Why not merge into 1 server? (rather than cross server queues or such)

[Savej]

It doesn't matter as people who arn't like me would still lose names in the merging process and more un-needed rage on the forums.

 

It's better to develope cross server tech.

 

Yes but It costs too much for them to develop new tech for x-server - they aren't doing it.

Merges are practical and can be done right now if BW decides to. Sure they'll lose people over naming conflicts but they're losing people now from dying/fading servers who either don't want to transfer / start-over and from people giving up on things like ranked pvp which is much too exploitable with small pops. Merges would improve the quality of gameplay for the remaining/new players and retention will go up (as it did after the last merges).

Edited July 15, 2014 by Savej

[Reno_Tarshil]

Yes but It costs too much for them to develop new tech for x-server - they aren't doing it.

Merges are practical and can be done right now if BW decides to. Sure they'll lose people over naming conflicts but they're losing people now from dying/fading servers who either don't want to transfer / start-over and from people giving up on things like ranked pvp which is much too exploitable with small pops. Merges would improve the quality of gameplay for the remaining/new players and retention will go up (as it did after the last merges).

 

They are losing people right because it's the summer and this is a usual lull period for MMO's. If everything stays on track I would be willing to bet the servers start to fill up again.

[Kalfear]

Becomes some people like to RP so they go to a RP server or they like to PVP so they go to a PVP server.....do I really need to keep going with this?

 

At this stage they probably do themselves a favor with 3 servers

 

PVE (normal server)

PVP ( Everyone flagged server but remains rep vrs imp factional)

Role Player Server (currently they really nothing but PVE servers to be honest but hopefully if they merged all the servers they would actually enfore naming rules and monitor chat on fleets and stater/home planets to promote a real RP setting)

 

But honestly, Id just be satisfied with Cross server queues for Flashpoints/Ops/PVP to be honest.

[Kulyok]

Technically, different servers have these advantages:

 

- you get access to 22 more characters on each server, so it's better for rolling more alts;

- you start with legacy level 1, so it's a chance to "start anew" once more, to feel like a beginning player;

- you can play on American server from Europe(or vice versa) in anti-peak times, meaning you can enjoy your game on a half-empty server without any node-stealing.

 

Merging would lose two out of three - or one out of three if they increase the number of alts.

[Kalfear]

They are losing people right because it's the summer and this is a usual lull period for MMO's. If everything stays on track I would be willing to bet the servers start to fill up again.

 

Your correct that summer is a down time.

I personally know a few that disappear from MMORPGs for the months of June to Sept (and possibly longer depending on how mild the weather stays into Sept/Oct)

 

But with this game now ageing you also can not just assume it will fill up servers in the Fall, Winter, Spring seasons.

 

Last year in the fall SW:TOR really had no new competition (sorry GW2 was never real competition) but with the release of ESO and Wildstar (no matter what our personal impressions of those games are) it will dwindle the overall returning player pool.

 

SW:TOR needs something to hook players to return and while I came back for the housing. Housing itself is not a guaranteed hook for everyone out there. So EA will have to produce something else that resolves around PVE content in the fall to promote coming back.

 

Ideally the perfect scenario and template was already designed by Everquest.

 

1 new FULL BLOWN EXPANSION every year (talking at least the size of Makeb/Oricon/CZ combined as a minimum standard) in the fall to draw returning players back in. EQ ended up having something like 12 or more expansions by doing that. Modern games could only be so privileged to have that life span while remaining fully profitable.

 

But you cant just assume any game will instantly draw its crowds back in after the summer slow season over. Every year produces more and more titles in direct competition for those same subscriptions.

 

Question is who is willing to step up and earn those subscriptions.

 

Time will tell on that side of equation

[Heal-To-Full]

At this stage they probably do themselves a favor with 3 servers

PVE (normal server)

PVP ( Everyone flagged server but remains rep vrs imp factional)

Role Player Server

That's still 12 servers:

3x US

3x Europe (English)

3x French

3x German

And this will still have problems, because US servers will have something like 3 times the population density of all others. So half the players will live in a very high population environment, the other half will have it just as it is now.

 

OP's proposal will make for a literal Tower of Babel. Don't like Española in general chat? Let's see how you like it when you have French and German and some of these people actually don't know more than a few words of English - the game is provided to them in their language. Oh, and they don't know how your ops and your flashpoints are called, they have their own foreign names to them, too.

[Rehneu]

If SOE can do it with DCUO, (of which revived that game and is well an kicking) Why can't they implement something similar? I am hearing that Shadowlands is one of the most populated servers now with others slowly dying off. Sad really.

