Player warning: Crowd Limiting System coming up

[____________Alantria]

Im surprised no one has mentioned another alternative to overcrowding that is already implemented in the game.

Look at shops for example, Im sure many of you decided to meet a friend in a shop and found he was not inside, yet he claimed he was, basicly more than one instance of the shop exists in the game at the same time.

Why not redirect the flow not away from the battle as that would be terribly dissapointing, but send them into another instance of the battle zone.

Suddenly if the limit would be reached the sent players could still attack the towers and their damage on them would be calculated betwwen both the zones,

New players for both sides could continue to flow in without any risk of lag. Perhaps maybe other instances could be player lvl based as you could plan your guild attacks in the low lvl and high lvl player zones, in which case lower lvl players would enter another instance of the battle, that may even make play less anoying for those with low lvl chars or playing a low alt at the moment a war brakes out.

[__________Soulmartyr]

It sounds good on paper, but then, what if you wanted to help out a friend, but because of crowding limits, you got sent to another instance and your friend got killed in the other instance?

I'm not saying you're idea was bad, but, I think the consequences in large battles would be negative as far as role-playing goes.

-Crimsus (WHAT'S THAT PRETZEL DOING?!!!)

Originally posted by Ascession
Im surprised no one has mentioned another alternative to overcrowding that is already implemented in the game.

Look at shops for example, Im sure many of you decided to meet a friend in a shop and found he was not inside, yet he claimed he was, basicly more than one instance of the shop exists in the game at the same time.

Why not redirect the flow not away from the battle as that would be terribly dissapointing, but send them into another instance of the battle zone.

Suddenly if the limit would be reached the sent players could still attack the towers and their damage on them would be calculated betwwen both the zones,

New players for both sides could continue to flow in without any risk of lag. Perhaps maybe other instances could be player lvl based as you could plan your guild attacks in the low lvl and high lvl player zones, in which case lower lvl players would enter another instance of the battle, that may even make play less anoying for those with low lvl chars or playing a low alt at the moment a war brakes out.

[____________Alantria]

The only solution to this would be enter at the same time, for instance have your frien leave that zone quick and come back with him at the same time, should only take the same amount of time it takes to zone.
It isnt perfect , but seems a much better alternative as not to be able to join a battle at all.

Also this system would prevent griefing as some omni or clan would not be able to zone in "dummy players" of their own from multi accounts to fill the other team allotment of spaces, if they did their enemy would zone into the other instance anyway and continue to do damage.

Of course once a enemy force was removed from the main instance and the socondary instance only had enemy, they would have to be booted from that zone and re-enter onto the main.

There still may have to be side limits per instance , but it would not stop the flow of battle or worst yet not allow players to join.

My six cents

[_______________ccl28]

This is really a tough one. Since so many people have taken poke at FC already, I'll refrain. Here's something that would bother me though.

The are a few uber guilds. These guilds have the ability to perma-camp rare spawns. Hence, they have better equipment that most people. So in an even number fight they would probably massacre their opposers. The way I had origianlly imagined the system, an uber guild would really have to pace themselves. If they were to beat on too many lesser guilds, they would be facing the wrath of multiple guilds at once. However, since they will always fight even sides they could go on a non-stop rampage. See how many towers you put down when uber guild x trounces you right away.

The other major problem, which has been mentioned, is that you plan a guild battle, and you get locked out of the zone for the whole fight. Ohhh, fun.

[Nanotony]

I am from a small guild of approximately 40 members, and was looking forward to Notum Wars. After reading the article posted by Gauge and the many replies from everyone in this forum I have to say I do not like the idea of CL.

It would be far more realistic to be slaughtered by an 'uber' guild than to be told we cannot fight. I see myself and my frustrations now. I pay for this game, as do all these fine players and we deserve better than to be told that we may not participate in a battle with our guild buddies. Realistically Battles of days gone by did include sudden strikes of large armies overpowering a selected target in a blood bath. And yes I can even say I would enjoy it, just as much as I can say being from this small guild I would love to be the underdog who hits your 'uber' camp when you least expect it with as many men as I can muster.

