Show server player count?? 🙂✌

@zenzuki said in Show server player count??:

The coding of this game is such that they can (and do) seemlessly merge us whenever server shards meet certain conditions. This is to maintain each shard's pop at the desired levels. Nobody, at any time, will ever be sailing the seas all alone.

Yes Ive gotten that merging message twice. But waiting for that message takes a long time with sailing and not seeing anyone which is why I would like to know how many are in the server at any given time.

@zenzuki said in Show server player count??:

The coding of this game is such that they can (and do) seemlessly merge us whenever server shards meet certain conditions. This is to maintain each shard's pop and interaction occurance at the desired levels. Nobody, at any time, will ever be sailing the seas all alone.

Or maybe a vote you can do to request a server merge.

You must not understand the struggles of a pirate not being able to find a kill. We spent 2 hours once going up and down the entire map and not seeing anyone.

@sloshed-smurf I actually kinda like the idea of not knowing the server population. One of the draws for me is the lack of things like a mini map of radar...and feeling alone should be something to celebrate in a game like this.

Of course...if you are hunting for others I can see the frustration. Maybe hang out off the coast from a port and follow quietly behind? 😉

@wearelegion said in Show server player count??:

@sloshed-smurf I actually kinda like the idea of not knowing the server population. One of the draws for me is the lack of things like a mini map of radar...and feeling alone should be something to celebrate in a game like this.

Of course...if you are hunting for others I can see the frustration. Maybe hang out off the coast from a port and follow quietly behind? 😉

Yea I heard people doing that but I've never done it. Camping ports sounds boring, especially if the server is empty.

Do you not enjoy getting into many ship battles @WeAreLegion ?

@sloshed-smurf Not at all, just seeing it from your point of view. I would prefer to see most skirmishes happen out on the sea or when two crews happen to be targeting the same goal or location.

In my head the scenario I outlined was more of a “hang back and follow another ship” as it sets out rather then camping the port and just jumping them straight away. Regardless I just was throwing out an idea for when we DO feel like our crew spawned into a zero pop server.

@zenzuki said in Show server player count??:

@sloshed-smurf said in Show server player count??:

@zenzuki said in Show server player count??:

The coding of this game is such that they can (and do) seemlessly merge us whenever server shards meet certain conditions. This is to maintain each shard's pop and interaction occurance at the desired levels. Nobody, at any time, will ever be sailing the seas all alone.

Or maybe a vote you can do to request a server merge.

You must not understand the struggles of a pirate not being able to find a kill. We spent 2 hours once going up and down the entire map and not seeing anyone.

If you spent two hours without any interactions you were just extremely unlucky. It's a big map and the population is such that you shouldn't NORMALLY see many others. But they have been working hard to hit their desired target interaction rates. Obviously that's a moving target (literally) and sometimes you won't see people for hours and other times you'll feel swamped with other pirates!

All the servers are synched (weather patterns, day/night cycle, etc.) so if the code sees the pop on a server drop or there's not been anyone else in the same area of the world as where you are for a certain timeframe, they just seemlessly blend you into another server where players are closer to you or more players are present in the shard. Most times, you won't even know they've done it, you'll just start experiencing more interactions.

It's amazingly clever, but also, not an exact science and they're still trying to sort out the best combinations to make for the best experience. Just give it time and let them hone it in. It'll get more consistent.

And I agree with @WeAreLegion, I kinda like not knowing the pop. It keeps a certain amount of tension going at all times. Plus the possibility of abuse could be an issue if it were to become an easily seen number.

What do you mean you wont know that they merged servers/shards??? You get a huge message saying the world is changing and so on. If you didn't know, that would be the servers being merged.

Aside from the "abuse" I've mentioned in the original post, what other abuses are you thinking of? Every other game shows the server populations with no issues.

@ZenZuki if I was extremely unlucky with finding other people than so were the many twitch streamers. And one of the developers mentioned that what want is for interactions to start happening after 5 minutes of game time. So far it was way more than 5 minutes every beta that I've played. But yes there were times where we encountered someone multiple times in a 2 hour time frame but it was the same one or 4 people crews.

If you like more tension than there would be more "tension going on" at all times if there were more ship battles. This game can turn into something where you have to constantly be fighting while the rest of the crew looks for the treasure on the island but this isn't what the devs want for this game, that I understand. They are looking for the balance between PVP time and PVE time. With all of these xbox gamers complaining of too much PVP, I feel like there will be less and less PVP in this game and this worries me. I feel like most xbox gamers aren't used to PVP games the way PC gamers are.

@spunkus-skunkus said in Show server player count??:

@sloshed-smurf I think that in general, a server selector tab would help much more in regulating the player base rather than displaying the player count on your HUD or menu; that way you could join servers based on your region AND you'd be able to see how many other players are on a server when you'd try to join it.

