When Sandbox Interactive announced a new server to accommodate the burgeoning European population on Albion Online – one intended to balance the existing western and eastern playerbases even more – you might have thought it would be a benign announcement, but nope! Players have been voicing concerns all week, primarily focused on the belief that a European server will pull away even more players from the American server than the Asian server did.
SBI has not been ignoring the uproar, and to prove it, the studio has now released a long post to explain its reasoning and reassure gamers. Essentially, the team believes that the effect on the American server will be more than seen with the launch of Alby Asia, it’ll be “easily offset by the underlying growth of the game that we’ve seen in the past years” – which is what happened when Asia launched.
“Prior to the launch of Albion East (soon to be Albion Asia), around 20% of playtime on Albion West (soon to be Albion Americas) was from Asia. Right around its launch, Albion East significantly overtook Albion West in population due to all the hype, and surprisingly, even the West server gained some players as a side effect of the Albion East hype and all the marketing that went with it. When things settled down a few months later, Albion East stabilized at a level somewhat below the West server. Nowadays, West is actually more active than it was before the Asian server was launched. Now, with regards to a European Albion server, note that the population of Albion West currently consists mostly of players from the US/Canada, South America, and of course Europe. While the current European share of players on West is higher than the previous Asian players share was prior to the launch of East, keep in mind that a larger number of European players will stay on West, since the pressure to change servers due to a high ping is not as significant as it was for Asian players on West, where players regularly had to deal with 300+ ms.”
Likewise, the studio understands many European players who already play on the original West server will want to move – but won’t be able to do as it’s meant as a proper fresh start server out of fairness to new players. However, the team has left open the possibility that it might allow transfers to Albion Europe once the economies have stabilized – perhaps 18 months or so down the road – though it’s not a promise: “[W]e can clearly say: there will be no character transfers to Albion Europe within the first 18 months after its launch.”
European players will be happy to know that SBI is working to make more skins game-wide unlocks rather than server-wide, though it doesn’t want to create a situation where newbies on the European server are running around in elite skins from day one.
Finally, the team provided a deep-dive into how it’s consolidating and modernizing event timers for things like territories and castles so that European players who stay on the American server aren’t suddenly at a major disadvantage in their timezone.
