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Sharding?! Oh crap
DeadlyByDez
Member Posts: 152
Just seen that my worst fear has raised it's ugly head. Apparently the servers are sharded? Can anyone verify this?
Comments
You mean phasing, as in AOC's phasing of public zones?
Would like some clarification on that as well. I heared varying but no definite things about this.
edit: typo
My brand new bloggity blog.
SWTOR creates multiple instances of one open-world area if the population on that area gets too high. If that's what you mean by "sharded".
You mean instanced zones? Kind of like Global Agenda?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8FlpyeZLi0
Look at this video *spoilers warning for Sith Warrior* or skip through it if you don't want spoilers.
Some thing interesting I've noticed. Just watch the top left corner of the screen. It says "Korriban" and there's a number next to it that keeps changing.
So I suspect the answer is yes.
As long as it's easy to switch between them, I'm a-ok with it. WoW's way of phasing where it separates you and your party was absolutely stupid.
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
I'm familer with what this person is saying. Basically what happens a zone can hold X amount of people. Once it exceeds that amount it makes a second version of it. considering these planets aren't set up in zones, some of them have to hold a lot of people.
Bioware did extend that these would only be used if it exceeded the amount which they ususally only see in one of two occasions, either when the game releases (as we know it will be high at the start), and when the game is going through stress testing as they tend to have less servers thus sharding happens more often.
You can switch to another shard but theres a 30 min cool down (most likely to prevent people just flipping areas if they don't like the current situation of mobs or whatnot). They also stated this is only likely to happen on the starter planets where everyone is together at once and thus on the same planets, as it goes on the masses spread out and the limit is harder to reach.
The limit appears to be pretty high though, but not unreachable. Even still while i was there i saw them open up a new server while i was playing.
Yes they do have sharding, but you get 3 outcomes when you get a lot of people in an area.
You either get
A. You shard the server until it dies down then remerge it.
B. You create a new server, which is dangerous if your doing this for hi pop moments as you may have to close them later and that usually results in bad publicity (omg your closing servers, game is in trouble type of thing)
C. You lag everyone to heck and back, which just annoys everyone.
As for how it works, it's not phasing as in city of heroes where your going to see people suddenly vanish (unless they switch shards, in which case you can follow them if you want), just that a new world is created until the first one falls back under max pop. Once it does and you revist the world i'm pretty sure that you get dropped back in the main one.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Thats exactly what I mean (multiple copies of the one open zone)
This wide open go-anywhere world that BioWare have been claiming for years is slowing being exposed as bit of a fib. I said it years ago that BioWare make some of the most linear RPG you can get and SWTOR looks to follow that trend no matter what the die hard want to believe.
http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Misc/Jesus/Jesus.htm
How does grasping at straws feel?
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
think you might be in the wrong thread, that isn't what this one is about...just a heads up.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Slippery.
http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Misc/Jesus/Jesus.htm
Perhaps BW can clarify on how they have it set up. Having a few shard's in the starting zone is quite understandible, They should tapper off the higher level you go and pvp areas should have none.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
You don't know what you're talking about.
Having played SW:TOR, it feels no less instanced than any other MMORPG on the market. At least the phasing in SW:TOR is clearly marked.
Unless you like fighting 500 people over spawns on launch day, there's nothing wrong with multiple zone instances. Most likely the instancing option won't even be used that much once the population thins out.
Seconded.
My brand new bloggity blog.
I'll have to dig up the quote on this but from the way they make it sound, this is only when planets have very large amount of people (more then a server can hold for that planet) that one is created, doesn't really sound like theres going to be 7 or 8 instances of the same world. Just 2 or max 3 at the start until everyone kinda spreads out.
PvP worlds like illum probably will have a lot of people, i think it's just a equation of
Does X exceed Y
If yes
Create new shard
If no return to start
(yes i'm not a programmer)
It keeps asking itself this question every once in a while to see if X has fallen back under Y, in which case if it does it starts putting people back into the original version then finally unloads the duplicate once everyone is out of it. Usually this happens when you change planets or go into an instance and back.
The way they worded it though is that they expect this to happen near launch but be a very rare occurance later.
Edit: by instance i mean things like black talon and such, not the green barrier things that you walk through.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
It should be a lot like EQ2. Once the population in a zone reaches a certain point, that instance is full and a new instance is created.
isn't that what i just said? :P not ragging on you, just sounds identical to what i said except shorter.
sounds like the same thing to me anyway.
Edit: unless you are just aggreeing with me...dunno it's late where i am, probably shouldn't even be posting, so my interpretations skills may not be up to snuff.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Shards are a lot better than overpopulation lag and I would expect Tor will have a very heavy load the first few months.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
PvP worlds like illum probably will have a lot of people, i think it's just a equation of
Does X exceed Y
If yes
Create new shard
If no return to start
(yes i'm not a programmer)
It keeps asking itself this question every once in a while to see if X has fallen back under Y, in which case if it does it starts putting people back into the original version then finally unloads the duplicate once everyone is out of it. Usually this happens when you change planets or go into an instance and back.
