Server overload!!!

Wompingtons

Hi, what are the chances the servers completely fill up leaving extremely long wait times or people just not being able to play for weeks. Is intrepid keeping a very optimistic eye about how popular this game will be launch day? I’ve been through a couple wow expansion releases that were awful. No offense blizzard.

Samson1

Just don't join a streamer server and I'm sure you'll be just fine.

mrwaffles

The open beta will help with that. They mentioned that open beta will be a couple weeks before official release. They will also keep the beta server active. People can stay there, essentially having an early head start, or people can decide start fresh with everyone else. Either way hardware is cheaper now-a-days. Companies can rent hardware from Amazon and such for release days to help ease the player base in until login times are more distributed and not all at the exact moment they are live.

Big failures IS should avoid is companies that invest in hardware they ultimately don't use incurring large debts after the population starts to subside (the people who just wanted to check it out leave). Also avoid a Blizzard mistake like the one for Diablo 3 where they grossly underestimated their population and it is known as one of the worst launches in modern online gaming.

Fantmx

Server stability has been a big part of what they have been working on and will continue to work on. I am sure there will be stress tests prior to launch. That being said launch day problems seem to be the rule rather than the exception regardless of studio.

arsnn

mrwaffles wrote: »

The open beta will help with that. They mentioned that open beta will be a couple weeks before official release. They will also keep the beta server active. People can stay there, essentially having an early head start, or people can decide start fresh with everyone else. Either way hardware is cheaper now-a-days. Companies can rent hardware from Amazon and such for release days to help ease the player base in until login times are more distributed and not all at the exact moment they are live.

Big failures IS should avoid is companies that invest in hardware they ultimately don't use incurring large debts after the population starts to subside (the people who just wanted to check it out leave). Also avoid a Blizzard mistake like the one for Diablo 3 where they grossly underestimated their population and it is known as one of the worst launches in modern online gaming.

The beta servers wont exist for launch.
There is no headstart through beta servers, that would be absurd.
There has been frequent talk about that not being the case.

To your second point: Have a look at AWS scaleable solutions. There is no way intrepid and my.com as publisher wont use such services

To op‘s point: fluctuating player count and initial hype is always a problem in games as a service and especially in mmos where the player base is tied in so many systems. Its something intrepid is aware of, there is no perfect solution though. We will hear more towards the betas and launch, intrepids focus should now be to make a compelling product so that they can have the luxury issue of having growing pains at the launch

BaSkA_9x2

I believe Steven has said in on of his streamer interviews that this is a huge problem and extremely hard to deal with and that they'd rather have long queues than server mergers in the future. He also believes this is a problem that only affects people who are already part of bigger groups of people before the game launches, i. e. it won't affect solo players and/or small groups of friends.

In my opinion, as long as Intrepid releases the server names before launch and the biggest streamers announce which server they will be playing at, just like how it happened in Classic, we should be fine.

Xenotor

I belive the Kickstarters have 2 Days Headstart.
But there will be HEadstart servers and you will see them so be smart and dont joint a headstart server.
There will be 2 Headstart servers per region. I think 1 per region would be enough.

As BaSkA13 wrote.
Avoid Streamer and mega Guild Server like the Plague.
If you join a server and 2 hours later see 100 people with the same guild tag that you know is from a Mega guild.
Do yourself a favor and delet your character and join another server.
It will take a long long time to reach level 50.
A few Hours or a Day are not going to slow you down much.



I also Heared that server capicity should be around 10.000 Active players and that Steven wants 50.000 concurrent players per server.
However i am not sure if this information is correct.
If it is, then we are fucked.
There is no way 50.000 people will be able to play on a primetime server.
Primetime server = the time set for Sieges on the server.
If there are 50.000 people, and only 10.000 can join for the Sieges and node war, then we will have a problem.
Or more likely IS is going to get a SH**Storm.

Then again thats just something i have heared. Whenever thats true or not will be seen when steven finally clarifies the Max ammount of Active Players during prime time on a server.

