08/11/2008    |    Devlog    |    isildur    |    Discuss

Population balance is a problem that any online game with multiple persistent teams faces. I can remember being steamrolled by the ‘Albion zerg’ in Dark Age of Camelot, outnumbered 2 to 1 and barely holding on in keep sieges. It’s not a new problem, but it’s one we took explicit steps to mitigate. That’s one of the reasons our port battles have a population limit, and our ad-hoc PvP battles have an even smaller population limit: even an outnumbered side can still win individual battles.

Unfortunately, population balance problems aren’t simple, and those solutions don’t address many of the other issues that arise from an outnumbered nation. For instance, an outnumbered nation might be able to win an ad-hoc PvP battle, but overall the nation with the higher population is winning more battles. An outnumbered nation can win a port battle, but can they win every single port battle, when their enemies can attack them on multiple fronts? An outnumbered nation can produce goods, but can they outproduce the kind of lineship-manufacturing infrastructure that a high-population nation can organize?

They’re hard problems, with no easy fixes. We’re going to be taking some short-term steps towards addressing this issue, though, and planning longer-range solutions to try to ameliorate the worst effects of population imbalance.

What we’re going to be implementing over the course of the next milestone is a system of incentives to play an underpopulated nation. If your nation is significantly underpopulated, you’ll receive bonuses to earned doubloons and experience (and, potentially, other bonuses to be announced later). Even if you’re just somewhat underpopulated, you’ll receive some degree of bonus. We’ll be basing the determination of ‘underpopulated’ on weekly peak population of each nation on each server.

We’ll also be making the ‘underpopulated’ status of a nation on a given server visible on the server selection screen. This is important because, as Rusty has mentioned recently, we’re going to be making an aggressive marketing and free-trial push to bring new players into the game. A player making a new account and a first character will be steered towards the lower-population nations on a given server.

We believe this won’t completely solve the issue of population balance, but will be a first step towards seriously addressing it. Our goal is, as always, for everyone to have a chance at fun, fair PvP ship combat, and we hope this will start steering us in the right direction.

08/11/2008    |    Devlog    |    isildur    |    Discuss