Being able to see the player count in-game would lead to people constantly hopping servers because they aren't satisfied with the player count on theirs; this would in turn create completely baron servers with one or two ships and extremely populated servers with up to 100.

This problem could be avoided completely however by just matchmaking people with others in their region and merging servers every time the player count gets below a certain threshold (On the Microsoft store, it has SoT listed as being an online multiplayer game with between 1-100 people per server, so I'd think that having a minimum of 50 people server-wide would keep everyone happy); seeing as Sea of Thieves is advertised as being a triple A game, I have no doubt that there'l be plenty of players ready to matchmake with you 24/7.

Of course any addition to the game regarding servers would be a huge step in the right direction and is definitely not unwelcome and I look forward to seeing what this game has in store and how they go about implementing a server system when the game launches in March. I hope you have a good day/night but until next time, goodbye friend :)

Honestly I don't have a problem with the server sizes as long as they increase the "merge" frequency so that were not playing a single player all the time which is what it felt like to me.

Yea no there wont be 100 players per server, it would make it easy for guilds to take over and call out where a ship is and destroy everyone. Basically guilds could kill a game like this and allowing for so many players on a server would encourage guilds to exist. 16 players is fine as long as its always full 16.

@wearelegion said in Show server player count??:

@sloshed-smurf Not at all, just seeing it from your point of view. I would prefer to see most skirmishes happen out on the sea or when two crews happen to be targeting the same goal or location.

In my head the scenario I outlined was more of a “hang back and follow another ship” as it sets out rather then camping the port and just jumping them straight away. Regardless I just was throwing out an idea for when we DO feel like our crew spawned into a zero pop server.

Ahh gocha.

@ZenZuki I do not think this is a PvP focused game. As I've mentioned above, there's time for PvP, and there's time for PvE (The Deckhands above just made clear how much time is expected to be put into each category, thank you @KattTruewalker !). Some of us just like more PvP and others like more PvE. This is made very clear in ( Mega Thread - PvE versus PvP ).

As long as there will be enough PvE content I think this whole discussion will be irrelevant as everyone will be focused on getting to Pirate Legend and killing players wont get you there. But once you are Pirate Legend/sea captain and with no more PvE content, this discussion will become relevant again, I guarantee it.

@Tartansnake-8 maybe my crew was just really unlucky. Is there a game mechanic that puts me away from everyone else for killing too many players? And yes the PvE style players could have been slipping away just before we spotted them. Many ships that we started chasing were going behind islands and going the direction away from us thinking that we haven't spotted them yet.

@the-contact said in Show server player count??:

**@sloshed-smurf said in Show server player count??:

@Tartansnake-8 maybe my crew was just really unlucky. Is there a game mechanic that puts me away from everyone else for killing too many players? And yes the PvE style players could have been slipping away just before we spotted them. Many ships that we started chasing were going behind islands and going the direction away from us thinking that we haven't spotted them yet.**

If you experienced fewer engagements in the scale test I'm able to verify the same lack of action as well. I did not experience such a barren sea in the closed beta before that.

On another note it seems to me that players loaded in often times as I was traveling long distances. If I stayed in the same area boats would not spawn in seemlessly from other servers without any notifications. There is no nomenclature on this from rare, however they have been slightly tight lipped lately as they are buisy finishing the game.

The lack of engagements was in both closed beta and the scale test for me and my crew. And for twitch streamers the lack of engagements was in closed beta.

@sloshed-smurf said in Show server player count?? 🙂✌:

@zenzuki said in Show server player count??:

The coding of this game is such that they can (and do) seemlessly merge us whenever server shards meet certain conditions. This is to maintain each shard's pop and interaction occurance at the desired levels. Nobody, at any time, will ever be sailing the seas all alone.

Or maybe a vote you can do to request a server merge.

You must not understand the struggles of a pirate not being able to find a kill. We spent 2 hours once going up and down the entire map and not seeing anyone.

Then go do some quests. If the only thing you are doing is trying to look for a fight then you aren’t really playing the game. The brutal truth is you are kind of getting what you deserve. They don’t want you to always find people and that will never happen

@sillycolt302271 said in Show server player count?? 🙂✌:

@sloshed-smurf said in Show server player count?? 🙂✌:

@zenzuki said in Show server player count??:

The coding of this game is such that they can (and do) seemlessly merge us whenever server shards meet certain conditions. This is to maintain each shard's pop and interaction occurance at the desired levels. Nobody, at any time, will ever be sailing the seas all alone.

Or maybe a vote you can do to request a server merge.

You must not understand the struggles of a pirate not being able to find a kill. We spent 2 hours once going up and down the entire map and not seeing anyone.