My favourite comments in this thread (the thread is far too long for me to remember who said it first) was that this is Anarchy Online not Fair Online. There should be large scale wars being held, I expect them. Admittedly I would be frustrated by 'lag' (regardless of it's origin) as would many others, but given a choice between lag and "you are not permitted to enter" I take lag. After all large scale wars would & should be anarchy.

From what I gather though we aren't even discussing 'shall we implement this', but rather 'how should we implement this' in which case I think from what I have read in all these posts IMHO I think that the best solution would be the reduction of players outside a 10M redius to default or generic models of low poly counts and dumping any player outside an 80M radius.

I will now be putting off my purchase of the Notum Wars booster pack until some other "Guinnea Pigs" have trialed it on the live servers and have some good feedback. I am in Australia and no doubt if I can get the pack, it will cost me some rediculous ammount and I want to know that I will be getting something worth paying for, and not be told I cannot enter certain zones when I choose.

Edited for spelling :P

[_______________Vydas]

I'm not a techie, so I understand that there is a problem, but, unlike so many others here, I have no alternative solutions to suggest.

I do want to recap just a few of key questions, though, stated elsewhere:

1. Are there any factors that influence which characters will be ported out?

2. Once they are gone, can they be replaced with anyone on their 'side', or can only those specific characters get back in?

3. My impression had always been that the towers themselves have both offensive and defensive abilities. If that is the case, how can a player 50/50 battle ever be 'fair'?

[Llorrac1]

While I understand the frustrations for folks with high-end machines that want to play the best MMORPG out there (AO of course), I can see exactly where GG is coming from here.

If your guild can't crowd in anymore attackers have alternate locations to attack. Every good tactician should have alternate attacks planned in case the primary goal is too crowded.

As for the whole engie beacon warp not working properly? This just encourages me to recruit MORE engie's into my org! Increase the odds in your favor if you're on the defense and the battle's not going your way!

Don't look at the proposed solution to the 'lag' issue and say 'aw crap, another nerf'. Approach it from the perspective of 'how do I make this work to my guild's advantage?'. You'll see if you give it a chance that this can work much better than you might first imagine.

Oh, in case anyone out there is reading this and is looking for a guild for the upcoming booster please send me an email and I'll be happy to explain what mine stands for. Engie's are especially welcome!

gatlinchris@hotmail.com

http://www10.brinkster.com/aovisions

[_____________1000101]

<quote from article>
Or should the definition of too crowded be a low-end computer with maximum graphics settings? Where should we draw the line?
</quote from article>

First off, bravo on the decision to do this. Being smart and brave enough to work within the parameters of reality and accept that you are not in fantasy land is a good thing.
Regarding the definition of a low end computer, You may want to check my rooted poll about how much RAM do you have?
Most people are running 512. Perhaps you should make this the defacto standard? If a person doesnt have 512, I suggest pricewatch.com You can get RAM dirt cheap.

[___________Katerchen]

Originally posted by 1000101
<quote from article>

Most people are running 512. Perhaps you should make this the defacto standard? If a person doesnt have 512, I suggest pricewatch.com You can get RAM dirt cheap.

I really do not see a reason to invest in more RAM only to run a game that lacks any efficient memory management.

If Funcom tells me that 256Meg with well tuned fat16 filesystems (for speed) and a permanent swap partition is too little memory then I only laugh.

The only program Iknow that chokes on my system is AO.

I won't go into technical details, but AO's internal memory and graphics handling is simply poor.

We know that Funcom is currently working on this (see the indication in the patch notes that you will no longer see the attack/cast animations of your foe unless it hits you, due to "optimizations")

Maybe I am wrong, but my impression is that the texture and mesh loading lags have become far peskier than before the latest patch.

