Dedicated Servers?

[Abriael]

Well it would depend on how many players you have, right? If the game is successful, and we all want it to be, there should be enough people playing it for this fragmentation to not matter, because the hardcore will have their community, the casual other (or whatever server differentiation should be made), and everyone would be happy.

If you assume the game will have few players, then I don't even know why are you guys bothering on supporting it, but as Yoshi said in a letter or an interview, when taking the FFXIV project there were 2 options: Let it die or bet on it all the way, and they bet on it all the way. Obviously something like this won't be of much use if only a small population plays ARR, but that's not the correct mindset.

No. I assume nothing. The idea of splitting servers in many little rulesets, different regions and to segregate old players from the new is terrible whether there are 200k players of four million.

The more you splinter the community, the more you create situations in which people have to bend over twice in order to play with their friends, because every one of those friends has his own ruleset of choice, his own region (who really has friends only in his own region?) and his own friends pulling him towards other servers (and those friends have their own friends and so forth).

Other developers (like funcom with the awesome server tech implemented in TSW, that lets you travel to any server at will, at any given time, or Zenymax with the megaserver tech that will be implemented in TESO) are making server segregation obsolete, and it's really a pity to see that SE is taking a step back by going against the flow with segregated regional servers.

Of course those that implement server-joining techs have to give up the income from server transfers, but hey, some time giving up income to make things a LOT more convenient for your players isn't a bad thing.

The internet is becoming more and more a globalized community. Situation like the one I describe below should really never happen anymore:

Player 1: Hey, you're fun, we should play together.
Player 2: Sure what server are you on?
Player 1: Gungnir
Player 2: Oh crap, I'm on Ridill
Player 1: Can you transfer?
Player 2: Most of my friends are on Ridill...
Player 1: Eh, most of mine are on Gungnir...
Player 2: oh, well... maybe in the next game then.

It's obsolete, unnecessary, has absolutely no positive side (besides a paltry income from transfers), it's absolutely inconvenient, and terribad for community building.

But anyway, bad to dedicated servers, they simply will not happen. Ever. The more you split the ruleset, the more you raise development costs and times. Every patch would need to be adapted and playtested to every ruleset, which is simply not feasible. Thus, this discussion is pretty moot, as the request is unrealistic.