Could we get an offical response about Notum Wars?

[Nival]

I'm not really sure where i should put this thread, but it is about Game mechanics.

I've seen all over the forum that threads about the massive lagg in mass pvp, and server issues are just simply getting closed due to rants etc,

-Could we get an offical response on whats going to happen to Notum Wars?

-When will you actually fix the server issues?
Its not possible to play the game in its current state.

I'm just worried you will actually release Alien invation before fixing Notum Wars.
Wtb info as i'm getting very sick of it and seems everyone else is after looking at 5-10 threads about this issue.

[Chaolz]

Originally posted by Phoenix
I'm not really sure where i should put this thread, but it is about Game mechanics.

I've seen all over the forum that threads about the massive lagg in mass pvp, and server issues are just simply getting closed due to rants etc,

-Could we get an offical response on whats going to happen to Notum Wars?

-When will you actually fix the server issues?
Its not possible to play the game in its current state.

I'm just worried you will actually release Alien invation before fixing Notum Wars.
Wtb info as i'm getting very sick of it and seems everyone else is after looking at 5-10 threads about this issue.

There won't be any "fix" for Notum Wars because there is nothing to "fix". I suspect the AO-code just wasn't written to handle such loads and I think it's the serverblades themselves who choke on the code. Fixing it would prolly take a huge amount of rewriting, and I just don't see that happening. I don't think it's related to bandwidth which was mentioned in the other closed thread.

But then again, what do I know..

[Rarevos]

There's some information you might find useful in this thread.

You're right that there have been many threads on this topic, but note how the one that got the furthest was called "Constructive NW Criticism", and was relatively flame free.

[Nival]

Problem is nothing has been done yet, the Notum Wars add-on has been out for quite some time now aswell.

It's just getting worse as when more people are level 220 what will they do? PvP for sure.

Not only that but the lagg has actually gone worse when shadowlands came out, you were actually able to do something when Just Notum Wars was out.. what happend?

i also read somewhere that Marius said something about tweaking the lagg somewhat (or something!) the latest patches, how ever i can only notice the lagg getting worse.

i just hope this issue wont go under the carpet.

[Chaolz]

Originally posted by Rarevos
There's some information you might find useful in this thread.

You're right that there have been many threads on this topic, but note how the one that got the furthest was called "Constructive NW Criticism", and was relatively flame free.

Raveros, I understand that you like a clean forum and that flaming isn't the way to get your message out - but the frustration this causes is rather high. Imagine gathering and planning a mass-raid with 150 people - and the zone lags out and finally crashes. Gets the blood boiling I tell ya

[endercn]

DAOC, Shadowbane and Planetside, all MMO games that were built around the idea of large scale PvP type encounters all still have the same problems year(s) after being released. Technology just hasn't reached the point where this kind of thing works yet, at least not given that they want 'state of the art' graphic engines to go along with it. Now I'm sure they can make it better than it is now, but I'm just trying to point out that its an uphill battle.

[Nanojeff]

All those games you just listed don't have a server crash almost every time you try to have a mass pvp battle. As for the original question, CZ said in a post somewhere that he wasn't sure if mass pvp the way we envision it is ever going to be possible. Awesome.

The problem nobody seems to want to acknowledge is that SL broke mass pvp. It was laggy before, but playable. Since SL it has got infinitely worse and completely unplayable at high level battles. It is obviously something that happened in the few patches surrounding the SL release, or just the fact that all the new SL zones were crammed on to the existing servers. Who knows.

Jeff

[Cz]

I suggest sending concerns about this to feedback@anarchy-online.com, so it reaches the game director.

We are aware of the issues, and are working on server improvements. I personally think a heavy dev focus on mass PvP is unlikely right now, but general server performance is alwas a high priority task, and it should help on mass PvP too.

Of course, I guess if 150 players in a tower area goes ok, 250 will attend, and the same problem occurs again. The limits will always be pushed.

[Cz]

Originally posted by Nanojeff
The problem nobody seems to want to acknowledge is that SL broke mass pvp. It was laggy before, but playable. Since SL it has got infinitely worse and completely unplayable at high level battles. It is obviously something that happened in the few patches surrounding the SL release, or just the fact that all the new SL zones were crammed on to the existing servers. Who knows.

One thing to consider there is that SL brought a lot of new effects (perks, more procs, checks for character facing, etc) that are now used in PvP, thus the data to process and distribute is greater than before. Same hardware and software (I'm not sure whether that is a fact though) + more data to handle = slower system.

I'm not a techie though, so I don't know how much effect this has, if any at all. Just a thought.

[Nival]

Originally posted by Cz
I suggest sending concerns about this to feedback@anarchy-online.com, so it reaches the game director.

We are aware of the issues, and are working on server improvements. I personally think a heavy dev focus on mass PvP is unlikely right now.

I dont understand this. you do know the servers crashed up to 4 times today due to heavy lagg?
It has happend before aswell. kicking 100+ people out of the
game after wasting alot of hours.

I cant see anything better to work on then making the game playeble then adding new things to the game

[ocra12]

And now it happened again

[Nival]

PW just crashed and 7+ Big Guilds was disconnected im guessing 150+ players.

[endercn]

All those games you just listed don't have a server crash almost every time you try to have a mass pvp battle.

