Can funcom consolidate servers because of declining players.
This only makes sense as the game is dead and would help pay for future development.
As long as the underlying server hardware provision is completely inadequate, this is a terrible idea.
Unless you think that 2 server updates per second and upwards of 700ms lag (which represent the typical conditions I’ve seen when playing on full servers) makes for a viable gameplay environment,
(And in those circumstances, enemies tend not to respond and you will be flung off cliffs and such because the client and the server cannot agree on where you are).
I’d also point out that once you have bought the game and assuming you bought the DLC too, Funcom only lose money the longer you play on official servers.
This isn’t a subscription game and the idea that the game “dying” is likely to be of any due concern to Funcom doesn’t make alot of sense for reasons of simple economics.
(sure, you might argue that future DLC is up for grabs, but in lieu of any published data about the ongoing costs with respect to projected profits, it’s tantamount to so much handwaving. And many people have fled the crippled official servers already, by virtue of them being underpowered, comically unreliable and riddled with pernicious design decisions and acutely trivial bugs that Funcom seems loathe to fix (and yet which modders knock out without any trouble whatsoever).
Now, if (and only if) either the underlying hardware provisions were improved to support a 40 player cap, or consolidated servers had a much reduced player cap, I might support the idea.
Edit: Thinking about it, if they reduce the cap AND reduce the number of servers, then there’s little room left for people to play there at all, so I’d revise that to say, provide servers that are consummate to the task of running them with the existing cap.
Regardless, if the overarching goal is to inexorably close public servers, I guess the game we bought is setting sail for the sunset, because private servers are expensive to rent and if you don’t rent one, you must suffer the whims of someone who did and all the risks that entails. (arbitrary wipes, bans, preferential treatment, undesirable mods and overnight closures).
If I’d have known before buying the game that the de facto choice was between private servers and crippled official ones, I doubt I would have bought it tbh.
Which isn’t to say that the game isn’t amazing in some respects (the art team really did such a fantastic job), but if you are frequently unhappy because either you can’t even log in or when you do, important stuff is broken or impoverished for no good reason, or the game was never finished, to support that situation with your money is to perpetuate it forever.
And that’s not an appealing prospect.
Speaking of which, I read recently that someone from Funcom said the sorcery update may not even happen. Which is typically dev code for, “It won’t”.
Great.
Let’s find out anyway.
I started playing on private at the beginning of november.
Server performance of officials were just fine then. But people caused performance to go bad. (Hacks or whatever else cause the problems.)
Meaning outside of certain times, performance was okay. With ping being at 50-100 & serverfps at good numbers too, whatever number of players were online. But once a certain time is reached, ping goes up to 500+ and serverfps <5 in few seconds. Havent gotten to know who caused that though. But I cannot imagine it in any other way.
At rare times, the number of players was lower with bad performance compared to good performance, which seems to support my guess.
I played around launch time for a few months and if memory serves, the server cap was increased after launch. Performance was awful then just as it can be now. If your server is half full, you can expect a reasonable play experience as pertains to performance alone.
If you are implying that bad actors cause the poor performance then my experience is a contra-indication.
I’d also point out that the recent patch being ostensibly to correct “flooding” and “exploits”, whilst very hard to prove or disprove from a players perspective does not seem to comprehensively account for what happens.
Edit: I just want to update my post to point out that it was edited by Funcom to remove references to being able to reproduce the no attack/harvest bug with normal and legitimate gameplay.
I understood the recent patch had fixed the issues else I would not have mentioned them here so as not to give a gift to trolls.
And so without giving the game away, my experience was that the bug was morely likely related to a recent patch when the server is loaded rather than any outside interference or deliberate griefing.
I’d also prefer that if my posts are edited, that contextual indication was given to explain why and to indicate where, Since otherwise it just looks as if I said nothing more.
Nope it wasnt.
Also back then playing on pve-c, performance was great: 40/40 and not the slightest hint of a lag. May be different for pvp though.
However this was on pc and on the servers I was playing on.
Then again, there had been a lot of extreme bugs back then…
Thats interesting. Hopefully someone like @Ignasi reads this. Maybe its some new information?
Which then explains the bad performance at certain times? 
I’m a muggle but this seems to make sense. 
Basically what’s causing the servers to lag this hard is an infinite loop?!
Obviously this would stop anything else…
Now if one could try to check wether this problem stops once the area gets kind of “unloaded” by the server - basically having every player get out of renderrange and possibly a little bit further and back in? …
Seriously, if you think you might have new information… dont wait for any Funcom employee to read this. This is what “mentioning” is for. At least I use it this way…
Edit: I took the liberty of trying to restore some sense to the otherwise blank quotes without revealing the content it was about.
Well, we seem to have had a different experience. On my server the server was often full and the performance was as I stated above.
As for the server cap, it was never changed or it wasn’t changed just after launch?
Either way, I’ve seen reports that if you buy a server from G-portal it doesn’t suffer from the same extreme performance problems.
Not an infinite loop as such since it seems to correct itself over time without a restart (unless Funcom can log in and effect some change to fix it).
SInce it only seems to happen during load (15-20+ players), there might be some internal mitigations in place that seeks to make the server more efficient at the expense of some responsiveness (pure speculation tbh, but the fact that (before this bug) enemies stop engaging at all during under load does not seem to be accounted for by load conditions alone).
