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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
No sharding?
worddog
Member
I read the wiki on this subject and didn't see any explanation.
How are they planning on dealing with thousands of players in a single area?
How are they planning on dealing with thousands of players in a single area?
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The goal for sieges is 250 vs 250 (potentially 500 vs 500). So you're going to need anywhere from 500-1,000 players in one zone to even consider sharding. For reference they mentioned 10k players on a server.
Personally, I say just let everyone spawn into a single zone and let it ride, baby! Overpopulation lag is something MMO players are accustomed to, so if there really is THAT many people in one place just let it lag a bit until people naturally spread out. I for sure see big streamers trying to get as many people piled into one place as they can to set records and stuff. I honestly think that makes for more fun gameplay, despite the lag.
How will they deal with it?
By not rushing to release.
Sharding is lame. But rushing to release has nothing to do with it. The hardest part of development is planning for edge cases. In this case, with a server pop of 10k, you THEORETICALLY need to have a way to handle 10,000 players piling into one city, which I highly doubt they plan to support no matter how long they take. If we know there's no sharding, then Day 1 Asmongold says "Ok boys! We're all going to Node X!" and then they crash the server. As much as I want them to support 10k players, they will probably have to support sharding to some degree.
My suggestion? If they target 500 v 500 sieges as "playable", then allow double that before it shards the population. Allow the lag to keep increasing until 1,999 players, then split them into 1k/1k, rinse, repeat. So that just means they have to be able to support 2k players in a single zone before the server crashes and dies. A much more doable feat than 10k.
Have faith.
Also, some people should rearch a tiny bit before posting.
The following isnt relevant to just this thead, but...
Doesnt it make more sense to read from the official sources, watching official videos, rather than creating 20 topics a day, suggesting changes, questioning the viability of designs without even understanding the direction of the game?
I mean, you're working on the assumption that server resources are allocated to an in game zone.
To be fair, this is the way many MMO's do it,but starting from Rift, many MMO's started just allocating resources to player characters instead, thus making this whole point a little redundant.
I mean, if you allocate resources to an in game zone, and those allocated resources allow for a specific number of players, you need to prevent greater than that number of players getting together (sharing, locking, crashing - any of these will prevent it).
On the other hand, if the resources on the server are allocated based on the player character, there is no limit on how many the server itself can handle in one location, and it then becomes purely a case of bandwidth.
Cutting player character appearance to a basic model will cut bandwidth use down to very low numbers, essentially cutting that out as a restriction.
If they are all a standard model - as Intrepid is planning on doing for large scale fights - yes.
ive done 500 vs 500 in l2 at barakiel. its not that bad honestly. ofc l2 has a lower gpu requiremnt but this was also over 10 years ago with a not soo good pc xD
prettu sure gpu today can handle it with everything at low settings. also, they said they gonna do conditional rendering...there will be things that wont show up on ur screen if they are not relevant to you in that moment
And iirc Steven (or someone else) said that UE5 is much better for mmo-sized fights than the previous versions. And I think I heard smth about them make good progress on their netcode too? Not sure about that one though. Oh, and UE5 is just optimized much better overall.
In other words, there's a high chance that we'll see low amounts of lag during big gatherings.
the ue version doesnt matter. that just means more out of the box features and more bugs fixed. you can write your own backend o add / fix things yourself before they are released on the engine.
ive also experienced hundreds of ppl in the same room in ro haha but thats a 2d game, i dont think it would blow up anyones computer haha
What suggestions? I was asking a question?
Sharding breaks immersion for sure. But from a technical level it's actually really awesome. Sure I'd love a game that doesn't need sharding, but there is a reason it exists. Servers can't handle 2000+ people in the same location, they just can't.
People talk about lag in really old MMOs back before we had tech like sharding and say it wasn't that bad. Those games are not even close to the same scale as Ashes of Creation. You get 10 guilds together in one node and the game is going to break. Why would they all be in one node? You don't need a reason, if it's possible it will happen, gamer's will always do things randomly for fun.
Now if the server crash around a node how will that affect it's economy? Will lag during trades cause duplication exploits? Will lag cause world pvp exploitds?
A lot of people have voiced their hatred for exploits at me on this forum, but this is an example of why the average player isn't great at preventing exploits. Massive scale server lag is a great way to find new exploits. And the ability to force server lag through player actions is a massive mess just waiting to happen.
