what is the plan are there going to be separate servers or one main server?
Wed, 09/04/2013 - 02:18
#1
servers?
servers?
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Last I heard, the plan was to have one big 'server' across multiple instances with some nifty phasing-type trickery done. That way everyone can interact with everyone else's characters without needing to buy a server transfer or reroll.
The world is a mess and I just ... need to rule it.
nice I like the idea of one massive server then it will make for teaming a easier process
The single server sounds great - but that brings up an important question - how will character names be handled? If it's like CoH and both the global and individual character names are unique - that could be a problem (at least with CoH you had multiple servers - but it was still a big annoyance). However, if it's handled more like CO and STO - the global name is unique but character names are not - that would work better in a single-server environment in my opinion - especially for a game so focused on letting players create the hero they want.
In a different thread, with secret Identity, we spoke of the idea of a 'displayed' name, as opposed to a hard-coded one, like most MMOs have. Champions Online does something like where you have your hard-coded global, which is the unique name, and then you can name your character whatever you like. For example, if I wanted to be Interdictor, it would be Interdictor@Ellis, while the poster above me would be Interdictor@Interdictor. With modern computing technology, there are ways to have dynamic load sharing, so that you only need a single "shard" and not 10 different actual "servers". I have those in quote, to differentiate from actual physical server machines and farms. So, depending on how good the programmers are, it could be possible to have the player global as the hardcoded bit, and not even just one display name, but a second display name for the Secret Identity, that the player could switch from one to the other.
The name drought was sometimes agravating... but at the same time, ownership of a name was kind of nice... if you picked MrX you knew you were the only MrX around and everyone recognized you as that name... weather they were in your contact list or just fellow heroes (yet to be introduced to) sharing the world with you
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Did we got some hardware specs about the stuff Paragon Studio used to operate the players on one of the biggest us servers?
Are the plans to run the infrastructure as VM Systems?
What Kind of Operation System will be used for infrastructure? Linux? BSD? Windows?
Yeah, as much of a pain it was sometimes to come up with a name, I wouldn't like to come across 50 Night Ravens or Starfires.
Perhaps an easy way to change your toon's name if you've found you're one of a dozen?
Steve
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Could be a nice sink for in-game currency as well.
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Back when Champions rolled out... non-unique names was one of the deal breakers for me... I've grown passed that since...
... but still, given the option I'd rather spend 5-10min finding a name that is unique to me when I create a character than find a new one down the line because I keep running into people with that name.
I'd vote for locked names and just let people search for a name. Have better character name wipe policy.
(Especially if I'm gonna spend extra for a custom chest logo with a specific character in mind)
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I liked having multiple servers and owning the name on a server. Multiple worlds full of similar heroes (or villains) fits right into superhero stories since "Flash of Two Worlds" back in 1961. It let me create multiple Justice Blues on the different servers, all with the same trigger points in their history, but resulting in different powers and attitudes, including the villainous Master Mind. That doesn't really work on a single shard. Yes I could create different versions of the character with the same name, but the rest of the world is identical, not filled with different heroes.
As for locked names, I saw lots of people complain about that on the forums, but I never had a problem. I liked using various deities and heroes out of mythologies from around the world as a basis of many of my heroes. It helped me generate backstory and personalities for the various characters.
I agree with Justice Blues, I too would like to have different servers. While I see the flavor of a single massive server, I like having multiples, each one had a different flavor and some of the "smaller" servers seemed pretty tight knit as far as communities were concerned. Pinnacle aka the Drunk Server was small and fun, Truimph every SG/VG knew each other, Virtue the RP server had it's specific nitch. People will flock to different servers based on their tastes and comforts.
Me I played on 5 different servers because of alts and friends, although Truimph is were I started but, Virtue was my home. Something you guys might want to think about.
My villain, my hero you mean. I always think of my murderers as my heroes.
I like the heightened feeling of community that comes from individual servers too...
For me CoH was all about Triumph server... I find that if mixed with the entire population... I'd bump into the same people a lot less...
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Personally, I would have to vote for unique global name with non-unique character names. I really don't have a problem with bumping into another PC that shares the same name as one of my characters (if anything it would be a funny conversation starter).
We also have to remember that over time, if this game is successful, new people will be joining and old players leaving. Add in the tendency for "Alt-itis" to creep in, people playing at different times (different time zones), and the actual chances of running into a "same name" will be probably be low anyways.
