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Why so many servers?
Terranah
Member UncommonPosts: 3,575
Before you give the obvious answer, because there are so many people, my question stems from the fact that the game is instanced. For example, if two many people are in a zone, a copy of that zone is made. As many copies as needed could theoretically be generated, or is this technically impossible and why?
The game needs only three servers for NA: pve, pvp, and rp. If everyone was on the same server, we wouldn't have to server hop to be with other groups of friends on other servers.
Comments
First, design a server capable of hosting a million players plus. Then we can talk.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
But ze server has to run ze instances?
..Cake..
It's NOT really highly instanced, and lets use the obvious example. Eve only has one server. Fights in Eve basically turn into clip-fests. No thanks.
Now for the obvious answer, because there are queues, there need to be more servers. (this is the second time I've had a queue, the first outside of prime weekend time)
So you will only talk to me if I am a computer engineer?
Well, it first must be physically possible to do what you suggest. While it isn't, there's not much point in discussing the idea, is there?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
But it is highly instanced. If you look up at the top left of the screen it says the zone and some number like 100. That's the number of people in the zone. Do you honestly believe there's only a few copies of that zone on launch day? There could be 30 copies of that zone or more.
Why are there even cues? Just make more instances.
If you have several hundred million dollars to make a game wouldn't it be possible to have a computer that could generate thousands of instanced zones...or as many as were needed?
The Hero Engine can actually support this, quite easily. The problem would be creating large enough worlds for a million players to all fit. This could be done through phasing, which they do already, but there's really no benefit for them to do this.
It's not a single computer, it's actually a cluster of servers working together.
Why is it physically impossible? Computers are technical devices not constrained by physical limitation, only human imagination.
Even if they could do this, they wouldn't. Now, you may ask "why is this?".
Simple answer: Paid server transfers (when they get introduced). It has been a major source of income for WoW, and I have no doubt EA wants in on that action with SWTOR.
Exactly, thank you. So if you have 100's of millions of dollars, it's just a matter of buying the right amount of clusters then?
HE claims to be capable of hosting 100k players at once. Thus far, the claim is untested, because there isn't any hardware capable of handling that many players in this sort of environment.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
So then it's a way to get extra money down the road....
Well, they are a business, and the point of business is to generate maximum revenues (and profits) while maintaining a certain level of quality. Paid server transfers have been shown to be acceptable in other games within the same target market, so the probability of paid server transfers being offered in SWTOR is pretty high.
No, servers are technical devices constrained by the physical limitation of how many i/o operations per second they can perform at peak capacity.
If your idea is ahead of the state of the art, it's a dead idea...until the state of the art catches up.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I could see the difficulty if everyone was in one persistent world. But in a world where zones are copied...
HE claims to be able to support over one million. And we're not talking about a single piece of hardware here. Each "server" is actually a cluster of servers, perfectly capable of handling that many players. The only limitation is where the players are at in relation to each other. If they're all phased into small groups, they would have no problem at all handling one million players on a "Server"
Even though his response was rather rude he's more or less correct.
Its far cheaper for companies to host multiple servers than it is to host one giant mega cluster of dooom. EvE is the only game I know of that attempts it, they have an insanely sick setup and they can run about 60 - 70k on one server.
SWTOR would need to be able to run a million plus on one machine and while its possible probably...economically and software development man hours its just easier to put a cap on certain servers.
Also, unlike eve, there is no way to really spread out honestly, so the entire populace would eventually end up in the top end map sectors. So you'd have million plus people on one zone and that node would not be a happy place to be on. EvE can run about 3k people on one system with fights but they implemented time dylation to deal with it. You really wouldnt want to quest with Time dylation.
So to sumarize TL:DR in a non dick way...
Its way to hard to get everyone on one server once it gets over a certain size and damn near impossible for theme park games
Yes, you could probably create thousands of layers (instancing or phasing) for the same zone, that is not the problem.
The problem is that you can only reliably have ONE DATABASE supporting all those layers. And if there are too many simultaneous transactions being fired at the database, things go very horribly wrong.
But if a server is actually a cluster of computers, just add more clusters. If too many i/o per second, shard and make a new copy on another cluster.
You could probably develop or buy a pretty amazing server/cluster for 100 million dollars.
Ahhh...this is the first thing that is starting to make sense to me. Even though there's lots of copies, one database for all. So each server has it's own database.
Yes, yes you could. But to add 100million on top of the current budget.......................
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
See the post above your last.
You're proposing multiplying the complexity (and cost) of the entire system, only to be amazed at how often the whole damned thing crashes hard.
Instead of clinging to an idea that's plausible, cling to one that's feasible.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.