One of the challenges with launching an MMO is being able to load balance the initial onslaught of players. Having everyone funneled into one single “server” (what looks like a single server from the player facing side) can lead to long queues just to get to the character creation/selection screen.
MU Legend isn’t completely open world; you transition between zones and continents (effectively their own instances which can be load balanced across several blades). Each zone can also spin up additional channel (instances of a specific zone) where the number of players are kept at an acceptable level (players can usually manually change to another channel though).
Webzen’s initial plans were to launch 2 servers in the Americas, 2 servers in Europe, and 1 server in South East Asia. For both the Americas and Europe regions, server #1 (Americas-1 and Europe-1) became the server many players (by choice) decided to play on since most know what will happen within the first 3 months (where those other servers will end up having a much smaller population compared to the first one).
Like most MMO’s that have multiple servers, you can only play with others on the server you are on (very few Korean designed MMO’s have cross server tech). This creates issues when it comes to playing with friends or being in the same guild together. This naturally leads players to make plans ahead of time to roll on a specific server. The problem though is that server #1 ends up turning into a queue simulation game like the following.
Webzen on their side decided to add additional servers (one more in the Americas and two more in Europe). On paper, the intention looks good BUT misses the point that with this initial surge of players, many are making a conscious decision to play on server #1 (which is why the above queue simulation is taking place).
This initial launch spike is eventually going to normalize and flatten out though where the other servers will turn into inevitable ghost towns. I tested naming collision and found that names are unique across the same region. What Webzen may not have clearly thought through was max character slots per account. Instead of having an account wide character slot limit, each server provides 3 free slots. Additional slots can be opened up by using Redzen (their virtual premium currency of which there is a unbound and bound variety; the latter is earned in relative small amounts via events, dailies, and achievements while the former can be purchased with real money and also be used on the trade broker where items can be bought/sold with unbound Redzen).
Digressing, opening up two more servers on Europe means that 6 additional free slots are now available while on the Americas. that is 3 additional free slots. Should they happen to merge a few servers in the future, they’ll need to deal with these discrepancies as far as free character slots are concerned (like those cases where a player uses up all the free slots on all available servers).
UPDATE: Webzen renamed the servers to make them sound less generic but this also makes it less obvious for newer players what “server #1” is.
Regardless, I’ve been in queues far longer than actually playing the game since my mains are on Muspell (and a couple of friends have already decided to quit playing).
