Increase the number of players on a map

Neither raid requires more than 5 teams to complete or so, and both zones are capped much higher than that. Is it easier with more people? Yes. Are they required? No. Ship Raids go smoothly with as few as 2 teams, and Hami Raids are done with <40 quite often.

While I've always been in favor of a better system to keep raiders in raids (hopefully it will be coming now that we know more big events are on the way), simply upping the cap on a zone isn't practical.

I remember sitting in the Hive listening to long open discussions with Castle and/or BaB about why the cap got lowered, and why it can't be higher (during closed beta for the current Hami Raid) I've also had talks with BaB via PM about why they didn't then and haven't yet come up with a better solution for Raid Controls.

Is it a bummer to miss a raid? Yeah. It's more of a bummer when the entire zone crashes mid raid and EVERYONE loses out though. That's the kind of thing that is more likely to happen with more people. It's not worth setting things up for failure and really unpleasant raiding experiences by a "simple" fix of raising the zone cap.

That's funny. I remember a LOT of complaints from people who had the game crash on them because the lag was so ridiculous.

If you have a computer that can handle that much information at once, awesome. But why would you want to make things more frustrating for people who don't have that kind of system?

It's not just server side issues that are the problem. The more people in a zone, the more problems people who don't have top of the line computers will have. If you increase the cap on people allowed in a zone, you will basically be saying "Buy a better computer or you can't participate in this event".

Sorry, but people who have no trouble playing the game in normal situations shouldn't have to upgrade in order to do certain things. The current zone cap helps alleviate some of those problems by limiting the amount of information that needs to be sent to client side.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I agree this kind of thing can be annoying when it does happen. Unfortunately the current zone cap is set as compromise between allowing the most number of players together in the same place versus the general server lag all of those players must endure. They'll never be able to completely eliminate the chance that what happened to you couldn't happen again even if they did tweak the zone cap any higher.

I actually suspect what happened to you doesn't actually happen often enough to enough players for the Devs to invest the time and resources it'd take to make the situation that much better. Unless you can afford to donate brand new server hardware to NCsoft I think this will always be a possibility.

Hive zone cap is 50 get a few leechers and a few dual boxers in there and it can be annoying. I've seen it suggested that raids become Instances so that if you DC you just zone back into the instance if your on a team, don't know if that is doable though.

Couldn't have been thousands unless they removed the zone cap i think those zones cap out at 150-200 i forget the actual number but it's in the low hundreds. The rednames can manually pull people into a full zone but somehow i don't see them doing that for hundreds of people.

The idea of instancing the raid has been around since it was introduced. Unfortunately, there is no sort of raid mechanic to support it (selecting a raid leader, tagging characters for entry into a certain instance, etc.). I'm not sure if some CoP mechanic could be applied to it, but it would be cool if it could (one instance with multiple 8-man teams).

The maximum for any zone is 200 player characters, AFAIK. To get back on topic, there's a good reason for this:

Take an average player character, especially on that uses fancy costume pieces with a lot of polygons, or a back option like wings. Multiply the number of polygons on a player character. Add in any FX like capes and auras. Now, multiply that by the number of player characters in a given field of vision, and then add in polygons and rendering any NPCs in the area, and then finally the environment itself.

It's even worse in combat. While rendering 50 characters (like in a Hami raid), the game also has to render their powers (extra geometry, FX, etc.) in addition to the Hamidon, any mitos, and the Hive /Abyss geometry. Rikti Raids are even worse when one considers the sheer amount of NPCs that need to be rendered, as opposed to one Hami and some groups of mitos.

Ultimately, one of the key reasons why the player limit is lower, especially in the Hive/ Abyss, is to reduce lag and rendering issues. Pre-I9, when the zone cap in the HIve was 200, at a certain point (due to all the powers and FX going off) one's computer would just stop rendering player characters and GMs, the latter making it easier for someone to grief the raid (before the encounter was changed to remove GMs once the Hami appeared). To make rendering and lag more manageable, the amount of players required for the encounter was reduced when the encounter was revamped.

And although the game's recommended system requirements have increased since Ultra Mode, its minimum requirements are still the same, making increasing the player cap because of improvements to the game improbable.

I remember being in Talos during the Anniversary Event, and people commenting on how their game had become a slideshow. And there were not "thousands" of people in the zone, considering the zone cap.

Angel Red
"We're heroes. Fighting injustice is the thing we do." ~Rebel Scum

Like I mentioned above, I've had a fair discussion with BaB about this. He agrees a system would be nice. He's even been booted from raids on his home server as a player.

However his well explained answer boiled down to the following:

As long as there's only a limited number of "raids" in the game, there's not enough push to spend the time and money on it. This made sense at the time and it's a fair enough reason.

I will say though that that was year's go. It was before NCNorCal and Paragon Studios. It was before the big expansion in staff and budget. I'm not for a moment saying that this explanation and stance is the same now as it was then. In fact my own observations lead me to believe they're heading toward getting it done. More raids now (ship raids, CoP, even the winter event) means more "need". Between that and what they've said about Incarnate content (more raids or zone events), I'm led to believe they've been trying different ways to handle things, and will eventually come up with a solution.

To my mind that's good news.

I don't buy the comment above that there were "thousands" of people in one zone at the same time. The game has never worked like that, even in the biggest player events on Test. Same thing would happen as happens when you hit the cap in RWZ or the Hive or the Abyss. The instance will split. For a holiday event where people are standing around and chatting, the splits dont really matter. However for a raid when said raid is only happening in one instance, that's definitely an issue.