I just want this game to have a smooth launch, and not be like new world and have game breaking issues that taint the majority of players view of it. I'm coming from a place of love here people
Here's another 300+ (144 on just one side) people now in not an instanced location
Netcode, optimization, player hardware - all have become much better since those days. And Intrepid are pushing them even further (allegedly). You need shards on poorly optimized games that weren't built for this shit. BDO should've been a great representation of that, but their engine is a bit fucky afaik, though even then, I'm fairly sure their sieges happen on just one server so they still do it.
???
Why are you giving examples of 300+ players? We all understand that at the minimum ashes expects to have at least 500 in the same location? And they hope for 1000 from what I hear.
A server will have over 8000 players. That is a lot of players! And they aren't faction locked. People need to understand we're talking numbers a lot bigger than 300+
If there are 5 metros that means there is a good chance at least 1500+ people will be in a single city at the same time on any given day. And when the first metro is created, there is a really good chance thousands of players will travel to at least see it, even if they aren't citizens.
Unless they have secret government technology I have no idea how something like that is going to be dealt with, without some tech like sharding.
sharding has existed for decades, and as far as mmorpg go, it has been in use in ultima online, probably before that as well.
i played l2 in retail and private servers. the 500 vs 500 i was talking about happened in a private server called rpg club. there were 15,000 players on day 1 in that server and there were hundreds of players everywhere you looked since everybody had to go through the same leveling process. the version was gracia final.
the 500 vs 500 happened basically every day, people trying to kill this one boss...
the server never exploded. ppl with bad pc suffered a little bit tho
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duping due lag can be solved by good atomicity and node updates. probs easier said than done
To my knowledge sharding is relatively new. Layering was used a lot in older MMOs.
I could be wrong though.
Here's 1300 bodies animating a fight in one place (1:08:00)
And Intrepid is still working on bettering this. Again, tech has come a long way and good devs can push it even further. And afaik there's some potential server (netcode?) trickery that lets Intrepid to have seamless splits of a location onto several processing servers, so that the overall load is shared across them. But I'm not well-versed in that and don't remember where I heard that from, so take that with a huge bag of salt.
Did you know Soil from Club?
You only gave examples of old tech though in your post, you didn't show this "new tech" that is so much better.
And there is a huge difference between thousands of entities and thousands of players each with their own connection.
If you could show me 2000 players all loaded in the same area without massive latency issues that would prove your point to me. I haven't heard of something like that though.
When to many players want to rush to a single area, one of the seven gods will spawn with a big hammer and hit them. There will be much blood flowing.
It's a horrible idea.
Unless the server is literally crashing it's worse than overcrowding.
I hated it in WoW classic I'd hate it here.
It ruined PvP and economy, it would ruin them here.
Why don't you just fucking wait and see for yourself when alpha 2 is live instead of opening dumb threads and trying to argue with members of the community that already tested the game and know a lot more than you do?
You'll probably have to wait at least until Alpha 2 for that.
Ashes of Creation features a custom Unreal Engine back-end with proprietary networking code to enable mass combat in the open world: such as PvP, Node sieges, Castle sieges, Dungeons and World bosses.[14]
The networking solution dynamically distributes processes and scales up necessary server instances to accommodate player density across the world.[15]
One of the most important things about Epic Games as the creators of Unreal Engine is the way they've allowed developers to have access to the source code. To be able to do that makes the engine very versatile.[16] – Steven Sharif
The upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 is primarily a change to the front-end side of the game. The custom back-end networking code remains largely unaffected.[17]
As you can blatantly see, I was asking a question, not starting an argument.
Usually things like sharding are used to deal with the problems that come with a lot of players in one area. If they don't want something like sharding, I'm asking what would be some other solution.
If you think I'm arguing they add sharding to the game than you are just ignoring what I'm saying.
So far the only response I've gotten is: "Ashes of Creation is a very high tech game that will be able to provide an experience that currently is not possible in other MMOs"
Seeing as no one has provided any evidence to support that statement, I've explained that I don't believe that to be an acceptable answer.
No need to be angry about me posting on a forum, if you don't like the post you can always ignore it. When you comment on a post you don't like you're making it more relevant by engaging with it. No ones forcing you to read anything I'm writing.
from what people have mentioned for the 500v500 idea that ashes has, the game might just default all the characters in the area to that simplistic version so it can just have everyone there instead-- but testing will tell in the end i imagine
Since Intrepid have said they will not have sharding, and since they have said they are working on tech to make sure they can have enough players in one are while maintaining stability of servers, exactly what is it you WOULD consider to be an acceptable answer?
Keep in mind, Ashes are developing the game with Amazon levels of compute in mind, something no one has yet done - not even Amazon. Everyone else has had to limit the compute needed to run the game to what their server hardware can handle - Ashes can scale up if needed and can basically assume to have as much computing power as they need.