Warth

Xenotor wrote: »

I belive the Kickstarters have 2 Days Headstart.
But there will be HEadstart servers and you will see them so be smart and dont joint a headstart server.
There will be 2 Headstart servers per region. I think 1 per region would be enough.

As BaSkA13 wrote.
Avoid Streamer and mega Guild Server like the Plague.
If you join a server and 2 hours later see 100 people with the same guild tag that you know is from a Mega guild.
Do yourself a favor and delet your character and join another server.
It will take a long long time to reach level 50.
A few Hours or a Day are not going to slow you down much.



I also Heared that server capicity should be around 10.000 Active players and that Steven wants 50.000 concurrent players per server.
However i am not sure if this information is correct.
If it is, then we are fucked.
There is no way 50.000 people will be able to play on a primetime server.
Primetime server = the time set for Sieges on the server.
If there are 50.000 people, and only 10.000 can join for the Sieges and node war, then we will have a problem.
Or more likely IS is going to get a SH**Storm.

Then again thats just something i have heared. Whenever thats true or not will be seen when steven finally clarifies the Max ammount of Active Players during prime time on a server.

10000 conc.

50000 acc per server was the latest info.

Also, you can't see 100 players of the same guild 2 hours in as guild size starts at 30-50

CaptnChuck

Redacted

NelsonRebel

Launch is going to heat the servers up regardless and probably crash it at some
point or prevent any more until it can process the flood.

Dont expect launch to be smooth since thousands of people are going to flood enter all at once and be ingame all in one spot at different parts of the world per in the server.

Kaelang

It's extremely difficult to predict, and manage, MMO launches. You can estimate the amount of people who will consider playing through Beta for example, but we don't know what's going to happen on the Launch Day, when it finally happens. There will highly likely be full servers with queues though, that's to be expected.

Warth

Kaelang wrote: »

It's extremely difficult to predict, and manage, MMO launches. You can estimate the amount of people who will consider playing through Beta for example, but we don't know what's going to happen on the Launch Day, when it finally happens. There will highly likely be full servers with queues though, that's to be expected.

that's why they introduced the server pre-register to gauge interest on server day.

However, even with a server capacity of 20000, there will always be a queue on launchday with 10000 concurrent slots

MrScrewtape

If they are using AWS, and they take full advantage of the available automation tools, spinning up new servers should be a super easy task. They would probably be well served to have 10x the number of servers ready to go on stand-by. Deleting them later is super easy in the Cloud, and well worth the investment.

The limits of 10k users at a time on servers will force them into an odd situation of balancing spinning up new servers that might need to be removed 2-3 months after hype dies.

Ideally the game is so amazing and they do launch perfectly with an awesome game, resulting in constant player growth and bringing new servers on for months to come.

Again, doing things on AWS (or any cloud platform) really allows them to be very flexible for building new servers. Biggest risk is server merges in the future, which is always a bad signal for the health of an MMO. But having too long queue times will result in a lot of people giving up and possibly not trying again in the future.

Nixal

Let's hope they have character server transfers ready for launch.

Warth

Nixal wrote: »

Let's hope they have character server transfers ready for launch.

lets hope they will never offer character server transfers ever

8BitBaker

Nixal wrote: »

Let's hope they have character server transfers ready for launch.

Why, so head-starters can jump onto non-head-start servers and flaunt it? Absolutely not, that would completely defeat the purpose of the head-start experience being limited to certain servers. I imagine server transfers will be a thing, but not for some time.

Kaelang

Warth wrote: »

Kaelang wrote: »

It's extremely difficult to predict, and manage, MMO launches. You can estimate the amount of people who will consider playing through Beta for example, but we don't know what's going to happen on the Launch Day, when it finally happens. There will highly likely be full servers with queues though, that's to be expected.

that's why they introduced the server pre-register to gauge interest on server day.

However, even with a server capacity of 20000, there will always be a queue on launchday with 10000 concurrent slots

I don't think I've ever pre-registered in any game, but yeah - there's going to be a queue and a some potential hiccups come launch. But that's all part of the fun.