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Same reasons Everquest has shards. It's not a technical issue anymore (though it once was. The engine we licensed before we wrote Rapture was really slow and couldn't have handled even the # of players Achaea has now.) It's a content issue and a design issue. Achaea's just not designed to grow as quickly as we'd like. Your advancement is too dependent on other players, and not in the "I need to team to bash" sense. You have to get approval from other players (guild leadership) to gain and keep your core skills, etc.
We were going to do a literal shard system but there are both technical and design reasons why that didn't appeal to us. Mainly we have a very admin-involved game (compared to the larger commercial games at least) and we like to have the freedom and ability to alter individual worls according to what the inhabitants of that world want. On a normal shard system, every shard gets the same development regardless of whether the population of that shard has evolved in a different direction than the rest.
So, we've done this. Instead of just opening an exact copy, we spend a few months making changes and additions and then opening it, and letting its codebase develop as its producer deems warranted. Over time, they slowly grow on separate paths. For instance, Aetolia has player vampire characters, libraries and a war system, none of which Achaea or Imperian have. It's got a bunch of areas Achaea doesn't, and vice-versa. Likewise, Achaea has a number of systems developed since Aetolia opened that Aetolia doesn't have, including player classes, subdivisions and housing, and so on. Imperian is, oddly, more changed at least superficially in the few months it's been developed than Aetolia has in the last 18 months. Almost all new races, new guilds, new cities, new newbie introduction, lots of the areas redone (though the overall continent shape is the same), new areas, new newbie areas, changes to some of the existing skillsets, etc.
I'm not sure what you mean by the storylines being the same though, as the storylines are determined entirely by the admins and players. Code doesn't have anything to do with storylines really.
Anyway, like I said, we'd prefer to have everybody in one world but we are fairly certain we have, in total, significantly more players and make significantly more money this way than if we had not opened Imperian and Aetolia (Achaea loses some players each time we open another game, of course, though Achaea is now more than twice the size it was when we opened Aetolia. We rebound well.)
--matt
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