Does anyone know if the beta servers are going to be the same as the live ones and does anyone know the names?

God I hope not. There's 2 servers, one is the normal pve enviroment (keep in mind there is a bit of pvp mixed in.) The other is the open pvp server (just race war).

I'd expect no less then 10 for the retail push.

I didnt start eq until almost a year after it came out.... but how many servers did EQ have on launch day?

They have only added like 10 or so servers since EQ release I believe. I hope World of Warcraft announces the server names before the game comes out.

My Guess is there will be 15 - 20 at the very least. You have to look at the interest in the game. Some lesser games, like Lineage 2, start off with maybe 10, but we're talking about the game that almost everyone who has stopped playing EQ, and almost everyone who still is, is looking forward to.

As far as I know, they arn't going to be using server clusters, ala Wish, so we're probably going to be looking at 2 - 3k online per server tops (possibly more, depending on the technology they are using). Opening day and week / release day and week for expansions, everyone and their brother is going to want to sign in, so they will limit the number of accounts per server (which IS different than the number of online users) per server to, what, 5-10k? Not really sure... I think EQ has somethign like 7k - 10k accounts per server or something like that.

Lets say they made allotment for 10k accounts per server, 20 servers would support only 200k accounts. Dosn't EQ currently have like 400k active accounts? Maybe less now that there has been a bit of a decline, but still.

I'm thinking WoW is going to have at *least* 200k accounts within the first few months, and depending on how good it is, will steadily grow from there.

Just a suggestion though: If one of the servers carries the same name as one of the beta servers, avoid it. I learned this the hard way with Lineage 2. Everybody wanted into that server (Bartz). The server was lagged, all the newbie areas were over-crowded. Just a pain.

Also, most likely all of the Alpha / Early Beta players will be on those servers as well. I don't know about you, but I'm the kind of person who likes to be looked up to by other players when I earn rank / levels and such... and not just feel run-of-the mill when I FINALLY make a level that such and such group of people from early beta got two weeks before because they knew exactly what to do. When you join a server that is completely new, name and all, chances are you're going to be with a bunch of other true "newbies" to the game.

I "think" EQ got around 350k active accounts atm, was close to 450k once, but it went down the drain a bit :P

I read somewhere can`t remember where i saw it but it was a link to a soe employee saying that in 2002 at eq peak they had up to 1 million active acounts , now they are at supposedly 350k active acounts or around there .

as to how many they will have per server not sure although from reading the beta boards most seem to think there will be around 3k per server .

as to how well it will do in terms of sold accounts will have to wait till dec or later to see it can`t do any worse then daoc did on release and i remember when it went live some guilds collasaped , others moved to daoc and others merged , scrambled to scrounge members to stay afloat .

As to how many they will have is hard to say but the market is large enough that they could have 100k to 300k active accounts easily lots of people playing daoc, ffx1, L2, eq will buy it if even to just try it out ,

http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce/Subscriptions.html

It hasn't been updated in about 4 months but it's still the best compilation of subscription counts that I've seen.

eq started with 4 servers and quickly went up

Interesting that Final Fantasy is more popular than EQ.

"FFXI announced they had reached over 500,000 active accounts worldwide. It should be noted that there are many Asian MMOGs that claim to have millions of users, but getting good data to compare them to the traditional subscription market is not an easy task."

That was taken from Palarran's link. Everquest is still strong, but SoE didn't get the presence that they could have in Japan and the other Asian countries. FFXI, however, was released in Asia first. I'm gonna bet that 75% or more of the 500k+ subscribers are not in the US.

FFXI also had the, err, Final Fantasy name. The tremendous popularity of the Final Fantasy series was probably responsible for a good portion of those subscriptions in the short term. Whether they retain those subscriptions remains to be seen.

"Whether they retain those subscriptions remains to be seen."

They've been growing.

In September too is the european launch..expect another leap.

Doesn't FFXI license "seat" licenses for Internet cafe's in Asia, like Lineage does? That was always the disclaimer at the bottom of any of Lineage's subscription numbers.

Doesn't FFXI license "seat" licenses for Internet cafe's in Asia, like Lineage does? Yes. I think the Gord has mentioned that in regards to the various PC Rooms he has visited.

Yes. I think the Gord has mentioned that in regards to the various PC Rooms he has visited. No.
If they do..they don't include those numbers in thier subscription rates.

Because then thier "Numbers" would be like 5 million or more.

What he saw was probly FFXi just installed on the cafe machines, since they have a "guest login" feature.
(as in..what purpose would there be for a cafe to buy a license? the user has to have thier own account anyways..in which case they could just log in)

Edited in: and thier subscription annoncement on playonline even specifically says active player accounts.