The way they worded it though is that they expect this to happen near launch but be a very rare occurance later.
Edit: by instance i mean things like black talon and such, not the green barrier things that you walk through.
In the video I saw. The number at the top left of the screen went as far as 287.
Then again, it is beta.
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
The way BW make it sound it makes alot sense what they have done, at launch the game will be so crowded that questing will be very hard the way it is now, almost impossible if they didt make it like this.
Im not a fan of sharding, but if kept to a minimum i prefer it.
I have been in a long line for a quest befor where only one could activate the quest then the rest had to wait until he was done, like they have in the training ground for jedi (unsure what jedi class that was, just saw a video with it) This quest i hope they change some since it will be a nightmare on launch day even with shards.
Aoc i think went to far with sharding and it spread the players to much.
I hope the RvR area wont have sharding.
Found the quotes related to this: (apologies for the weird formating, linking things from sw:tor.com didn't usually cause this, i cleared it up some.)
Stephen Reid said "The complete game was available this weekend. What you call 'phasing' we call 'instancing'. What that means to us is, we create copies of planets when they become too full. Part of this weekend's test was to look at just that - to figure out when a planet does become 'too full' (it varies by planet, as they vary a bit in size), to see how players felt about instancing generally, and so on. We expect instancing to happen, especially during launch when a lot of people are crammed onto the early planets. However we also expect over time as people begin to spread out over the galaxy, instancing will happen less."
GeorgZoeller: Launch is a pretty unique situation in many regards. It creates loads on part of the game (the Origin Worlds) that are never seen again after that point.
Design the areas as if they were always under full load. That would lead to large, empty areas after the initial rush in which the normal player population gets lost. You create a large desert - fine if the planet is called Tatooine, but generally large areas with duplicated content suck in MMOs.
There are several ways to handle this:
A) Phase (or instance) these areas to handle the temporarily highly inflated load.
C) Put out tons of additional servers for a few days to handle the temporarily inflated load, then consolidate them later. Players generally don't like that, as it destroys communities.
D) Put up long, multi-hour queues. Players hate that and you really don't want to be exposed to:
'My lord, permission to land on Korriban has been denied. They say the planet is full and that the Sith Environmental Protection Council has decided to protect the native population of K'lor' slugs from being overharvested by denying entry to new visitors.'
E) Don't do anything, after all it's temporary and tell players to 'deal with it'. This leads to people 'waiting for respawns'.
We opted to go with (A) since it's a native, well tested feature of our game engine (we work in different phases/instances on our development servers), it can be activated on the fly and deactivated as population levels normalize and since it has the least impact on players.
We definitely plan to minimize the use of this mechanic, but as with our decision to limit the launch supply of the game to a manageable number of players, we are making these choices in order to guarantee satisfaction for the paying customers that will flood our service at launch day.
GeorgZoeller: Does instancing hurt PvP?
No, it doesn't.
You can't switch instances while in combat and you won't be able to switch them constantly at will (there are various limitations on the switching we are actively testing to find the right balance between convenience and prevention of abusive behavior).
It doesn't affect Warzones, since those are already instanced.
What it might affect is someone's ability to continuously gank the same player in the same spot. Frankly, we've taken other steps already to make this scenario not very likely. The player can just quick travel, revive in stealth or revive at a medical center outside of your reach if he decides he has had enough.
GeorgZoeller: Also, before people conjure up horror scenarios, we're talking about a very low number of instances. Nothing even close to the double digits people have been suggesting here.
GeorgZoeller: Apparently you skipped my post.
This has nothing to do with servers. It has everything to do with not designing the entire game around the idea that an area is 100% full all of the time, which causes the creation of massive areas that are deserted just to handle launch load.
GeorgZoeller: It surely is not. Our planets are sufficiently large to hold hundreds of players at once, without instancing.
Linkage:http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=484789&highlight=sharding
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Shards will also reduce the queuing, nothing worse than getting stuck in a que line at launch.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
At this point is there one server (like WoW realm) or more?
Has anyone experience grouping where group members were not on the same channel (aka shard)? I'm wondering if a player would have to select the correct channel or if possibly joining a group pulls them to the same channel as the group leader.
Nothing wrong with this, better than WAR's solution of opening up more servers every day and ending up with ghost towns.
I would rather them do this than force people onto other servers. Look at RIFT launch, guilds would have to sit 5 hours to play with the guild they was in. Least this way people can just jump to the same zone plus I don't think it would be much fun having 8000 trying to kill the same mob or do the same task that would pretty much suck.
Many servers.
The rest I am curious about. I assume there is some mechanic to cross talk realms and/or pull friends or groupmates in from a different shard/phase/instance/dimension/whatever.
I don't expect this to make a huge deal overall but if there isn't a mechanic in place to pull 'known' folks, there will be some confusion. Guild-mates and fiends for instance.
Until I see otherwise, I'll assume something IS in place though seeing is believing.
I agree. I'm thinking the system sounds like what AOC uses. Sounds like they're prepared for large populations.