Game Girl Advance wants to know why online worlds are segregated into smaller servers – i.e. why are you forced to choose whether to play Virtue or Justice when playing City of Heroes. This is, of course, one of those ideas that just keeps bubbling up, and keeps disappearing again. Many games have promised it, only to back away later. Surely, if 1500 people in a world is exciting, then 150,000 people is deliriously exciting, right? If we’re selling social gameplay, shouldn’t there be as few barriers as possible?

There are a myriad of reasons why. The first of which is that doing so is a large technical challenge in a genre already replete with them. People often forget how complicated these games are to engineer. As such, you need a pretty compelling design reason to undergo the endeavor. But instead, huge seamless worlds open up design questions instead. Examples include:

1) Namespace. How hard is it to get the name you want? This is already a problem in City of Heroes with the smaller player base (although “Righteous Furry” always seemed to be available).
2) Different rulesets. One nice thing about having different servers is that they can have different rules – a PvP server, a fast advancement server, a roleplay server, a server where you pay an extra 40 bucks a month for the right to play with people who use vowels in sentences.
3) Ability to socially escape. One hidden benefit of having different servers is that, if you or your guild has committed a major faux pax, they can leave the world and start somewhere else. If your guild has been pwn3d and has no place to go and regroup, they are left with no other option other than to disband.
4) Content. A biggie. The more people your world must hold, the larger it must be. You could hope to randomly generate much of the world, but randomly generated content has never proven to resonate the way hand-crafted content does. This is, of course, much worse in a Licensed world – who wants to spend time in a randomly generated flyspeck on the map when you can hang out in Gondor or Tatooine?
5) Keeping people apart. Somehow, you have to keep all these people from gathering into Tatooine at the same time. Do you make copies of Tatooine (as City of Heroes does for their zones)? If so, how do players traverse them? How do they find each other? Do you bother to explain this in your backstory?

The final one is the one that academics and sociologists spend a lot of time thinking about – how many people can you have in an online world before it goes all to hell? When the market went from Meridian 59 (100-200 people simultaneously) to Ultima Online (1000-3000 people simultaneously), a lot of the things that we took for granted about online communities and societies started to get questioned. In Meridian, for example, it’s fairly trivial for a community to police itself – it’s pretty easy to keep an eye on the Who list and know who’s been naughty or nice. In UO, that was flatly impossible. As such, there were many fun social design constructs in M59 I would never have put into a modern game.

Raph has talked frequently about how various sociologists have claimed there is a perfect community size, which hovers around 150-200 people, and how that number has been cited by many sociologists outside our field. If you get a community larger than that, then the society is forced to divide into smaller and smaller subsocieties for the members to cognitively keep up. All the same, it’s not uncommon for a player logging into an online game to feel like they’re dropping into New York City with a ‘kick me’ sign on the back. These issues of community bonding and newbie overwhelming are issues that fall in the category of “we, collectively as designers, have a vaguely bad feeling about what could happen here, but we can’t put our finger on it.”

That being said, it will probably happen sooner or later, and it is to everyone’s benefit to begin breaking down some of the barriers as we can. Sony Online has taken the first step, one that GGA requests, and it’s a remarkable one, and that is the ability to send chat messages to people playing not only other servers, but other SOE games as well.

Cross-game tells do work in EverQuest II.
To message characters on your own server:
/tell character message
To message characters on another EQ2 server:
/tell server.character message
To message characters in SWG:
/tell swg.server.character message
To message characters in EQ:
/tell eq.server.character message

It’s a neat feature, and one worth doing if you’re SOE and investing your entire future in the online space. However, while I think that it’s boffo, most people are going to prefer to actually PLAY with their friends. As such, I only think that one class of users is going to use it heavily: CSRs. This system allows for CSRs to answer your question, no matter what server they’re logged into. If it’s a simple and stupid CSR request (as, believe me, 95% of them are), a CSR no longer has to log in to resolve the issue. As such, CSRs won’t have to disco and log into a new world to handle a call on another world, unless further examination is needed. You know how much time you spend staring at loading screens? Imagine having to do that 50 times a day. If no other benefit is seen from this change, the reduced number of CSRs who shove a pencil into their temple to make the pain end should be benefit enough.