possibly nothing needs to be done

by electricpirate , Thursday, May 23, 2013, 10:23 (4024 days ago) @ FyreWulff

Splintering has a too possible negative effects

1. I can't play with my friends
2. The population is too thin on my platform of choice, so I can't find people to play with/or people in the world.

As for 1, sadly there's not much that can be done. That's by design of the platform holders, as they feel it's in their best interest to hold your friends list hostage (FWIW of course, it's also an advantage that I can keep it from game to game. A third party independant, cross platform friends list would be great)

As for Destiny, how much of an issue will it be? I mean, if destiny was a traditional MMO, splitting the playerbase into 4 wouldn't be enough. Most MMOs (and even large scale shooters like PS2) have dozens of different servers. Destiny seems different though, as it's designed around curating small interactions, rather than just putting everyone in a mixer and letting you go.

Bungie is accomplishing this via some form of matchmaking, which in my experience has a logarithmic relationship between game quality and population. IE, double the population in Team Objective improved MM significantly, but in team slayer it had little effect.

From a players perspective, how different will it be in a heavily populated version vs. a less populated one? The big, obvious signs of matchmaking breaking down: Long waits and bad matches are less of an issue from what we know. Instead of sitting in a screen waiting, you are just playing, and you may or may not run into people. Depending on how pivotal those other people are to your enjoyment, you may not notice, or it may be a big deal, but either way, it's less obtrusive than sitting in a blue screen waiting.

So the final question is, "How many people do we need in each version?" Dark souls is probably a good clue here. When I played DS on the 360 it had pushed maybe 600k copies at that point, and I rarely had issues summoning or getting summoned. Also worth noting, DS has extremely rigid matchmaking, a little flexibility, and larger server populations (I think it was broken into 3 different servers) would have probably wiped away those other issues.

So yea, I'm not too worried about it making numbers for population, but hey, maybe the content will be so sprawling that it will be an issue. There's a lot of unknowns here.