familiarity and feeling of 'home'.
While completely my own experience, when I try a game with a mega server, I find it much much harder to find any sort of community. With how ESO used sharding on it's megaserver it was near impossible to find other RPs, there was no way to flag yourself to be in such a dedicated shard. I never really got a good feel for the community or what guilds did what because I just saw new ones all the time. Then again, when playing a modern game with individual servers, it can be easy to start on one with a low population, or a crap economy, or one with a community that does 0 pvp at all and you find yourself asking if you want to pay for a server change or restart from scratch again.
One of the best aspects of City of Heroes was it's community. While great as whole, everyone has memories of their server community. Memories of the familiar faces in Atlas, the familiar super groups. With a megaserver, I'm afraid of losing that. I'm afraid of logging in a month after launch and still not recognizing anyone, that a month after launch there's no familiar faces and it won't feel like a home. I don't want RPers to give up because they're all sharded apart and unable to find each other. But at the same time, I'm aware of the pitfalls of the 'dead server', or joining a server where the players have no interest in what you want. Where you're told to server change because there's no one who cares about high level end game where you are. (Not that CoT is going to focus on high level end game.)
Those are my thoughts anyway, to reap the benefits of the megaserver but with soft walls that group players to make communities.
What are everyone else's thoughts? Am I worried over nothing?
I don't know enough about server architecture to know how likely this is, but if this sort of thing has even a moderate likelihood then I share in your worry, because I agree with your assessment of community and the importance of being able to see familiar players in the game.
Spurn all ye kindle.
I don't think you're worried over nothing per se, but it does seem you may have overlooked some tools to help mitigate this. With a little effort on your end, you can still have the community you seek. Using examples from CoH, the 1st thing I think of is a global friends list. This let you play with folks you gel with. Expand this over time and soon enough you will never lack for a team. Conversely global ignore helps with the open zone trolls.
Next up are SGs. (Super Teams in CoT) There are many on the forums that have been organizing for YEARS. I'd say there's a fair chance folks like that should be reasonably active.
Global channels makes the list as well. In CoH they seemed to replace many of the social functions of flailing SGs. (Heck I'm basing a Super Team/League on a global channel from CoH.)
Add these all together and the old game had some fairly robust tools for finding a community to your liking. Now it would be entirely fair to point out we don't yet know how CoT may approach these functions, but we know the Devs were players. We know they loved the game enough to work for years on CoT. And we know that this time a lot of the initial playerbase will know how to use these tools to good effect.
I'm highly biased, but I have good feeling in these areas.
A global friends list is a great tool but doesn't help someone who is new. Forums are generally used a very small portion of the player base. Global chat channels are also nice, once you know them, which a new player won't.
These tools are great to people who already feel established in game or have experience, but do nothing for players new to the neighborhood. You can be new in WoW and after a few days start knowing familiar faces in the capitol cities and chat channels provided, it's much harder to say the same for Champions Online, Elder Scrolls Online or other megaserver games.
I had a lot of the same concerns as McJigg when I first read about the mega-server implementation as I was very much into how CoH/V was arranged; the forums, the global chat channels, the friends lists (both Friend and Global), the unofficial server identities, so on and so forth. But, as I came to think about it, people are going to seek each other out no matter what and they will use the tools that are available as they have become more common and readily accessible. Sure, in our new city, I won't be a Champion anymore, I'll be a Titan... and I'm okay with that.
If I understand you correctly they have, in a way, laid the ground work for this functionality in that they can create different "shard types" (a.k.a rule sets), currently used for separating PvE and PvP focused play. They could probably create other named shards without any real need for another rule set.
Now should this be in the game? I don't know. While there is no direct cost to create them I'm not so sure about the benefit of it. Can only speak from personal experience but most of the people I remember from CoH was through custom global channels and thus mainly their global name. While in the beginning it might be individual characters that "identifies" someone I think over time global names will be that "identity" in for the majority.
I also believe this to be true. My original global handle was not my most well-known character that people mostly associated me with. It wasn't until forming up for a Hami Raid in the raiders channel, where no one knew who I was by my then-current global name, that I changed it to @Cobalt Azurean to better facilitate team leadership delegation. The rest is history... or infamy, in some cases.
A lot of my original connections with people in the old game were made because we just happened to bump into one another a few times on the streets. I think McJigg has a point regarding the likelihood of that sort of thing occurring on a megaserver.
Spurn all ye kindle.
I see I misunderstood your context to mean you personally as opposed to new players. But the answer in my mind is still much the same.
We teach them. We honor the legacy of the prior game by helping new players understand the tools provided. We head into our "new" community with our eyes up. In CoH my coalition was able to organize pre-programmed lectures inside SG bases (To avoid disturbing an open zone, yet handle more than a team's worth of players.). If we have the option to let any player into our base, then we can widen the scope of lectures.
That's probably the extreme end though. Nothing wrong with helping new folks you might encounter 1 at a time and telling them to pay it forward. It all helps.
In the end, whatever tools the game provides whether they be soft walls or not, the choice of how community forms is up to the players. Not the devs, not the marketing, just the players. The best we can do is to make knowledge as available as we can to the players that want to learn and ask them to pass it on. It takes will to do it and it takes time as well. But mostly it takes a decision. I hope everyone reading this makes the decision to help newer players in some way be it large or small. It all helps.
Mega-server with 'Shards' is how I recall CoT being described. I've played other games with a similar structure. The one missing feature is a way to select and move between shards.
Be Well!
Fireheart
The ones I have played have fairly good ones.The one thing everyone had was when in a team you could always "sync" with leader, some even had with any team member. Others you could pull up the main map and choose a specific shard to move to (given it hadn't reached its population "limit").
If you mean shard-type, like PvE or PvP, then I only played one with that kind that I can remember, DCUO. There you just went into the main hub for your side and talked to an NPC to change type. Team member syncing could still pull you onto the other shard-type but no idea if that actually changed your preferred type.
Most games I've played that had a shard structure, you could pick the shard you wanted to move too, often with a cooldown timer.
Teams auto-shifted to the leaders shard or a new one if it was too full.