Then go do some quests. If the only thing you are doing is trying to look for a fight then you aren’t really playing the game. The brutal truth is you are kind of getting what you deserve. They don’t want you to always find people and that will never happen

I disagree. This isn't a PvE singleplayer game or some kind of Coop but you wish it was. This is a PvP and PvE game and one of the options is to be a pirate and go find people to kill. And yes they do want us to always find people so you are wrong about this too. Read what the Deckhand wrote above before posting. You are supposed to see another ship on average every fifteen minutes to half an hour.

@logansdadtoo said in Show server player count?? 🙂✌:

@sloshed-smurf
If you are talking about during the scale test, don't forget that this was in the release notes known issues -
'Ship encounter frequency will not be at our desired level during this play session, with encounters sometimes less than we intend for launch.'

I must not have read that part. But I had issues in closed beta with this as well.

@tartansnake-8 said in Show server player count?? 🙂✌:

@sloshed-smurf - I don't believe there is a mechanic that puts you further away from player because you're killing them. A sunken crews ship usually spawns somewhere nearby that isn't near another ship. This gives the crew the choice to either return to the battle or flee.

Comparing sighting frequency between Beta & Scale, I had way more sightings in the Scale test which was a surprise. At one point I sailed my sloop right through a 3 galleon battle and continued on my journey.

I believe there is an element of luck when it comes to sightings as I see an equal amount of posts from both side; too few / too many.

If you see that people complain about too few / too many equally. Than its balanced. Could we keep it that way? I'm just afraid the "too many" side will win.

Seems like this post has gone a different path.

@tartansnake-8 If you see that people complain about "too few / too many" equally. Than its balanced. Could we keep it the way it is than? I'm just afraid the "too many" side will win.

@the-contact said in Show server player count?? 🙂✌:

@sloshed-smurf I saw a lot of twitch streamers that did not have that problem. I'd like to be able to name them here but I won't.

Last but not least we have not seen this game released, so we don't know how widespread this issue may become. Matchmaking runs off ports and if you do not have the right ports open, change your router every couple years and check ur connection for packet loss and latency when the matchmaking server does a qos test to place you in a populated server or have other ships group with you via matchmaking especially in a beta might fail.

This is a console game and it uses xbox live ports. If you and your crew were using port forwarding they may wanna disable that and try DMZ.

Just trying to help I didn't experience things the way that you seem to be claiming. A good thing to try in the next beta is to try going in alone. If you don't see any players fiddle with your settings on your router then try again. Maybe call the isp. This type of conduct concerns me as I have been on xbox live for 15 years and an open nat does not mean that it is necessarily open believe it or not.

My connection is not the issue, its the game mechanics of maybe seeing a ship every 15 to 30 minutes that I find an issue. My crew was always out for blood but it was difficult spotting a ship because of this 15 to 30 rule. And I play the PC game not the Console game.

@The-Contact why cant you name the streamers? They mention streamer names in their videos.

@the-lion-turtle said in Show server player count?? 🙂✌:

@sloshed-smurf said in Show server player count??:

A lot of times I found my crew sailing the sees looking for players but it felt like we were alone sitting in an empty server.

I can promise you that you were never in an empty server. If you were, you would have gotten the message about the servers merging to bring in new players.

Rare still hasn't gotten player encounters right where they want them. There were definitely people in your server, you just likely never crossed paths with them because they have yet to narrow in on their ideal encounter ratio.

It could be empty if at the time I was playing was late at night when most people were sleeping and there weren't any other servers. So there wasn't another server that mine could have merged with.

@sloshed-smurf said in Show server player count?? 🙂✌:

@sillycolt302271 said in Show server player count?? 🙂✌:

@sloshed-smurf said in Show server player count?? 🙂✌:

@zenzuki said in Show server player count??:

The coding of this game is such that they can (and do) seemlessly merge us whenever server shards meet certain conditions. This is to maintain each shard's pop and interaction occurance at the desired levels. Nobody, at any time, will ever be sailing the seas all alone.

Or maybe a vote you can do to request a server merge.

You must not understand the struggles of a pirate not being able to find a kill. We spent 2 hours once going up and down the entire map and not seeing anyone.

Then go do some quests. If the only thing you are doing is trying to look for a fight then you aren’t really playing the game. The brutal truth is you are kind of getting what you deserve. They don’t want you to always find people and that will never happen

I disagree. This isn't a PvE singleplayer game or some kind of Coop but you wish it was. This is a PvP and PvE game and one of the options is to be a pirate and go find people to kill. And yes they do want us to always find people so you are wrong about this too. Read what the Deckhand wrote above before posting. You are supposed to see another ship on average every fifteen minutes to half an hour.

Nope o love pvp and I saw plenty of people during the game. I am not going to waste my time looking for people when there are other things to do. If I see them I see them, if I don’t then I don’t.
If you want to waste your time go ahead but o am pretty sure the reason you weren’t finding people is because you were looking for them and not playing the game 👍