Anyway, to add up to my previous article, I played a bit today, quite bored by the neverending mission scheme and got quite frustrated again by various bugs. l searched a cave mission three times without finding the mission item (am i stupid, are my eyes bad, or is it a bug? Many told me the same happened to them, always in cave missions...)

Then I logged off after 7 consecutive failed tries to leave the shop, each taking a few minutes... "Area change was not initiated on server"...

I think I am getting a taste of CL.

</whine start>
Hmmm - I really would prefer not to whine, I am ready to leave AO, but I feel sad about it.

I had much fun playing my chars. I also enjoyed much soloing, as I am not always in party mood.

Maybe it is funcom's intention to disencourage players from soloing, or maybe I was used to solo too high mission levels until the patch.
Maybe I am a bad player, but I cannot find joy in regularly dying and losing the exp when encountering a bunch of red engineer NPC that cast swarms of even more reddish droids.
And please don't think that I set the difficulty slider too high. This even happened after degrading mission ql to the first higher ql step above the own level. This should be acceptable for well-equpped chars, but with these unbalanced NPC pets it isn't.

Please don't take this as unreasonable whining, the NPC pets are admittedly still not balanced.
As I don't want to be a paying software tester, I am thinking about cancelling my account if there nothing improves. There are still 8 days left to the next billing, so I think I will simply not go online the next days, until something changes. If Funcom doesn't do the necessary fixes, I'll cancel in the hope that they get their ass up in the next 3 months, so I might have FUN playing AO again.
</whine end>

Sorry for the language... I am not very amused about my today's playing experience...
Have fun...

Ànnoyed Online, Yours
Katerchen

[Cmdr-Redruum]

So...... does this mean I won't be able to lead hordes of clanners into Omni Territory and crash your servers any longer?

[___________Katerchen]

Hi...

Today, Monday in the morning, I thought about re-checking the playability of the game, as my internet connection to the server is perfect at this time.

I didn't play for long, though.

I had to unwillingly verify two new bugs that I already noticed on the weekend.
Now I know that these are real bugs and not peak-hour-connection problems.

These are:
Bug 1: Whompa Lockup
Often when you enter a whompa, your PC will lock up for quite a long time. You might mistake it for a crash, because the freeze time without hard disk activity can last many minutes. I don't know the reason (client memory thrashing? server not transmitting the new zone information?), but this is none of my business.
Fix this Funcom, it is annoying to sometimes need about 20 mins from Borealis to Avalon.

Bug 2: Calms are broken now
I had to repeat an observation I already had some times on weekend.
A mob that was successfully calmed and being displayed in the yellowish calm haze might attack you any time.
Yes. It can surprisingly attack you anytime. The special thing is that this can happen anytime during the calm nano's active time and that the monsters remain being displayed as calmed while they attack you.
It looks like as if calms now have a chance to break by themselves.
I couldn't find this announced anywhere and also because of the mob being still displayed as calmed - there is also no message that the calm would have expired, so this must be considered as a new major bug. (No, no reflect shields etc were active, no AoE attacks were being used etc... it was clearly a bug)

Conclusion:
I hoped to have enjoyable playing.
But it was not very enjoyable.

You will understand, that I do not want to pay for AO as long as it has been downpatched to a beta quality stage.

Now is Monday. Please fix the bugs asap, or I'll cancel my account in time before the next payment would be due. That is next Monday.

Learn from your mistake, fix the bugs first before working on the expansion packs.

Thank you.

Annoyed Online,
Yours
Katerchen

[_______________Lara1]

You say that the speed issue with loads of people wearing loads of armour/clothes/weapons, along with all the headroom that adds to the amount of network traffic that has to go between client and server. And that this is a possible tactic to reduce the gameplay of people on slower connections or those with insufficient video ram/ system ram or hardware support because those people would still be loading all this data from the network and disk and then possibly getting into a infinite loop of swapping.

Just a silly thought, and please excuse me if this is absurd, but it makes sense in my strange little mind ...

