I should be able to select any available server, and my client automatically spin up my character on that server. Technically that is a trivial migration and should be default behaviour.
I saw that you guys were acting like you’re being magnanimous for doing it for free. IMO that is absurd.
Don’t matter there’s not enough servers for everyone that wants to play anyway.
“Technically that is a trivial migration and should be default behaviour.”
Oh really? If that’s the case do explain.
Especially elude on the trivial part please. I’m not being sarcastic, I’m somebody that’s quite technical and curious!
You seem to at least imply you have an idea on how to fix something no MMO has done before (maybe some have, likely not one’s that have more then hundreds of thousands of players) so go ahead.
I’ve worked with large data migrations in the past. It literally is basic data management and load balancing. Companies have been doing this for a long time now. MMO’s not doing it is immaterial.
(maybe some have, likely not one’s that have more then hundreds of thousands of players) … this is not first game with a huge number of online gamers, but literally not prepared …
I’ve wrote a somewhat technical explanation here Pull head out of your A** Development Leaders - #4 by vincie.net
But it comes down to this:
You can’t have a central database that is able to concurrently handle 500.000+, users (I believe new world is already passing the million mark even) for a game. You know how many net events a MMO has? Each action that a player does generates a net event. Moving. Typing. Questing. Inventory. Missions. Etc. Etc.
All of the above has to be stored in the database eventually (not everything all the time, but basically a shit ton of data transactions per second).
Now for your solution to work ideally, you need a central database. Since well you want to be able to play with your character on >any< server. All this server would do is process the net code. Do all the logic processing and then write that to said DB again.
That’s not realistic and there is no database engine to my knowledge that can scale this well and still perform well (and do share some solid data if you do know one because I would like to get my hands on one).
The above is very likely the reason AGS went with smaller databases, per server. (I imagine they’re using a Amazon RDS instance per server but likely even multiple).
“OK but just make a cluster and put it behind a load balancer”
Again, limits. Even hardware load balancers go only so far with concurrency or the amount of connections. And even then you would still have the problem or needing a DB engine that can handle this amount of concurrent data. There is simple no thing that scales that much.
Now. Let’s imagine for a second amazon does actually make this change. Amazon finds a new DB engine or creates one that can handle hundreds thousands, no, millions of concurrent read / writes. And they now have to do a migration.
They now would have to migrate and merge the data of $amount-of-current-servers and while doing that the servers can’t run. That’s going to be already at this moment gigabytes of data.
Yes. Quite trivial… Not.
Now to be clear I’m not making fun of you but it’s a bit more then “trivial” work and has reasons as to why its not the current behaviour.
"but why can’t they just transfer my characters data from this local server to another server when I login? ".
That’s likely what they’re making right now it seems and the exact reason why you cant transfer a character from a server right now (assumption). That said such a process would still take a couple of minutes as you would have to copy data / load it in. Obviously out some failsafe in so people can’t login while the transfer is being done etc.
Again, not trivial.
Source: I am a large scale infrastructure architect and engineer. All of the observations here and assumptions are based on behavior I spotted on the servers so far and the workings deduced from looking at the status pages and how the login flow goes.
Everquest had that kind of player base in 1999, Wow has had it fenfold for a decade. Argument doesn’t cut the mustard I’m sorry.
My money is on the fact that it was going to be a paid for service and they’ver had to abck track and offer it now casue of the piss poor launch and community feedback. They had an idea of numbers with pre-orders and the fact they’ve plugged it ehavily with streamers.
Unique global names, low server caps and some other things make me wonder how commited they really are to this game. All of the previously stated make merging servers easier when the player base starts to dwindle and leave. They’ve got your cash with your initial purchase, money wise you staying or not is a moot point, to Amazon.
Lets be honest, it comes down to cold hard cash. Minimise your expenditure, maximise your profit.
“Everquest had that kind of player base in 1999, Wow has had it 10 fenfold for a decade. Argument doesn’t cut the mustard I’m sorry.”
Wow has separate servers. Same construct pretty much as new world has. It’s also one of the reasons login queues are also a thing during wow expension launches.
No clue about how Everquest technically worked. According to EverQuest - Wikipedia pretty much the same way as wow and thus new world are working. Also I can’t find any player counters for the beginning years but I doubt it had 750.000+ users playing at the same time. (do link something that states differently because seriously that would have been an achievement in 1999)
My point is: you can’t have hundreds of thousands of people at the same server. You simple can’t. You always need separate servers. Is it not the server hardware side as a reason then its simple because your pc would melt from having to process thousands of people running around.
Sure, instancing can be used but then you have the down side of the world “feeling empty” or other arguments that folks over at guild wars used to mention they don’t like instancing.
I think the gist is. There are technical reasons in place for this. Money can’t solve everything.
I do agree they could scale and spin up servers way faster and they should have definitely learned from the experiences of beta. And that sucks, a lot.
Login ques for WoW where bad granted but this isn’t a login server issue is it. Login servers are different to the game world servers. This is down to the fact they set a pop cap so ridiculously low that it’s almost criminal. Either they’re naive and shouldn’t be in this game ( no pun intended) or they’ve deceived a large player base by not being upfront the low pop numbers. Do you honestly believe that a game that requires the economy to be player based will survive with pop numbers as low as 2k. Basically you either get in now or it’s a waste of time,.Need that rare crafting item, sure give me your first born as it’s farmed by early adopters of the game. Same goes for the world PvP with territories, the early companies claim everything. Low pop servers don’t work as people leave which diminishes the player base even more.
Come play our game but if you don’t login in first then chances are you can’t play with friends, but we will let you choose a server where you don’t know anyone is playing on.
I’s piss poor and just shows they ahve a lot to learn, and need to listen. Alot of this was mentioned in alpha and beta but seemed to have fallen on deaf ears or just wasn’t worth worrying about.
Yeah, me too.
Been there, done that with data migration and user load balancing. Total user base has been in the mills, though I admit concurrent max users below 100k, and when we migrate/balance users they don’t need to know or care. It’s also not gaming.
Maybe I was a bit hasty calling the solutions as trivial, but I’ve never bought a game I couldn’t actually play when I wanted, because in queue forever.
You do bring up some good points, but IMO we would never see 500k users asking to migrate simultaneously. Also, I don’t feel the actual data needed to be migrated per user is all that large. I mean we’re talking journal, inventory, stash, current status,etc. What would that be, maybe 1-2MB per user, less? How much is there really? A lot of it would be pointers to tables, and flags for attributes. So it takes 5-10 minutes to migrate - if not seconds - it’s still better than the hours in queue.
Anyway, the issue is obviously that characters are tied to one server, and they’ve allowed way more than the server max to sign up for that one server. So another option is to either have small server farms spin up instances as needed to handle the excess, or limit characters per server to their max. Sorry can’t sign on to server X, max characters limit reached.
IMO there are options - and they all have their issues - but what we had yesterday with 6 hour or longer queues is absurd. Another absurd thing is charging for migrating to other servers. Data migration IS trivial. We need to be able to play the game we bought.
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