Goonhub
11-07-2020, 06:21 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-07-2020, 06:25 PM by Studenterhue. Edited 3 times in total.)
The Goonstation Nightshade servers we set up for TomatoGaming had player caps (upon Tomato's request). There were three servers, two with tomato's RP rules, one that had RP rules at first but then became no-RP, so it was sort of like our current structure. They had a cap of 69 (nice.) at first before it was bumped to 55, became tomato felt it was harder to have good RP at higher populations than that.
Interesting thing we saw was that if Nightshade 1 was at cap, people would usually either wait for a spot to open up or play on our servers with their lack of cap, both when Tomato was and wasn't streaming.
Even if you don't think the Nightshade servers can't be compared to the mainline Goonstation servers, I think it's worth at least acknowledging that players won't necessarily join other Goonstation servers just because one is full, and it's not solely numbers that drives people to play on certain servers. Maybe their friends/favorite people play on a certain server for example. Or maybe they're just too afraid to venture out onto other Goon servers.
Because of the phenomenon above, if the intended goal is to balance out server populations, I don't think player caps are the answer. I'd be more at home with Urs's idea to make jobs and job equipment distribution scale better to higher populations, so that whether we have 10 people or 100 people on a server, they can all have something to do.
Now, if the caps were put in for performance, I'd totally be up for it. "The game isn't coded around X amount of players" is more objective measurement than "It is not fun to play with X players, even if the game plays okay". So I've heard from MBC, 130+ is when the game lags so much from all the players it's objectively unplayable. The performance-based player cap should be at that then.
Interesting thing we saw was that if Nightshade 1 was at cap, people would usually either wait for a spot to open up or play on our servers with their lack of cap, both when Tomato was and wasn't streaming.
Even if you don't think the Nightshade servers can't be compared to the mainline Goonstation servers, I think it's worth at least acknowledging that players won't necessarily join other Goonstation servers just because one is full, and it's not solely numbers that drives people to play on certain servers. Maybe their friends/favorite people play on a certain server for example. Or maybe they're just too afraid to venture out onto other Goon servers.
Because of the phenomenon above, if the intended goal is to balance out server populations, I don't think player caps are the answer. I'd be more at home with Urs's idea to make jobs and job equipment distribution scale better to higher populations, so that whether we have 10 people or 100 people on a server, they can all have something to do.
Now, if the caps were put in for performance, I'd totally be up for it. "The game isn't coded around X amount of players" is more objective measurement than "It is not fun to play with X players, even if the game plays okay". So I've heard from MBC, 130+ is when the game lags so much from all the players it's objectively unplayable. The performance-based player cap should be at that then.