Caspien clarifies that there will be no support for 1000 player battles

Slapshot1188 · February 2018

Q: the game is not going to be able to handle 1000 plus players on the battlefield

Caspien: We've never said that it would. In addition to which, a distributed OS like SpatialOS doesn't solve that problem. Whether we used SpatialOS or our own spatial partitioning system it's important to understand the differences between horizontal and vertical scale-out.

Horizontal scale-out is the ability to support a bigger world. With a bigger world you can also support more players. So long as they're spread out. As soon as players start to cluster in one location you're talking about vertical scale-out, which is a bigger problem to solve as you're fighting physics.

As players gather in the world, the load on the individual servers as well as your clients at home increases. We can procedurally sub-divide the server around that location in order to lessen the load, but at some point, there's so many processes running on individual servers that the network traffic and latency actually starts causing the simulation to perform more poorly. That's why it's easier to get 100,000 players in a single world than 1,000 players in a single neighborhood.

And - even if we could subdivide the servers enough to solve the back-end problem - could your PC process the client-side load of updating and rendering 1,000 players on-screen?

In the end, there's a lot of work to do to optimize CoE, but the hardest optimization problems aren't solved through horizontal scale-out or even sub-dividing the world into smaller and smaller chunks. It's solved through understanding of the game mechanics and experience optimizing client engine code like UE4 - something we have experience with.

https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/23833/i-dont-think-the-servers-are-going-to-be-good-enough?page=1

Uhoh... As discussed in the other thread. The starting continent will be around 18,432km^2

There's a thread that shows this to be the size of Madison Wisconsin and suburbs (down to Rockford Il). Better hope these kingdoms remain friendly and don't try and team up for a war... or I guess they can just take turns in teams (team size to be determined at future date).

I wonder what mechanism they will try to use to manage that so too many people don't enter the same "zone"...

mystichaze · February 2018

Only time will tell.

cjmarsh · February 2018

Looks like there are still a whole lot of unknowns where there should be solutions by now. Then again, I'm sure this particular quote wasn't chosen to make SBS look good either.

jahlon · February 2018

I do enjoy how he closed out this thread:

"I'm not going to dislike your post. But I do wonder what benefit there is to coming to a game's website and posting your negative feedback about a decision that's already been made. While people may commiserate their concern, all that really does is stir up concern again for an issue that's already been laid to bed.

You're clearly not going to change our minds with your post, so I don't entirely understand what the purpose of the post was. And if you suspect to be down-voted going in? Why waste the time on the post in the first place? A downvote means people feel you're not contributing to the community.

In any case, I'm closing this thread. Your questions/concerns have been addressed, and there's no reason for people to further come to our defense. We made a decision we're happy with, and continue to feel it was the best long-term decision for us and for the players."

(https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/23833/i-dont-think-the-servers-are-going-to-be-good-enough?page=3#post266534)

I went from being a supporter of CoE, to a skeptic that it would ever launch, to now I"m not so sure if it should ever come out. Statements like this from the owner.....

In the end, there's a lot of work to do to optimize CoE, but the hardest optimization problems aren't solved through horizontal scale-out or even sub-dividing the world into smaller and smaller chunks. It's solved through understanding of the game mechanics and experience optimizing client engine code like UE4 - something we have experience with.

(https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/23833/i-dont-think-the-servers-are-going-to-be-good-enough?page=3#post266534)

...are pretty laughable from the company that has had to push their anticipated release to the right by over a year, has had to do layoffs, is struggling to find financial support of a publisher (after flip-flopping on the position of even getting a publisher) and finally sending out supporters of the game to try and shut down any negative reviews on the game.

“So what I was discussing on Discord the other day was for you guys, the community, to shut down such behavior. We can’t be everywhere at once, nor does it look good for us to try and discourage such behavior. But we can encourage you guys to shut down such behavior. Remind people that it’s perfectly fine to be skeptical.. but to try and spread the skepticism is bad.”