Instead of kicking people out of an area when there are too many people there, which to me will spoil the fun of whatever event is going on, why not allow those people in but only transfer what is needed as a bare essential. Such essentials might be their name, level and anything that the AO client relies upon to make the game work client side. Then such people would be represented in the world as a generic look (maybe a ghost of some kind) until you select and *t* target them.

First off, I realise that network traffic still has to be sent and recieved to say what these people are doing, but you are not sending any data that might not be important, nor clogging up the users hard disk, graphics card and memory with excessive things to display and manage.

The trade off, obviously, is that in a very crowded area, some people will be just like dummies in appearance until targetted, but atleast everyone has a better chance of participating in an event or attack if they choose to.

It seems it could be possible to have a client side setting too, to limit how many people in an area can be seen be the client in full detail and at what threshold they become temporary ghosts. And ofcourse, this number would be rolling in that if your limit was 30 characters in detail, and you target your 31st, then one of your detailed chatracters would have to roll off to ghost mode if resources are low. Therefore people with high specs can get full depth and beauty in crowded areas, and low specs can still know who is there!

In my little world, this solution would be more acceptable to me than restricting the ability to participate...that is if it is possible to do in reality, which I wish not to make any claims that it is - because I don't know!

One last comment about the polygons being optimised to increase frame rates and memory usage etc... One reason I came to AO straight after its BETA period ended was because it looked so nice. The reason I stayed was because I got hooked to the game. I would still hope in light of this that AO would still look as beautiful as it does today. I hope the optimisations don't make the game look like DAOC or EQ.

[Coldshadow]

I am VERY happy to hear about this change in the game system because of the following:
I have a celeron 466 oc. 525 w/ GF2MX. Lowest-end possible IMHO. Because of this I have 2-4FPS in cities like Tir and 8-10FPS in BS mission for example. (Why playing under these conditions? I am FOND of AO and I am addicted... the miracle this world has makes me play anyways. )
As I have noticed it is not the net-conn. that limits my gameplay but the computer. More players = more lag, my ISDN is sufficient not to drop me and provide this computer the necessary net-data with neccessary speed.
Conclusion: very good idea, thank God someone starts to think about low-end players. (Believe me, I would be the happiest if I could improve my machine, but I live in a country where computer prices are like in developed countries but wages are one tenth only).

Jagienka ( mailto://sesam@intermail.hu )

[________________xoox]

First off, isnt the booster out this month (Nov) ? I am dismayed that this is only being discussed now, cause ya gotta test it too.

Second, I hate any idea of Funcom controlling pvp fights.

Third, we've all seen what happens at Tarasque though, and I never liked the idea of alternative tarasque's. I think if the idea has to go forward the limit should be to allow the maximum number of people in with some slowdown. I should think 50-50-50 would be good. NO kicking out players. Once player limit is reached then no one can zone in until the count drops which should happen quickly with deaths etc. Kiryats point, I think all of us Tar raiders have thought of this too, having seen it in Camelot before, raises an important issue. Whats to stop clans from making alt-omni guild of low levels to camp the area ? I think only recognised guilds could participate. This means all guilds that do not have MAIN characters in another guild faction. In fact, they should cross check all characters and make sure all alts are in the same guild. Sorry, it needs to be done.

Yadda yadda, high end systems. Yeah yeah everyone posting has high end computer. I am running a Cray supercomputer with dedicated optical line, parallel ATI 9800 controllers, yadda yadda...
An average most popluar system should be used. I'd say a 1GHz, 256 MB, Gforce 2 would be about right.

[_____________Protest]

I sure do like candy.

[_______________Dhuan]

Crowd control: I have some very real concerns over this proposal, and I have to say it smacks at the ultimate example of a lack of technical imagination. No offence intended to game director, but this could ultimately open the way to destroying AO and denting some what its quality of reality.

“This article is not the easiest of documents - and I am sorry about that.”.

So am I. I would find a document like this difficult to write as I would know that many of the players would equate it as “We don’t want to spend money on faster hardware so we prefer to take your money and handicap the game for you.”.