At the very least non-unique character names would help cut down on the "leet speak" names that people would resort to - I would much rather just let people have the name they want to have regardless. Besides, this game is going to be all about enhanced customization - playing the hero or villain you want to play - I'd like to see that extended to what we get to name said characters.
As for the server question - I'm pretty sure that's already been locked down - the devs have said on multiple occasions they are shooting for a single server with sharding. And this I don't mind at all. I'd rather have one bustling server than the fifteen sporadically populated servers that CoH had (not including the two test servers). Fortunately from what I hear they are planning to have plenty of social spaces for players of all stripes and I'm sure there will be specialized chat channels as well.
Short form of current plans. Not set in stone, although since some of the proposed KS rewards involve at least one bit of this, it is somewhat firmer than mud. However, even with that, your mileage may vary, batteries not included, contains small parts unsuitable for children 3 years of age or younger, choking hazard if you yell at the Sheep:
[list]
[*]Global namespace (this is a short way of saying "not split servers"); globals are unique.
[*]Character names only required to be unique within the scope of a single global.
[*]Renaming policy not extensively discussed, but presumably available at some point.
[*]Game world split into "districts" (separate map areas) and instanced content; population limit TBD based on experimentation and monitoring (UDK limit is 50, source license permits raising it to roughly 5x that, but experience so far indicates that neither the servers nor player's machines are likely to be happy with it that high).
[*]Deliberate griefing by mimicing others or similar actions is understood as a possible drawback, and a suitable set of corrective measures will be available to those responsible for handling such situations. We have a couple of specific ones in mind, and may think of others over the development cycle. However, players are encouraged to bear in mind that simply *having* the same name does not, in and of itself, constitute harassment. And if you're both named W0nderW0man and wearing the associated outfit, I reserve the right to mock you both mercilessly while thinking of Mystery Men auditions.
[*]How to handle situations involving PvE and PvP is still under discussion; several ideas have been tossed about, I personally am fairly sure that at least a couple of them are feasible from a technical point of view, and at least one appears to have some potentially neat side effects or implications.
[/list]
Folks, I have a character on $game_that_shall_not_be_named_here that does the unique global + whatever character name approach that has a name based on a slightly dated pop culture reference. One that is a glaringly obvious reference to her powers and build. In the *entire* time I have played her -- several years at this point -- I have met exactly *one* other person with anything that could even remotely be called "the same name", and it was a different form of it (which means it would have gotten through fine on CoX).
If you really see fifty other folks with your name, perhaps it isn't quite as creative as you believed. That, or you have a fandom. Which is to say, "minions".
Mine are woolly.
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Thank you very much for the clarification DSFH (well - as much as can be clarified at this point in the development cycle). This is pretty much what I was hoping for.
As for personal stories about running into characters with the same name - the only one I have is from CoH where, shortly after I joined a team, someone exclaimed "A-HA! YOU'RE the one that took Frostblade!" Apparently he had an alt named "xFrostbladex" or something like that. Was pretty funny actually - we both had a good laugh at it.
Oddly enough, part of the reason I really like the naming policy is exactly because it bit me on CoX. I can't swear I was the first "Memristor" on *any* server, but it does seem fairly unlikely that anyone else predated me given that I snagged the name shortly after it appeared for the first time in technical press (as opposed to research papers). Years later, when I transferred to another server to be able to group with friends, I failed to check to see if the name was available before I went...
Of course, if I had, it would only have meant that I was then stuck with "lose the name" or "don't transfer my primary character to a place that I could group with my friends". Some of us don't consider all of our alts equal.
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I thought the same thing when Champions Online came out. Until I learned that each instance/shard could only accommodate something like 50 people.
On the topic of having a unique name versus name@globalhandle, I have to admit I'm not a particular fan of having @globalhandle attached to my characters' names. On the other hand, I'm really not fond of seeing Raven, Rav3n, R@ven, or whatever other such permutations people generally come up with (yeah, I'm rather a snob in that regard), either. In the end, I'd rather be able to use the name I chose for my hero than to discover that my cool, new hero now needs a less cool, new name.
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I thought it was upwards of 100 to 200? Did they scale that back? In any case - at least the zone chat channels in CO are not limited to the shard - they are for all instances of the zone - so someone in MC 2 can speak with someone in MC 33 with no difficulty.