Perhaps there’s a bug there where the server is being overzealous. Snapping shut like a clam rather than easing back. Given the severity of the result though (a server wide effective denial of service), I don’t really understand why they did not simply roll back the pertinent patch until it was fixed.
Non of this precludes outside interference mind, and it could be a combination of both.
I can understand Funcom being wary of discussing details in either case for obvious reasons, but the patch is now in, apparently.
I also offered assistance before (with the PCT) and was rebuffed, and when I published it here, I was ignored so I guess I didn’t see the point.
Realistically, not without wiping the servers in the process. So all the talk about whether they should do it seems irrelevant until someone tells me how they could do it.
I’ve been through merges on other MMOs and in general, they worked out really well, but none of those were a buildable, sandboxy world. Here, I think the only way they could merge would be to find servers where there has been no activity for a while, meaning pretty much everything is decayed away, close the server, then notify all the players that had characters on the server.
Compensation would be a character creation code that could be used on any server (one time) that would instantly level the character to the same level they were on the closed server.
It would require someone at Funcom to administer the process and handle a lot of potentially annoyed customers, but then again, maybe it would make for a lot of happier customers, knowing they have a free refresh and could jump into a populated server for more good times.
A really bad business plan is to pay for servers in a data center that sit idle. Really bad. From what I read. each of these official servers have assigned resources, so it isn’t dynamically adding and subtracting RAM/CPU as needed to each server. If they did, I don’t think there would be any big problems if a server ramped up to 40 plus players at once.
Good clustering solutions usually aren’t cheap though and you are really limited when you sub out the server farm from wherever.
They could spend the money to make an amazing server farm, but to what end? Most of their money comes up front, since there is no monthly subscription. It is more of a quarterly subscription or bi-monthly, with the rapid releases of these DLCs.
Long story short. I approve of consolidation. Idle server sprawl is a plague on this planet that should be wiped out. Thankfully server virtualization has cured most of it.
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Migrating characters (without their buildings) would be a fairly simple procedure, comparatively. But to me that doesn’t count as a true server merge: if no-one has been online for [maximum_decay_time] then the server is not just depopulated, it’s dead and could probably just be shut down without worrying about merges at all.
Amen.
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Just now I counted 180 server with zero players. Doesn’t mean they don’t get used, but that is pretty thin. I’ll look again mid day tomorrow if I remember and see how it stacks up then.
Hey there,
It seems that perhaps we’re talking about different issues. You seem to claim that with your findings, what happens is that archers get stuck in a loop of equipping/unequipping weapons, although there is no mention of the ability of damaging enemies or entities being affected. We’re aware of some issues with the AI of archer thralls, one of them being this situation you’re mentioning (as a matter of fact, we issued a few fixes on testlive that should take care of some this silly behavior).
If the issue you’re mentioning does affect the ability to damage anything after you “trigger” it please let me know privately, as our team is constantly looking for ways to put this problem to rest once and for all.
(For the time being, I will edit out the details on how to reproduce it since it’s against our community guidelines, but most importantly, if it triggers the main issue we’re dealing with we don’t want it to spread too much)
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I think in the very first months, the cap was actually 70. Meaning EA, back in january/february 2017.
After it got lowered to 40 it never changed again.
You do know about how stuff where no player is isnt being calculated, right? So basically by having everyone leave that specific area, the loop will be taken out of calculation.
So probably the default way how thralls are is idling.
This is what I thought about.
That’s not what I said at all unless you are being quite pedantic with respect to exactly what you are referring to, but since you deleted what I said and I cannot reiterate it, I can’t really say much more.
As for contacting you privately, I’m happy to do that but sadly, have no more information other than that which you already removed since it’s inappropriate for me to test these things on a production server where everyone on the server can be denied access to a playable game as a consequence of doing so.
(And given the severity of the problem, I don’t understand why you don’t roll back the particular patch that seems to have caused it until you fixed it).
All I can suggest is that you spool up a VM for testing the server and successively reduce the hardware allocation to simulate load and increase the aforementioned quantities to see if you can reproduce my results.
Then should it occur, you can debug it.
But in the abstract, there was a compelling correlation between what I was doing and exactly when the attack/harvest bug manifested itself.
The reason of why it was removed is this:
EXPLOIT DISCUSSION
Do not describe how an exploit works or can be abused. NEVER explain how to perform an exploit publicly.
Included in our Community guidelines.
I am sorry that you find my writing style pedantic, but as my job requires me to gather feedback from the community, I want to make sure I can gather it correctly. And since this is related to an issue that it’s our top priority right now, I want to make it double sure so as to not send the wrong information to our devs. Hope that clears it out.
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And you’ll note that nowhere did I complain about it the fact of it’s removal.
I only mentioned it because I understood it to be fixed as per your patch notes and if it’s no longer exploitable, it’s not an exploit.
What bothers me is that you removed what I said then publicly referred to it in such a way as to misrepresent it, which certainly leverages my inability to correct the record under the provisions of the community guidelines.
And this doesn’t really seem fair to me.
If you didn’t want me to talk about it in public, why did you?
/sigh
Edit changes are still available and visible to our staff, so if need be it can be restored. It is a cautionary measure as we are still investigating this issue. In no way it was meant or intended to misrepresent your words and if it came that way please accept my apologies.
Though that just shows that this probably wasnt known and they dont want to spread it any further.
So understand them editing your posts as a weird “thank you for sharing the information”, science!
That being said, I am not certain wether that bug? happened only since a recent patch. I would dare to claim it may have been around for a longer period now? Not certain on that one too…
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