Recently I’ve been noticing the slow but steady decline of trains around the map in SCR servers. Don’t worry, I checked, and it’s not just because I’m in a small server- as a matter of fact, this story gets quite a lot more interesting.
I’ve noticed that people always abandon branch lines after a few weeks to return to the mainline. Sometimes, a new branch can become dead silent in only a week. When was the last time you drove to Stepford Bay?
I feel like if these branches had more life to them, people would drive on them more. This is why I decided to dig deeper and find out how these branch lines are holding up in public servers.
A deeper dive into branch traffic
Just to prove to everyone that I’m not crazy, I decided to run my own mini-experiment (Trust me, I’m onto something) I went into a full 75 player server and checked out the branches and their traffic. The results were quite interesting to say the least, take a look at this:
Stepford UFC in theory should be an extremely busy station, right? It has 2 operators as of Metro’s addition, and is on a branch connected straight to Stepford East, another busy hub.
It had 0 arrivals or departures when I checked on it – a clear sign that something is up with the way that people treat these branches.
When a branch is added or updated, it booms with popularity, and then quickly dies out as people return to the mainline. I mean – The Whitefield branch to me is a personal favorite, but even I get bored of driving on it sometimes.
It just seems like a problem that seems hard to tackle without just increasing players – how do you entice more people to drive on a branch that they wouldn’t on normally?
Whitney Green, the lucky receiver of the tram network! When checked on, it had 2 tram arrivals scheduled, which I was quite surprised about if I’m being honest.
However, this low amount of arrivals could be caused by the state of the tram network at the moment in general.
What truly shocked me was there being no waterline trains! I assumed that there would be at least one, but not in this server there wasn’t.
Ah, Leighton West, the perfect station if you want to be tied down to the tracks for a day and not even be sat on by a fly. As assumed, there wasn’t a train here either.
It can obviously be argued that this is due to the annoying layout of the branch, which I actually fully agree with, but it isn’t unheard of for trains to go here. A larger server size could help potentially boost this number of arrivals.
Increasing the server size could help in solving these issues – but it also brings in the question of if the game can handle it.
Optimisation
That was a smooth segway onto this section, you have to admit. Anyways, a large part of why SCR is currently resistant to adding larger servers is optimisation.
Over a year ago now, SCR ran an experiment to see how the game would handle servers up to 100 players. From this, the developers took action and increased server size from 50 to 75, quite a significant difference for the time!
However, during these tests the game was having such a poor time that the departure and concourse displays had to be disabled to make the game playable. This proves that making another 25 player jump would require some severe optimisation efforts from the developers that might just not seem reasonable at the moment, just to make some lines feel more alive.
What is the community’s take on this?
Earlier today I asked some of the community what they thought of increasing the server sizes to tackle dead branches, here is what they said:
“scr wont get omptomized”
– lft_in2
“they have had 9 years to optimize it aint happening”
– Subordinatin
This seems to be what most people think about the optimisation problem, and I have to say I agree. I don’t think the developers would spend this much time on something that isn’t needed.
“SCR has larger servers than every other transit game already”
– RelaTransport
Solid point! We should be happy with what we have, after all.
Conclusion
No, SCR will not receive larger servers anytime soon.
Due to all of the optimisation needed and the small effects, I don’t predict this happening anytime in the future. Although… none of us predicted the panto-graphs getting added so there’s always a chance! (Except panto-graphs were an actually useful feature but lets ignore that)
What do you guys think? Maybe you really care about this? Let us know! Until then, enjoy the servers and community that we have!
By Cazot, 23.06.26