Heck - even CoH had sharding of a sort - remember AP33? Not sure what the population limits were on COH maps though.
You're probably correct about the CO shard numbers. (I doubt the SWTOR instances are any larger, for what that's worth.) Even 200 people can look and feel like an awfully small number when they're spread out across the entire city. At least the Unreal engine has (will have?) multi-core support, so hopefully the individual instances can be quite large.
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Just because there is a global handle attached, doesn't mean you'd have to see it. The name floating above a hero's head can simply be "Captain Bob" and you don't see the @someguy global unless you say select the player and hover over his portrait or right click his name in chat.
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In chat it would have to at least be an option to see global names, just in case you do have two Captain Bobs involved in the conversation. I'd find it to be quite irritating to have to continually mouse over the names to see if it was Captain Bob@firstguy or Captain Bob@secondguy.
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However it's resolved, having a single shard is a big advantage in terms of maintaining a community as the game matures. Come the endtimes of CoH, many of the shards were deserted, but there was apparently no smooth way to merge servers. I suspect that was in part due to global ID not being part of the original design.
This is one of the things I'd say they got right with CO. It would be nice if showing global names was not the default, if only to promote immersion.
Get yourself right; the world has enough problems.
And PLEASE if you must have a name-tag floating above my characters head like we're in a convention, can it at least be subtle so my secret identity is not obviously tied to my hero. At least then I can PRETEND nobody knows I am a hero/villain in disguise. ;)
Thanks
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The major complaint at the start was "I don't want to change my character name if someone else has it"...
I believe that once they had merged the server lists, and so sorted out the "duplication of global names", that they could have looked again at server merges, and been able to sort it out (if it was required)
And yes, I do agree with you that at Global names/chat not being in at the start could have quite possibly made it harder to work... but it would not have been impossible...
Just time consuming and being VERY VERY VERY careful to get right 1st time.
When it comes to PDS (post-delivery service) I have some experience.
Nothing is impossible. Most things are harder than management wants them to be.
Some things are hard enough to never be practical without a bottom-to-top re-design.
I suspect server merges were deemed by whoever the decision-makers were to be in the latter category. Whether it was actually that bad is another story. Management's views seldom align with the technical reality.
Get yourself right; the world has enough problems.
Name clashes were one that needed resolving, and not to mention SG renaming facilities.
Those were two things that needed resolving, and probably took more effort than what was needed.
People will argue back and forth until the end of time if CoX should have had some merges or not... and I can understand the arguments from both sides.
At release it was 40. They latter raised it to 100. So far as I know it is still at that number, but I have not checked particularly recently, so it might have changed in the past few months.
UDK terms (as opposed to source license terms) limit it to 50. Source license lets you change that up to the maximum number the engine itself allows, though going quite that high is generally not a terribly great idea. What we actually end up using as a cap will be determined by some amount of design, a fair bit of experimentation, and possibly a dash or two of creatively (and deliberately) breaking certain of the things that drive that limit, but only in the places where that makes sense.
An example of the last bit mentioned: a meeting hall that disables summons and has no NPCs can safely assume that every skeletal mesh available can be allocated to a player, rather than having to reserve overhead for combat calculations, AI, etc. Depending on what we find once we have source access, we *may* be able to arrange for certain very specific cases to be optimized in ways that would allow a higher-than-normal user cap.
However, this is not only "not a promise", it is something that we have not yet established is even possible on a conceptual level, without a massive engine rewrite or something — only that what we can see in the currently-exposed bits makes it seem likely enough to be possible that it will probably be worth looking into *at some point*. Even if we do it, it may well not be until several issues after launch, given that "enough for normal zones to not feel utterly desolate" is the only thing that is a realistic "front-line" priority.
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We're both right! *flex*
This reminded me of another situation: how are the cases of creating and removing instances handled? It's got to be quite crappy to have one full instance with 50 people and be the only person, or one of few, who's in the new instance. In the other direction, at what point does the system decide that this instance (or these two or three instances) are small enough to merge them into each other or other existing instances?
I suppose that having a simple dialogue box pop up, alerting the player that they can move to a more populated instance, could accomplish the latter function.
ETA: Bloody typical. The one time I decide not to preview my post I bork it.
