Would this game best be served with a single sever?

Champions Online and EVE both use a single cluster rather than an array of demarcated servers. EVE's is of course persistent, CO utilizes zone instancing to handle area populations.

I think it's a sound idea and was implemented well in both of those games. It probably would have worked great in TOR as well. The one major hurdle I see is implementing it within open PvP zones. Players would understandably want to crowd into the most populated instance of the zone, and complain when they wanted to PvP but couldn't access the most populated instance because it's full.

1.7 million subsribers. and one server, hmm i dont think that would work. i know its not likely, but imagine they all log in at once.

Agreed. I hated going to ESD all the time and never recognizing ANYONE there.

I much prefer the server "shard" model, where I can keep bumping into the same people over and over again. Obviously there are some balancing issues with the servers that need to be taken care of, but as we all know, they're working on that and trying to deliver it ASAP.

But I'd have to vote a big solid NO to a single-server model.

It would mean no open PvP other then select areas like you see on PvE servers.

Concur. Really dislike seeing gobs of other players messing around in a mission I'm playing. I whack a mob of bad guys, and some loony tune rushes in to grab the item I was fighing to get. Item re-spawns, along with bad guys. Ugh.

Or worse, some bored Level 50 PvP cat (or group of cats) sees my Level 28 PvE alt conducting a mission and worms his way into one of my area attacks, turns me PvP and then whacks me for fun.

Rinse and repeat.

No thanks.

If they can do it with instancing, it would be perfect tp have one single server.
But I imagine they would need a PvP and PvE server and of each a RP version, so 4 servers total.

They need to do SOMETHING, cause right now, even though I am on a popular server, the game is death, totally dead.

And this game has such a great sense of community, right ?

It wouldn't be any different now, basically they would take all the server they have now, including the log in servers and just link them.

I think the less servers the better, but one is probably too few, especially when different server types (PvE, PvP, RP, RP-PvP) are needed.

Plus if you combined them all now, there are going to be a lot of pissed off people who lose names. Like, right now my Operative is named Wraith, which is a pretty cool name for a stealther. I imagine there is most certainly a Wraith character on every server, and if you combined us all into one, you're gonna have the 40-50 people who suddenly don't have that name be really pissed off.

Still, since my server isn't that populated, I may transfer at some point, but it would be to a server where I already have named placeholder characters.

Yes, it does.

Maybe not on every server, but it has more of an opportunity for community where you keep seeing the same players instead of there being so many instances that you literally can see a brand new set of people every time you enter a region. How do you build community just bumping into everyone once?