(http://massivelyop.com/2017/12/22/chronicles-of-elyria-allegedly-struggles-to-find-a-publisher-enables-store-gifting-and-battles-harbingers/)

There are games already out there that have several hundred people engaged in combat at one time (Archeage, Revelation Online). I think it would have been less damaging if CoE had said "We are aiming at a cap of XXX players in simultaneous combat"

cjmarsh · February 2018

Personally I think you're bitter about potentially losing out on a game that could have been as great as CoE, just like I am. But do you really have to go and stir shit up in their forums to make yourself feel better? Is that helping anything at all?

mystichaze · February 2018

Johlon said:

There are games already out there that have several hundred people engaged in combat at one time (Archeage, Revelation Online). I think it would have been less damaging if CoE had said "We are aiming at a cap of XXX players in simultaneous combat"

Which is an example of how it -can- be done without using SpatialOS. And let's be honest if an actual number was given at this stage of development, before testing, it would just be something else for people to jump all over and claim deceit.

Renoaku · February 2018

Well even 500 vs 500 players seems great, but I am not sure if I trust COE, i mean how big is the development team + the whole thing of aging and dying turns me off it kinda feels like another Albion Online game incident minus customer service likely wont be so horrid but I mean the development just seems really small compared to Ashes, or Crow Fall?

Slapshot1188 · February 2018

You might be thinking to yourself... Hey Slapshot why does this matter?

Let me try to explain.

CoE is a territory control PvP game where 6 kingdoms exist on a single continent, under those Kings are Duchys (ruled by Dukes), Counties (by Counts), Cities, Towns, and Villages (with Mayors). Conflict between Kingdoms is supposed to be one reason that Kings will lose their Titles and lands.

The sample continent is 18,432km^2. The average Kingdom is going to be around 3,000km^2 (simply the total land divided by 6).

Now we take the 100,000 target population per server and divide it by 18,432 to get ~5.43 people per km^2

We take the 5.43 and multiply it by the size of a kingdom (3000) and get 16,290 per kingdom. When two Kingdoms are at war we double that number to 32,580 characters.

What percentage of people can actually participate in the battles of this "war"? Well let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they can support 300 player battles. That means that less than 1 percent of characters could actually be supported in such a "battle".

Yes, there are people who just want to farm and craft.. undoubtedly! But don't you think that significantly more than a fraction of a percent of the citizens of a kingdom at war would want to go fight in a major battle?

So again... I refer back to The Way Forward thread where it is suggested that they lower their sights and start with some target of say 10,000 to start. Build the game around that and then feel free to expand and grow once you are stable and can do it incrementally.

Slapshot1188 · February 2018

Renoaku said:

Well even 500 vs 500 players seems great, but I am not sure if I trust COE, i mean how big is the development team + the whole thing of aging and dying turns me off it kinda feels like another Albion Online game incident minus customer service likely wont be so horrid but I mean the development just seems really small compared to Ashes, or Crow Fall?

500 vs 500 would be 1000.. which Caspien clarified they are not saying they can support.

Slapshot1188 · February 2018

cjmarsh said:

Personally I think you're bitter about potentially losing out on a game that could have been as great as CoE, just like I am. But do you really have to go and stir shit up in their forums to make yourself feel better? Is that helping anything at all?

That OP was too uniformed to have been me

Trust me, if I made a post like that it would have been much better researched.

mystichaze · February 2018

In the end, there's a lot of work to do to optimize CoE, but the hardest optimization problems aren't solved through horizontal scale-out or even sub-dividing the world into smaller and smaller chunks. It's solved through understanding of the game mechanics and experience optimizing client engine code like UE4 - something we have experience with.

As I said, only time will tell! The rest are only assumptions and biases.

jahlon · February 2018

Slapshot1188 said:

You might be thinking to yourself... Hey Slapshot why does this matter?

Let me try to explain.

CoE is a territory control PvP game where 6 kingdoms exist on a single continent, under those Kings are Duchys (ruled by Dukes), Counties (by Counts), Cities, Towns, and Villages (with Mayors). Conflict between Kingdoms is supposed to be one reason that Kings will lose their Titles and lands.

The sample continent is 18,432km^2. The average Kingdom is going to be around 3,000km^2 (simply the total land divided by 6).

Now we take the 100,000 target population per server and divide it by 18,432 to get ~5.43 people per km^2

We take the 5.43 and multiply it by the size of a kingdom (3000) and get 16,290 per kingdom. When two Kingdoms are at war we double that number to 32,580 characters.

What percentage of people can actually participate in the battles of this "war"? Well let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they can support 300 player battles. That means that less than 1 percent of characters could actually be supported in such a "battle".

Yes, there are people who just want to farm and craft.. undoubtedly! But don't you think that significantly more than a fraction of a percent of the citizens of a kingdom at war would want to go fight in a major battle?