DAOC relic keep battles crash the server all the time and lesser battles crash zones. Planetside's largest battles repeatedly crash the zones kicking everyone in zone out of game. Shadowbane had some sort of different setup where instead of crashing everyone out you just got SB.EXE errors every 2-3 minutes and were kicked out. So yes, all thse games do have exactly the same type of problems. I have yet to see a game that can handle 150 player characters fighting on a side without crashing the majority of the time.

But as I said before, I'm sure they can improve it, its just not something 'easy' to fix.

[Nanojeff]

That's strange, I've pvp'd in every game you've just mentioned and never saw a crash. Especially planetside, where I had about a million large scale pvp battles with 10x as many people and never had a zone crash.

One thing to consider there is that SL brought a lot of new effects (perks, more procs, checks for character facing, etc) that are now used in PvP, thus the data to process and distribute is greater than before. Same hardware and software (I'm not sure whether that is a fact though) + more data to handle = slower system.

I'm not a techie though, so I don't know how much effect this has, if any at all. Just a thought.

This is a good point, and something I've thought of myself. I guess I just don't understand why an expansion would be released that directly breaks a previous expansion. But maybe that's why I'm not a game designer.

Jeff

[Reactive]

What erks me is that they have the gall to announce yet another expansion with issues like this still out there. Do they think we're supposed to get excited about that?

[Zane0]

I think a revised crowd control system is the first step towards a significant improvement. I'm not sure if we can count on FC to just.. add more servers or whatever, I'll bet that costs much more money.

[Autumnleaves]

Originally posted by Nanojeff
All those games you just listed don't have a server crash almost every time you try to have a mass pvp battle.

Back during the beta test, fairly small groups, about 100 or so had a better than even chance of crashing Planetside. It could be better now. When I played DAoC, large raids (dragon, Caer Sidi, etc) and relic battles almost always crashed the zone, and sometimes the entire server. Of course, I played on Percival and Guinevere, the two servers with the highest populations...

Shadowbane's servers don't seem to crash much, but (apparently) stop responding to clients and time them out. Or something. It amounts to the same thing from the player's perspective. I will say that Shadowbane is very light on bandwidth (and pretty light on server hardware, too, from what I hear), and I can't figure out how they managed it, which annoys me.

The problem is that the algorithms for MMORPGs just aren't efficient. In fact, they're so inefficient, that hardware upgrades tend to push the "crowd limit" only a little higher. You can double your CPU speed and RAM... and can only handle 30 more players (I made these numbers up, but you should get the idea).

There's been alot of discussion about various server architectures on the MUD-DEV list, various wannabe game dev sites, etc. Some of them are almost certainly wonky (completely distributed games) while others sound somewhat plausible (quadtree load balancing). Alas, none of these techniques have actually been used in real games, so they're all theoretical.

There's been almost no discussion about finding a more efficient algorithm for even simple stuff like position updates (which takes up a huge chunk of both bandwidth and server CPU time).

So if you know of a more efficient algorithm, you can be rich! And work in the game industry! For 100+ hours a week. In someone's basement. With just the light of your computer monitor to see by. With a 'furry' puppeteer sitting on one side. And a drunk artist who frequently copies his local folders over the network folders and rolls back everyone's work on the other side. Until you gain 70 pounds, all your hair falls out, and you die of a stroke at the tender young age of 33.

Personally, I'd rather leave nasty stuff like network code to someone else.

[___________Skyminder]

Originally posted by Nanojeff
That's strange, I've pvp'd in every game you've just mentioned and never saw a crash. Especially planetside, where I had about a million large scale pvp battles with 10x as many people and never had a zone crash

Jeff

Thats amazing as I played Planetside from beta through core combat, and it was COMMON KNOWLEDGE that zones crashed constantly during large battles.

In fact some outfits would do it on purpose if we were losing a continent. So I find yur satatement about "a million large scale battles with 10x as many people" to be blatant hyberbole. (besides that PS doesn't have the extensive item-database that AO does)

Hell, EQ is the stable standard of MMORPG's, and you can even crash zones there with a large enough raid. (everyone take your bard to the bazaar muahaha)

I think lag issues in AO comes down to inefficient database code, but any sufficently large database will have that issue.


Besides, if your really up for 150 man pvp, you should be playing tribes 1 (with renegades mod). Aside from being one of the best team games ever made (tribes 2 and plaentside were made by the incompetent rejects of the tribes 1 dev team) Its the only one I've ever seen to play 164 poeple with no lag.

[Auto]

Hehe. Just wait for the lag when you pvp with large alien battleships flying around. (Alien Invasion)

[Darkbane]

Processing and bandwidth requirements likely increase exponentially with player numbers. At some point, any bottleneck between you and the servers will cause issues at the client end, regardless of code, stability, server power etc.

(eg if each update for 1 player takes 50 bytes, then for 2 players that's 200 bytes total, for 3 players it's 450, 4 is 800 etc... multiply by the update frequency and by 8 to convert to bits-per-second... gets nasty real quick...)

Now, AO is a zone based game world as far as I'm aware, where individual zones reside on their own server. More modern MMORPG systems use (or will use) a more general distributed mechanism that can better spread the load across the server farm.

But that only helps at the server end (ie reduces likelyhood of the system falling over there), and even then, has limits (though high bandwidth LANs do make those limits harder to reach ) There will still be issues getting the data to your client though, so lag will remain even on those architectures.

So whilst server tweaks can help mass battles in AO, it would take a complete re-architecuring to really help, and even that would simply increase the limits.