“If you connect these things you will see that we might possibly get a problem. People have experience what they call "lag" in many situations while playing the game. Usually this is when you get into an extremely crowded area with a lot of other players. To call this "lag" is actually a wrong definition of the problem.”

Hmm, I tend to class lag as the data transfer rate between your servers and my client, not the slowdown of a heavily textured environment. You should be giving people the option in there settings to allow their own limiting of crowding. You could also enable the limiting of textures for crowded areas as an option in the client setup. This would blow away most of your “client “ problems, but I tend to think that the issues are more with the servers being underpowered for popular areas. Please dont patronise us with this, 99% of the players know the real score here.

“People can crowd in - so many with so many different looks - that other people coming into the area freeze up or sometimes experience client crashes when your computer tries to load more than the size of the 3D card memory. (You get lock-ups from infinite swapping...)”.

This is actually the fault of the client, not the users’ graphics card. As I pointed out in a erlier post, YOUR client likes to re-render the textures and polygons again and again and never seems to clear them away afterwards. Also I was under the impression, especially where I have been developing graphical systems, that the correct use of the graphical interfaces prevents the card from attempting to load textures beyond its physical ability. If for some reason you have an exotic solution to this then again it’s the client which should prevent these crashes by managing its resources better. Given that EverQuest doesnt give these problems I would have to ask why does AO?

"Digression: I confess that writing about this makes me uncomfortable. In an ideal world I would very much have liked to have a system were we could handle any number of characters with an infinite number of polygons and textures with 120 frames per second on any PC.”

In an ideal world we would have a client that could manage the graphics properly and prevent slowdown. In an ideal game world we would NOT have limits on the number of visible players set by system administrators but would allow individuals to decide this.

I think that most readers know the difference between slowdown caused by graphics and lag caused by busy servers. The original article does not mention the lag when one is trying to leave a zone, or a room or an almost empty play area such as Broken Shores. It does seem to me that either AO have lost the technology plot a little and have not understood the players experience, OR, they are fully aware of the problem, know it will cost them money and are looking for a cheap solution at the players expense. Given the "inspired" game development and the fact that high levelers are leaving in droves I would tend to think the latter.

We are not fools AO, you play around with us, we simply go and play with some one else.

[________________xoox]

Here is a simple solution :

create more pvp categories !

ie instead of 75-200 pvp able, split it into thirds :

75-100

100-150

150-200

Since towers will have a level quality, then diversifying pvp categories will mean less people able to attack. It might also prevent some ganking.

[_____________Soukyan]

I'm not sure how I feel about the implementation of such code. On one hand, it is a war and as I play DAoC as well, I know how large scale combat can be. On one side, this is "anarchy" and allowing any number of attackers that can be mustered to attack would fit that bill. DAoC does not limit the amount of attackers/defenders and things seem to work out fairly well although there noticably is one dominant side of the three on each server. Which side that is depends on which server you play on. Regardless of that, things seem to work out fairly well and the player numbers stay amazingly even. The nice thing about the system is there are no constraints. The downfall is that if you are on one of the "underdog" sides, you often find yourself up against many opponents and "zerg tactics" end up winning the battles (i.e. the side with the most people can kamikaze roll over any opponent). On the other side, limiting the amount of people to a "playfield" or "battlefield" will force players to use tactics. When I've found myself in small scale combat in DAoC, I find that I have the most fun. In one group vs. one group vs one group battles, tactics win the fight and the battles can last quite some time and be exhilarating. Not to mention that "controlled" numbers plays more toward that tacticians out there. As far as fitting into RP, it sadly does not very well although political RP can be more readily addressed in the controlled system. But more of this later...

I have what I would call a "fair" system. I run an AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz processor, 512 Meg of SDRAM, 7200 RPM Western Digital Caviar IDE HD, GeForce 4 Ti4600 128 MB video card, Creative Audigy Gamer, Windows XP SP1, cable modem and a 19" monitor. Not a bleeding edge system by any means, but sufficient as far as resources go.