So again... I refer back to The Way Forward thread where it is suggested that they lower their sights and start with some target of say 10,000 to start. Build the game around that and then feel free to expand and grow once you are stable and can do it incrementally.

You get out of here with that crazy logic stuff.

killimandros · February 2018

I must admit Ive only heard about 1000 player battles in EVE online, although Ive tried a lot of big wvw games. I cant recollect Archeage having battles with 1000 players, unless it dramatically increased in population after I left (2 months after launch). Consider how many 1000 players actually are. ESO's Cyrodiil dies if all players in a shard gathers up to fight over a keep (and thats 150x3=450 players)
(actually it just did 5 mins ago, which is why im here :P) . I just spent some time crashtesting CU, and it broke before the 1k mark, repeatedly so

If they can hold 500 player combats I doubt there will be more fighting in one area at the same time. Thats quite massive as well

The BIGGESt question isnt the battles, the bigger question is what will happen in big citys, if 1k players are gathering up doing their things. A more likely scenario. Will there be lag? Stuttering? If they manage to heap up lets say 30k players on one server, it would be reasonable to imagine the capital city having 1k at peak hours. What about the OPC's. How much lag will they create in the biggest citys?

Edit; I actually clicked the link and read Caspians reply and the whole discussion :P Now apart from the last section, where he gets butthurt, its not unreasonable what he says. I think it applys to most MMOrpgs doesnt it? Enlighten me if Im wrong

But with the current technology not many games (that I am aware of) can support this

(apart from EVE online, Im being told).

I do see why it will raise concern (as I mentioned above), but its more a general MMOrpg concern isnt it?

Asm0deus · February 2018

Slapshot1188 said:

You might be thinking to yourself... Hey Slapshot why does this matter?

Let me try to explain.

CoE is a territory control PvP game where 6 kingdoms exist on a single continent, under those Kings are Duchys (ruled by Dukes), Counties (by Counts), Cities, Towns, and Villages (with Mayors). Conflict between Kingdoms is supposed to be one reason that Kings will lose their Titles and lands.

The sample continent is 18,432km^2. The average Kingdom is going to be around 3,000km^2 (simply the total land divided by 6).

Now we take the 100,000 target population per server and divide it by 18,432 to get ~5.43 people per km^2

We take the 5.43 and multiply it by the size of a kingdom (3000) and get 16,290 per kingdom. When two Kingdoms are at war we double that number to 32,580 characters.

What percentage of people can actually participate in the battles of this "war"? Well let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they can support 300 player battles. That means that less than 1 percent of characters could actually be supported in such a "battle".

Yes, there are people who just want to farm and craft.. undoubtedly! But don't you think that significantly more than a fraction of a percent of the citizens of a kingdom at war would want to go fight in a major battle?

So again... I refer back to The Way Forward thread where it is suggested that they lower their sights and start with some target of say 10,000 to start. Build the game around that and then feel free to expand and grow once you are stable and can do it incrementally.

What so it's going to be like Elite Dangerous where you go participate in combat/war CG's but you hardly are able to get in the same instance as your friends/buddies/factions?

killimandros · February 2018

No thats not how its supposed to work. If I am correct, you will always be in the same world, but your section of that world (loading to your machine) will be smaller the more people there are (I still remember the invisible armies suddenly materializing in front of me in GW2-same issue)

Slapshot1188 · February 2018

All valid questions Kilimandros.

When making comparisons to other games though... how many of those have 100,000 Online 0layers or player characters still online in OPC mode?

Darkfall was much small scale... nowhere near 100,000 characters online at the same time yet massive battles were impossible. As a matter of fact, one old Hyperion tactic was just to have everyone login to crash the server. Those big alliances were hundreds or low thousands of members.

Imagine kingdoms with 32000 players having a major battle. Or as you said... just congregating in a city.

Wizardry · February 2018

cjmarsh said:

Personally I think you're bitter about potentially losing out on a game that could have been as great as CoE, just like I am. But do you really have to go and stir shit up in their forums to make yourself feel better? Is that helping anything at all?

The "potentially great" was a smokescreen,i was fooled,the whole image was nothing more than to sustain investors,gamer's to give them money.

