Let's say it pulls it off and becomes the next WoW, 8 million sign up. Will the mega server handle it? Wont it just become overcrowded? I read a review that one of the negative things was that you could never go anywhere without finding someone else, so it felt you weren't exploring a barren landscape anymore like in Skyrim.

Have they even thought about this? Or does the server just crash?

Dunno..not a fan of this mega server by any means.

They will add more machines to the megaserver?

Just an idea...

I had a concern when I hit a Queue, I assume the "Mega Server" was in use this past weekend.

But...the thing I means is...wont the server get overcrowded? Like seeing 500 people doing the same quest you are at the same time? How exactly does it work? Do we see every person in the game on one big server?

Mega server is not a single server, its more of multiple servers connected to other.
If they gain 8 million players then they would increase server cap

I think you should do some more reading about how server shards will work. No matter how many people are online, you will never see everyone else.

This, just because its a megaserver doesnt mean you see everyone thats currently playing. Theres different shards/realms they are all just connected though.

They will call the president (Potus)

I read it and don't understand it, to be honest. Is it like GW2? If there are different shards, what's the point of a mega-server? Just make different servers. Is it just to take away the choice of server you can play on..or what? I find it baffling to the point of having a mega server but there are different shards (i.e. servers). What?

They were not using the server to its full capacity, it was a stress test for a portion of the servers.

Most servers consist of many processors working together, and consist of multiple server racks http://www.ecotarget.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/big-rack-of-servers.jpg, so they just add more racks as needed. It's not a single machine equivalent to a home PC.

And now thanks to the stress test they know that the limit of X server racks and how many users they can handle with each rack. So they can figure out how many more racks they will need to handle whatever launch number of users they expect.

Because having the megaserver means that you and your friends don't have to coordinate which server you want to play on and be disappointed if that server's population is awful. Shards don't completely separate you from everyone else; you can team up with people from different shards, etc. It's a much more streamlined way of getting players together. This way, everyone is on the same server, but you aren't overwhelmed with too many other players on screen at the same time.

The point of the mega server is NOT having different servers, so you dont have to transfer everytime you find a long time friend went on a different server, or when your server is losing pop.

In fact IT IS like having several servers, but merged together as phases instead of separated.

About time we spoke about the game...

So in other words the game automatically chooses which server to put you in, right? That means everyone isn't playing together all the time..so say a million people are playing, you are not sharing the world with a million people, right? Cos that would seem like a bit of overcrowding.

I dont think you guys understood the op.
He ask if the server will be like a banana boat from cuba to usa or a bus in india. ;D

Would be fun to see.

The "mega server" force splits players into different instances.

Correct.

Remember you can switch to a different phase (that would be like transfering on a different server in a traditional MMO) at anytime.

i believe their goal with the megaserver was to create a scalable server. so if too many people want to log in, they can just add more servers to increase their capacity. if they have a huge spike of players at launch, followed by a big drop in concurrent users, they can then scale down the server size. since everyone is on a single server, we won't see long queue times during population spikes or dead servers during population lulls.

i don't think you'll see 500 people chasing the same butterfly or whatever. they're using phasing (i think that's what they call it) so what you see at an given time is only a fraction of the people that might be at that place any given time. if they think 50 people is the right balance for a given phase, you'll only have 50 people in your phase at once.

Yeah that's what I meant. I like sneaking in bushes instead of using paths (not in real life..!!) but what's the point if every bush there is a person in it? I'm hoping it's like Skyrim where you can explore on your own and only see someone every now and then...

I think "seeing someone every now and then" is a bit much to hope for, as this is an MMO. But if (for example) they get 500,000 players at launch, you will not see all 500,000 in your shard.

You will be disappointed. Unless you wait a couple of months after release, then you might avoid the crowd.

The world is full of players and in a MMO it is supposed to be so.

That's hard to imagine. While I dislike WoW, it's inevitably the most successful Mmorpg out there. And I doubt anything could even come close to being as successful. TES fanbase is no where near as large as Blizzards, and TESO is definitely not going to appeal to everyone who enjoys mmorpg's, or TES series. So... pretty hard to say "let's say it becomes as successful", because it won't.

Point being, I don't think you'll have to worry about anything like this.

i don't know about that. i bet the population will generally be concentrated around certain hubs still, and if someone were to run away from said hubs, there will likely be empty areas of the map. i expect most people are still going to want clear instructions given to them rather than exploring for the sake of exploring, and a lot of areas of the map won't have an npc telling people to go there. of course open area will be easier to find a month or so after launch when it settles down.

Man MMOs at release are always overcrowded. Always always always

There is literally a queue of people in front of every quest npc/monster.

I just chose a comment of yours at random in order to reply to you directly.
Don't worry about the megaserver not being able to handle that potential crowd since they'll just upgrade it if needs be.
You have phasing through out the entire world, so even if there are people in the area you most of the time don't see them because they are in a different phase of the game.
Something I'd like to add from my personal experience through the beta and that's how amazingly smooth it was. Never once did I lag, or experienced severe delay, and the server was appearently in the US while I'm sitting in Sweden.