graal 4.1?

[Googi]

Originally Posted by Tyhm

On the plus side, that makes Graal one big game, with every PW another planet; on the downside, these planets are still competing for a limited number of players. Thus I agree it is an idea whose time has not yet come; we need a steady inflow before anyone will consent to letting a single server steal every other servers' loosely-attached players.

You still seem to think inter-server competition and server vs. global game competition is a consequence of players being some sort of "scarce resource". Let's say that there's some truly huge number of players. Let's say there's a billion players, and for some reason they're all online at once (we'll just ignore all the lag/overcrowding issues that would be associated with this). An individual player shows up. No staff member on any server cares about what server he plays. A single player is negligible because they already have tens of millions if not over a hundred million players playing the server (and there's maybe around 10-20 million playing global games). But let's go even further. Let's say that this player is somebody nobody wants on their server (though for this example we have to assume he isn't banned on any of them). Let's say that he's Viper. Even in this scenario, the servers and global games are still competing over him, because he can only play one of them at a time (interestingly, it is theoretically possible to play multiple servers at once the way things are now (though hardly anybody does it) whereas it would be truly impossible in a hubworld model). He is going to be attracted to one server (or to global games) more than the others. Competition between servers is about what the players want to do, not what the server staff want them to do.