You CANNOT make a game like this,it will NOT and never be as good as a game that already has the money and the well laid out design.You can't just wing it and just hope for money or hope for a certain team size or just hope,we do all the hope and dreaming in our sleep,sometimes happy dreams,sometimes a nightmare but when we wake up it is back to reality.
The proper way to make these KS'r games is to aim for a budget that can RELEASE a playable game.Then if people are satisfied with the effort done on a limited budget,then you can expand and ask for more money or perhaps even ask if a sub fee is acceptable.

This goes the same for SC,another developer doing it WRONG and will end up wasting tons more money than was needed and the game even on an enormous budget will be a subpar game.You have to do it right from day 1 or expect lots of disgruntled gamer's,people.

killimandros · February 2018

Slapshot1188 said:

All valid questions Kilimandros.

When making comparisons to other games though... how many of those have 100,000 Online 0layers or player characters still online in OPC mode?

Darkfall was much small scale... nowhere near 100,000 characters online at the same time yet massive battles were impossible. As a matter of fact, one old Hyperion tactic was just to have everyone login to crash the server. Those big alliances were hundreds or low thousands of members.

Imagine kingdoms with 32000 players having a major battle. Or as you said... just congregating in a city.

Ye I think actually with that bit of information the whole OPC plus online characters is whats gonna make the biggest mess, especially if you imagine you want your OPC to gather resources, and can get a script for that. How many OPC's wont roam around the closest and best farming spots, travelling the same route back to the best spots to refine their products and repeat all over again the transaction/script. Then these spots will also most likely be where many players will gather as well, so I can see on a server with lets say 30 000 players (although I really doubt there will be more than 50k all together at launch, and I think thats a reasonable estimation, if not generous) the spots like these will be very difficult if not impossible to stay close to.

Now they MIGHT solve it the way GW2 did, where your "portion" of the terrain narrows in the more toons in your vicinity. Then youll typically have small armies of miners and farmers (OPC's) suddenly materialize in front of you magically. I think this is what we will see happening, as having the server run smooth to facilitate the OPC scripts is most likely more important than having a long distance view. If the OPC scripts starts to stutter and break, they will have many unhappy customers, while if your line of sight is low/short in certain boundries, will more likely be tolerated (Imagine they toss in smog as an effect where theres lots of players :P just mindtravelling. Id do that if I were them. Make sure the scripts run fine so my company gets income from them and throw in some cheap effects to explain why you cant see then 400 farmerbots right in front of your nose). Coming to think about it, I remember the brief period I played BDO exactly that happening in front of the banks/those big slug dudes who took my gold

Ungood · February 2018

killimandros said:

I must admit Ive only heard about 1000 player battles in EVE online, although Ive tried a lot of big wvw games. I cant recollect Archeage having battles with 1000 players, unless it dramatically increased in population after I left (2 months after launch). Consider how many 1000 players actually are. ESO's Cyrodiil dies if all players in a shard gathers up to fight over a keep (and thats 150x3=450 players)
(actually it just did 5 mins ago, which is why im here :P) . I just spent some time crashtesting CU, and it broke before the 1k mark, repeatedly so
If they can hold 500 player combats I doubt there will be more fighting in one area at the same time. Thats quite massive as well

I hit 100+ player battles in GW2 and my Graphic Card takes a Dump, hell 100+player world boss and I am back to 8 bit, I have no idea how a 1000 player battle would even happen on my end..maybe really.. really.. low res graphics.. like stick figures.. or maybe just gray blocks?

cjmarsh · February 2018

killimandros said:

No thats not how its supposed to work. If I am correct, you will always be in the same world, but your section of that world (loading to your machine) will be smaller the more people there are (I still remember the invisible armies suddenly materializing in front of me in GW2-same issue)

That's pretty much true but I should point out that the terrain is local to the player's machine so the world's terrain wouldn't disappear while the entities on it might. The back end was designed in such a way that everything on the terrain such as creatures and trees and people could be split up dynamically and grouped in a way that individual servers could host the load in a balanced way. When bringing so many people together it means all the physics processing and input processing of those players would have to be done either on the same server or on different ones and then communicated to each other constantly. The technology just doesn't exist for battles of 1000 players at once with modern graphical assets so I'm not sure why this is even considered an issue, unless people were actually planning on this, perhaps due to the world being so large.

Arghimo · February 2018

I'd be happy with 100 vs. 100 considering most battles will be skirmishes between counties or multi-pronged fronts when larger entities clash (imho).

EponyxDamor · February 2018

Well, at the very least they're being more realistic. Though, I am now interested in how they implement making NPCs care about whether you log in or not. Are they gonna send you mail IRL if you don't log in?