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
For the record... being "creative" is probably not what most people who would like a claim to any one name are after. It sounds a lot like an easy and cheap dismissal.... "if you don't like it, it's because of you" type argument.
Maybe many comic fans just want a simple "obvious" name like those characters they like from comic books... Wolverine, Batman, Hawkman, Green Arrow, Blue Beetle, Cyclops, Thor, Captain America etc...
I don't think there's anything wrong with that especially in a superhero themed game.
Just saying... I don't know why "creativity" in the naming of the hero always has to come back as an argument / accusation...
It's not a huge deal but it's really annoying honestly. I know you don't mean much by it and it probably sounds to you like I'm blowing it out of proportions... I understand choices are made because of technical / logistical challenges... just not a fan of being characterised that way and dismissed like I was supposed to call myself something completely unexpected that no one would think of
You value something I really do not in this context. (Really I value the exact opposite)
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I like the idea of unique global names and non-unique character names. As an extreme example, I might find myself on a team composed of myself (StuporGuy) and 7 (or so) other StuporGuys. Communication in chat intended to address a specific StuporGuy, or /tells would be problematic, and I'm not sure how this could be ironed out without the clumsy step of clicking on the character in question before attempting communication.
Someone upthread mentioned having their Secret Identity name displayed instead of their Hero/Villain name, with an expectation that the casual observer wouldn't know that this was really StuporGuy. A click option to change names (similar to costume changes) might address this, with perhaps a limit of 2 available names to choose from. Changing the name in this manner might also automatically change to a specific costume, so someone wouldn't see StuporGuy with the name "Percival Poindexter" above his head before he could change into his civilian costume.
To address this thread's topic specifically (servers), if it turns out that there are multiple servers, there should be multiple ways to switch servers. Of course, this would work best with unique global names and non-unique character names. Some ideas for switching servers are paying real money for a transfer (but not ten dollars -- c'MON!), paying a large amount in Influence/Infamy, losing a set amount of experience gained (this one is unattractive and very likely to be roundly rejected, but it's an idea nonetheless), or gaining a "transfer debt" that must be worked off before another transfer can be made (such debt might be worked off by splitting XP gained 50-50 between leveling and paying off the transfer debt, much like normal debt was -- but what if the character already was in debt due to defeats? Work off one debt before the other? Disallow transfers (and transfer debt) until defeat debt is paid off? Split XP between transfer debt and defeat debt, with nothing going to leveling until one of the two is paid off?)). In addition, perhaps a set time limit must elapse before one could do a second transfer (say, a week).
Is it nuts that I'm once again excited, even though the game is another couple years off?
So Guild Wars is planning on "Mega-Server" technology for PvE. I don't yet understand if this is for instances but it surely makes for a better social experience. They cite some really good reasons for the upcoming change.
Authentication Server
Account/Character Server
Chat Server
Map Server - the most important server for MMO infrastructure imho
Combat Server??
How much info/detail goes on each server is up to the server architects and there may be some ongoing info that the game needs like a *Store server and the like. I would very much like to speak to the lead network/database engineer about how CoT plans to set up their systems and how we can make the things outside the Map/Combat Server available to Portable and iOS devices.
By having access to the other servers we can easily handle things like an In-Game Wiki, a "Mids" or Build-A-Titan system, an "alerts" system that texts players to log in from their SG/Friends, a offline chat system.. the ability to integrate Titan City into your IRL life is both extremely sell-able and great for player retention.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
The mega server for Guild Wars 2 is just for the open world maps. Instances by their nature are just "you and your team" and nothing else. What it can do though concerning instances is make it easier to find people to team with.
Please note: This is not a server consolidation though. You still have your own server which is used as one of the deciding factors for it to decide as to which copy of the map you go into. Your friends list, your online guild members and language also influence the choice as well.
As an equivalence for the "Single server" setup that CoT is going for... this could be done to influence which *copy* of the map you go to, so say the french speakers/german speakers are more likely to find themselves in a copy of the map that also has speakers of that language with them (unless the map is full). Also, you would be more likely to end up in the same instance as friends/SG members as well.
Hell, if CoT uses a RP flag, you could find yourself with other RPers. And the same for PvPers (even if the map is not necessarily a *direct* PvP enabled map, you could still find youself in a map that is PvE orientated but filled with PvPers taking a break.