Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
They've talked about being able to support 500 v 500 battles. Which I think is a reasonable claim, it's ambitious but not unreasonable. It can also be scaled down, if they can't handle 500 v 500 they can make them smaller.
What I'm referring to is the possibility of thousands of players gathering in the open world. That is not something you can just hand wave as "something we're working on." And you cannot scale that down unless you lower server populations, which I don't think they want to do.
Sharding ruins immersion, so it's totally fine to complain about it and not want it to be present in Ashes. But if you don't want sharding, you need to provide an alternative.
So far all I've heard is "sharding is bad" without any alternatives being provided. Hoping for something better doesn't make it real or possible.
If you want I can give an example of an alternative. Not saying this is a good idea, just providing an example.
Maybe they could limit player movement. If 2000 players are in a node, the node prevents other players from entering. This would have it's own issues, but it's a real option that exists, not just some theoretical super server.
and if the argument comes up that rendering so many players is problematic i can only say that intrepid (if necessary) plans to generalize the appearance of the players characters which saves a lot of computing power and that the computing power to render the characters has to come from the user. The servers do nothing for the graphics calculation.
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I don't know why you're talking about the player's personal computer or connection, that has nothing to do with this. We're talking about server load, not if a player is lagging because they have a weak rig.
When you say "servers today have incredible computing resources and bandwidths that a user will never reach" can you provide literally a single example of that in the context of a persistent game world.
Ashes of Creation is not going to be using a data center worth billions of dollars to run their game.
I just wanted to make clear that Intrepid has the ability (and I'm sure they will) to use cloud computing services that are extremely scalable (if they program the backend correctly). Intrepid will not buy their own servers and distribute them all over the world. Cloud computing services today offer the possibility to rent the best available servers all over the world, set up your game infrastructure on them and have nothing to do with the maintenance and upgrading of the hardware.
I don't know what you mean by "in the context of a persistent game world" but server hardware is designed for use cases with compute intensive applications (as is the case with Ashes). Besides, there is the possibility to add more computing power to the server array with a few clicks (if you use a cloud provider) if necessary. Therefore, the theoretical computational power available to Intrepid is the computational power offered by the cloud provider (which should be several petaflops (quadrillion operations per second)). The bandwidth of a data center will also be more than the internet connection at home.
Of course it is a question of money how much computing power and bandwidth, storage, etc Intrepid rents but it is far cheaper than buying and maintaining the hardware yourself.
In the end, it depends on the efficient programming of the backend, how performant the game will be. Since Intrepid got some experts from Planetside 2 (has the world record in 2020 with the most players in a fight (over 1200) https://youtube.com/watch?v=MTXcrnjyzqs at minute 12:55) and other big games I am confident that they will make the backend so efficient. and in case there are 10k players in one place the home internet connection is probably not enough.
my opinion
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I can't really understand what is happening in that YouTube video but if 1200+ players are actually being loaded and there isn't any delay or latency issues that's a pretty good example.
Again, I don't care if players themselves crash or timeout. I only care about server performance because it can cause exploits, bugs, glitches and errors. If a player gets disconnected that won't break the game.
if the server load gets to a critical point intrepid can get more computing power/RAM (more servers) for load balancing with a few klicks (or automated). thats no big deal today
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You sure?
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Servers
Server hosting
Ashes of Creation servers are being hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS).[134]
The Ashes of Creation Apocalypse stress test was hosted by Microsoft servers in the US Midwest (Ohio).[135]
Google was the original candidate for server hosting.[136]
Literally Billion dollar server farms.
Several of the Devs are from Planetside 2. Networking/programming devs.
PlanetSide 2 holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest first-person shooter battle, with over 1,158 players being recorded in a single battle. The game beat its own record in 2020 when 1,283 players participated in a single battle.