[Vincire]

If SOE can do it with DCUO, (of which revived that game and is well an kicking) Why can't they implement something similar? I am hearing that Shadowlands is one of the most populated servers now with others slowly dying off. Sad really.

 

While I agree that merging the servers would be nice from a population standpoint, I remember logging into DCUO after a long break and I was required to change my character's names and by that time all of my names were taken. It wasn't game breaking for me but I was a little sad that my character lost his identity.

 

Cryptic has a better solution where all characters are appended with an @AccountName so that multiple accounts can have the same character names because of this composite key kind of situation. Still this method is imperfect though more elegant than the traditional server shard silos.

 

I'm pretty sure that Bioware could cram all the servers into 1 big cross function farm but they might not feel that it's worth the ROI. It would be cool though.

Edited July 15, 2014 by Vincire

[Kalfear]

That's still 12 servers:

 

And this will still have problems, because US servers will have something like 3 times the population density of all others. So half the players will live in a very high population environment, the other half will have it just as it is now.

 

.

 

but thats what instances would be for

 

So rather then 6 instances spread over 6 pve servers you would have 6 instances on one PVE server

 

Population density would not be an issue because of instances

[Jeweledleah]

That's still 12 servers:

3x US

3x Europe (English)

3x French

3x German

And this will still have problems, because US servers will have something like 3 times the population density of all others. So half the players will live in a very high population environment, the other half will have it just as it is now.

 

OP's proposal will make for a literal Tower of Babel. Don't like Española in general chat? Let's see how you like it when you have French and German and some of these people actually don't know more than a few words of English - the game is provided to them in their language. Oh, and they don't know how your ops and your flashpoints are called, they have their own foreign names to them, too.

 

having played Neverwinter - its pretty weird when you pug. because half the time you have no idea what your team members are saying. sometimes you can kinda guess, but not always. communication? what communication?

[TUXs]

Why bother, since we have various instances, why not just merge it all and get rid of the idea of "servers"... there is just "the game", you log in, your toons are there, everyone is together.

100% agreed!!! There's no reason to separate them. None.

[Drockter]

Personally, I wouldn't mind a single server, with higher number of allowed players in an instance. Well, depending on where ... Fleet could stand to have the number of players in an instance toned down just a hair.

 

If you want to PvP open world... turn your flag on, or maybe a specific instance (i.e. you turn your flag on (or it is on), when you zone in... you are placed in the PvP instance.

 

If you want to RP... then RP (maybe a dedicated channel... PvP has one IIRC)

 

If you want to PVE have a mixture ... do that.

[Drockter]

As for the naming issue... I suggested legacy names as the unique... mentioned above... honestly, I thought they were. Was a little put-off to see they weren't.

[MillionsKNives]

Single server with everyone on it, awesome. But wait, what about people who live in different countries. Well we don't really want to force Warzones or even operations across those distances so we should probably separate people by location to make ping times better. So maybe we'll just have a European server and an American server, or maybe two for US for east and west. Not too bad, still down to three servers. Oh, but wait people speak a bunch of different languages, and that would make it really hard for people to communicate. So let's have a separate server for English, French, and German on the European side. Still not too bad, we're still only at 5 servers. Oh, but some people don't like the same playstyles so we probably want to have separate PVP and non-PVP and RP and non-RP servers. So that leaves us with (let's see 5*4 is..20) 20 servers. We could even fudge out the RP-PVP servers since they're not as popular, which brings us to 16 servers. Still not too bad, we're- wait there are (let's see 1, 2, 3...) 17 servers currently. Wow, that's not really any better is it?

[Anaesha]

100% agreed!!! There's no reason to separate them. None.

 

It must be because it's still early but I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or serious.

[DarthDymond]

It must be because it's still early but I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or serious.

I am honestly surprised that the internet age hasn't led to the rise of the "percontation point" (a backwards question mark denoting irony or sarcasm) in the English language. I feel it is sorely needed.

[TUXs]

It must be because it's still early but I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or serious.

Very serious about this. There's really no reason it shouldn't be done.

 

The way the game is designed, every player can already flag themselves for PvP if they want. PvPers would presumably wander around on Oricon/CZ/BH/SecX flagged for PvP...PvEers would simply do what they've always done. PvPers would have no reason to complain because those PvEers who aren't flagged, wouldn't have existed on their PvP server to begin with.

 

Or...have the instances created be PvP or PvE rulesets. Always send players to the instance they prefer, but allow them to switch for grouping (or to try the other out). You and I would both be on Oricon, I'd be flagged for PvP in the PvP instance 1, you'd be in the PvE instance 2 spamming LFG. If I joined you, I'd go to your instance and be unflagged unless I turned it back on.