Not trying to derail the topic, just a thought.

LackingMMO · February 2018

Don't really see any good or bad in that thread honestly. Ill have to see how it plays out in game if/when the game comes. But ugh whoever mentioned armies popping in out of nowhere in gw2, that was so frustrating lol! I remember running with a group and all the sudden be in the middle of a zerg. Good times.

Realizer · February 2018

Ungood said:

killimandros said:

I must admit Ive only heard about 1000 player battles in EVE online, although Ive tried a lot of big wvw games. I cant recollect Archeage having battles with 1000 players, unless it dramatically increased in population after I left (2 months after launch). Consider how many 1000 players actually are. ESO's Cyrodiil dies if all players in a shard gathers up to fight over a keep (and thats 150x3=450 players)
(actually it just did 5 mins ago, which is why im here :P) . I just spent some time crashtesting CU, and it broke before the 1k mark, repeatedly so
If they can hold 500 player combats I doubt there will be more fighting in one area at the same time. Thats quite massive as well

I hit 100+ player battles in GW2 and my Graphic Card takes a Dump, hell 100+player world boss and I am back to 8 bit, I have no idea how a 1000 player battle would even happen on my end..maybe really.. really.. low res graphics.. like stick figures.. or maybe just gray blocks?

That's odd because GPU isn't the bottleneck of the GW2 engine's net code, it's the number of CPU processes per action. Also the fact that the CPU is responsible for particle effect actions which should be on the GPU side. If they had routed most of those tasks through the GPU rather than the CPU the game would perform much better. It's shame they built the engine that way, because the only way to remedy it would be to recode the entire game.

To clarify for everyone there's never been an engine made in where 1000 player battles are a possibility without issues.

As for CU they are very close to 1k, in fact I've personally been in tests with over 1200 at about 35 fps. Today's crashes were caused by testers dropping as many items on the ground as they could. The first one caused by someone dropping all armor and 400 siege scorpions at the same time. As of now the performance is quite good with 100v100v100 in the scenario.

Realizer · February 2018

Wizardry said:

cjmarsh said:

Personally I think you're bitter about potentially losing out on a game that could have been as great as CoE, just like I am. But do you really have to go and stir shit up in their forums to make yourself feel better? Is that helping anything at all?

The "potentially great" was a smokescreen,i was fooled,the whole image was nothing more than to sustain investors,gamer's to give them money.

You CANNOT make a game like this,it will NOT and never be as good as a game that already has the money and the well laid out design.You can't just wing it and just hope for money or hope for a certain team size or just hope,we do all the hope and dreaming in our sleep,sometimes happy dreams,sometimes a nightmare but when we wake up it is back to reality.
The proper way to make these KS'r games is to aim for a budget that can RELEASE a playable game.Then if people are satisfied with the effort done on a limited budget,then you can expand and ask for more money or perhaps even ask if a sub fee is acceptable.

This goes the same for SC,another developer doing it WRONG and will end up wasting tons more money than was needed and the game even on an enormous budget will be a subpar game.You have to do it right from day 1 or expect lots of disgruntled gamer's,people.

Woah.... I agree with Wizardry? What's happening in this world?

I do think SC is a different animal purely based on fandom and the amount of money they are willing to throw at it. However I agree they are doing it wrong, and they should have come out with something a bit more achievable first, then went for the big show after.

I'm hoping that's going to be the case for CU, but I know that's probably being wildly optimistic. At least they are on the right track though.

CoE really needs to bring the scope of their project down to Earth and get it out of the clouds. If they had millions of disposable income it might be a bit different, but they don't. So at this point they have to figure out what they truly want this game to be, and try and head in that direction with whatever funds they still have. Here's hoping they don't let their egos kill this project.

When I see things like this though, "Remind people that it’s perfectly fine to be skeptical.. but to try and spread the skepticism is bad.” it doesn't make me feel like they are willing to drop that ego.

It's okay to be skeptical but you shouldn't voice your concerns because then others will be skeptical before they have a chance to give Walsh their money? Is that the sound logic here? Because it seems like the only reason to say something like that.

Azaron_Nightblade · February 2018

mystichaze said:

Only time will tell.

Only if that game ever sees the light of day.

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Caspien clarifies that there will be no support for 1000 player battles

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Caspien clarifies that there will be no support for 1000 player battles

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