While not an MMO is important to note they have work to do and I for one think they can do it.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Gear_sets#Gear_appearance
A "default player appearance" may be automatically applied during sieges or other large scale battles to improve client-side performance.[85][86]
They have other tools they can use to help the situation as well already planned.
This is the exact opposite of the game style that will make resources spawn faster if the population in an area is high. Or would increase the number of channels available in an area of a lot of people are there.
Imagine of the Lost Ark system was implemented, and all of a sudden there's a caravan that can be attacked. People would switch channels to attack that caravan and there would be no defense. Or you go to a mining area to find a guild is defending that area. You wouldn't have to try to fight them, just switch channels.
The metropolis areas will be high pop yes, but that high pop comes with a downside. You will have to travel further to get to an area where you can access resources. This should also cause people to spread out, although I'm not sure how that will work when you need to level up a node to access higher level content. If they do it badly, everyone at endgame will end up gathering in the highest level nodes. I'll just assume they have a plan for that.
the problem isnt really a lot of players standing together in one area doing nothing. the problem is when they all send a request to the server at the EXACT same time, and then, the server has to update all the players. there are different thigns you can do to fight that, such as actual sharding (not the sharding people know from video games lol) and other things. what is intrepid doing? well, they have expert on the matter.
explaining step by step what they are doing to the world would be a bad idea, because they would be giving information to people with malicious intents.
im also very confused by your posts. you are worried about exploits and stuff, but you ask IS not to ban exploiters xD
Literally the only practical reason for players to be that localized is if they are trying to test the server hardware.
In that case, both lag and crashes are acceptable. If thousands of players are working together and pushing to see if they can lag or crash a server, lagging or crashing the server should be one potential result.
However, keep in mind what I said earlier in this thread. You are assuming server resources are being allocated to in game zones, which is the way 90%+ of online games do it, but is not the only way to do it (again, Rift was the pioneer in allocating resources to players rather than zones, meaning they could literally have an entire server in one city).
Intrepid haven't gone in to specific details about their back end, nor should they. We know compute isnt an issue due to using Amazon, we know they intend to support as many people being in one spot as will likely be in one spot.
We do not need more details than this.
Surely guilds wouldn't purposefully start lagging out areas for malicious intent. That's never occurred before...
There is literally no other reason for that number of people to ever be in the same location.
Reason doesn't matter. The ability for players to break the game shouldn't be possible in the first place. That's like saying if you jump 15 times next to a specific tree and your character gets deleted, it's not a big issue because it's such an unlikely event. Can we just get games that don't break please?
It's not like it's hard - if you are actually trying to do it.
No product is able to protect against everything. They protect against the most likely things to happen, and the things they know about with the worst consequences.
If a game has a bug where a character will be deleted if they jump next to a specific tree 15 times, then the developer will likely not want to spend the time (and thus money) on fixing this, and instead will simply copy/paste any characters lost to this from server backups.
When it comes to what you are talking about, why would Intrepid spend millions on making it so an entire server of 10k people can be in one place, when instead they could spent 10% of that to ensure that 10% of that population can be in one place at the same time, knowing full well that there is never likely to be any more than that in one location.
It would be financially irresponsible of Intrepid to put resources in to anything more than is needed in this regard.
Current MMORPG wouldnt have benefit to work on it, aside the "no sharding there" to flex... but it has a cost, and be it for small or big companies : useless cost are useless.
Not a "is it possible" problem but a "does working on it deserve the money it will cost ? "
I think that Intrepid will fix a bug that deletes accounts. If only for reputation reasons.
What I hope for is that Intrepid will program the backend scalable, so that (if needed) more computing resources can be added very easily and removed when they are no longer needed. In my opinion, this would also make it possible to have 10k players in one place.
Whether this would be a good idea financially I do not know, because I do not know the required computing power and the prices that AWS calls for it
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Quelle: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Servers#Unreal_engine_4_.28Custom_back-end.29
it also says here that the backend is designed to dynamically add more servers/compute power to handle large player masses
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