 

I truly believe that ONE server is all this game needs. Possibly regional ones, but otherwise, just one MEGA server.

[Raansu]

Becomes some people like to RP so they go to a RP server or they like to PVP so they go to a PVP server.....do I really need to keep going with this?

 

This game is at the point where server designation is pointless. OWPvP doesn't exist outside of events, and generally those events have forced pvp areas, so there's your pvp for that...which is extremely limited. You don't need an "RP" server to RP. Hell last I checked/heard the RPers on RP servers are outnumbers by normal players looking for a populated server.

 

So ya, server designation at this point for this game is incredibly pointless. But even "if" this game ever managed to get OWPvP outside events (it wont happen) the engine is designed around instancing. I can't imagine it would be difficult to designate an instance specifically for pvp rules.

 

I'm in full favor a single server at this point. The one thing I liked about ESO was its mega server...too bad the rest of the game was horrible.

[Zoom_VI]

Please no, I want to be able to read someone's chat comment before it gets pushed off.

[TUXs]

Please no, I want to be able to read someone's chat comment before it gets pushed off.

 

GSH will help you in that regard. You can also always slow chat down and scroll up like a normal person does.

[Raansu]

They did this in ESO and it sucks. It really sucks. I played it and it was pain after pain after to connect with your friends in the same instance, because the instances aren't named, numbered, anything, they try to hide it all from you.

 

Well lucky us this isn't ESO. Instances in swtor are labeled quite clearly and are easily accessed through the map.

 

And then, of course, there's complete lack of responsibility on anyone's part, because unless you become friends, they'll never meet you again.

 

This happens anyways with low pop servers, so really, who cares? Put them on ignore and move on.

 

It also harms guilds, because they can never become anyone, no one knows which is the "top" guild, which guilds matter and which don't.

 

The top guilds will stand out...thats why they are top. This is also a non issue.

 

 

I suspect that each server might actually be a single machine. HeroEngine isn't all that advanced and running on a cluster is very high-tech.

In 2012 when servers merged, a state of the art server would be either a 4-CPU box of Opteron Interlagos at 16 cores, ~3GHz each, or an 8-CPU box of Intel Westmere-EX at 10 cores at ~2GHz each.

 

Either way you're looking at 64-80 cores that run a single instance of the operating system, and so can run a single instance of the server program. It just might be enough for the amount of population supported.

 

Had SWTOR run an advanced cluster-based engine like EVE, it would've been able to dynamically allocate resources to overloaded servers such that they never become full.

 

Well good thing you're not in the IT field cuz that's not how it works.

[Raansu]

Please no, I want to be able to read someone's chat comment before it gets pushed off.

 

That could be easily handled by splitting the general chat channels for each instance that you could freely move between or have them all in a single channel if you so choose.

[Vincire]

Well good thing you're not in the IT field cuz that's not how it works.

 

Here is a link to some of the lower level technical details of the hero engine:

 

http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Scalability_and_Building_For_Massive_Multiplayer_Audiences

 

According to this, the engine is cluster aware and might actually be capable of the 1 large farm concept. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised of several farms placed regionally and clever database replication schemes could make this 1 large farm concept doable on a "global scale". This is in interesting thought experiment for me since lately, I've been doing a lot of work in regards to SQL Server in the Amazon cloud which I guess is somewhat similar in some respects.

[Raansu]

Here is a link to some of the lower level technical details of the hero engine:

 

http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Scalability_and_Building_For_Massive_Multiplayer_Audiences

 

According to this, the engine is cluster aware and might actually be capable of the 1 large farm concept. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised of several farms placed regionally and clever database replication schemes could make this 1 large farm concept doable on a "global scale". This is in interesting thought experiment for me since lately, I've been doing a lot of work in regards to SQL Server in the Amazon cloud which I guess is somewhat similar in some respects.

 

I was more referring to his single machine per server comment but ya thats the gist of it.

[LordArtemis]

I personally think having a single server would cause more problems than it solves. I think it would be better to move forward on some kind of code that would allow cross server queing.

 

As I have suggested in the past, having a separate server for end game content that a player is drawn to would allow cross server ques, since the host server can poll current shards to find suitable players. The shard would then update the player information in the database when the player returns.

 

I would also suggest that cross server ques should have a gateway instead of using the current code that draws you directly from the game world. That way players gather in one spot, and can be drawn to the outside server from this spot, as well as updated before they return.