I have seen several people boast that EQ and DAoC are far better when dealing with large amounts of people on-screen. As I currently play all three games, I will tell you that those people are incorrect, to an extent. EQ has very low quality world textures, even with the full Luclin "upgrade". EQ also has a fairly poor engine as having more than 50 Luclin models on-screen at the same time causes "graphics lag". For a game with such poor world textures, this is poor performance. DAoC has less plygons than EQ and AO, but does have better world textures and much more detailed spell effects than EQ. However, when more than 50 people get on screen, the graphics lag once again hits. DAoC also has a bad graphics memory leak that has plagued them since release. Many people must still "relog" every few hours just to improve their framerate. I find this same problem to a slight degree in EQ as well, especially on large scale raids.

Long story short, all of the current 3D MMORPGS have somewhat lacking graphics engines. But they are not lacking in the ability to render beautiful world for the roleplayers. The engines are lacking in the ability to handle large amounts of players well. But ask yourselves, is it really just the engine? Yes, my video card can handle 16 players in UT2K3 with graphics options maxxed and amazing high framerate. But I think that my card might just stagger a bit under the load of 50-100 players in that same engine in a zone that is 10 times larger than the map I am playing. There are many "faults" in the system and the developers of these games are doing an outstanding job on working with what they have and making the best games they can with limited resources.

I see many people who are of the EQ camp, or the DAoC camp, or of the FC should fail camp. Those in the EQ camp will say that it is tops until they quit the game or they die IRL. The same goes for DAoC. Those who want to see FC fail, I will withhold my opinion on as they neither help nor hinder our situation here. I am of no camp myself. The politics in AO intrigue me as there are goals to be attained and each side will fight to reach an end. Am I a fanboy of any of these games? No. They all have good RP elements. They also all suffer from camping and loot-centricity and elitism and general mismanagement. But they each also having shining saving graces. When I want to play a Gnome Necromancer, EQ is where I go. When I want to play a Norseman and battle for realm superiority, DAoC is where I go. When I want another world and technology and politics and warfare, AO is where I go.

So you see, you must view all of these games objectively. IMO, all three game engines completely suck. Really they do. When I see other game engines being developed that can perform much better and that can be made to perform astoundingly on current hardware, I get upset that these companies don't have these engines. But we have what we have. If you have a graphics card that is more than a year old, face it, your performance is going to be poor (compared to those with current hardware) no matter which game you play. Face the facts and don't say FC is blaming YOU. They are saying that there are hardware limitations. There are also game limitations. Those are the facts. That's the truth of the matter.

~Soukyan

[________________xoox]

"When I see other game engines being developed that can perform much better and that can be made to perform astoundingly on current hardware, I get upset that these companies don't have these engines"

Which ones ?

[_____________Soukyan]

Which ones ?

UT2k3 and the engine being made for Lineage 2, which is a modified UT engine. Of course, looking at the recent in-game performance of Lineage 2, it appears that they are hosing that engine as well by trying to "adjust" it too much to fit the RPG.

I believe the Big World engine is still in development and I'll be interested to see what kind of MMP engine Blizzard develops, although it looks as though they are going with instancing in their worlds like AO does. Hmm... could FunCom have something there? For those who haven't followed FC as a company, they aren't what I would call n00b at game development. They may not be huge, but their technology and innovation has some merit. Look at the big picture and then look at all the little parts. The process of game development will be an evolutionary process for a long time. It gets better and better, but there are so many factors other than just the game engine that govern how well a game is developed. I can't stand level grinds in an RPG, and as far as I'm concerned that is my biggest gripe with AO, EQ and DAoC. But quite frankly, DAoC and AO have enough other things to do (read PvP and crafting) that I actually enjoy myself and the level grind fades into the background. But I digress...

A game engine is a difficult thing to get "just right". Not to mention the fact that you can please some people some of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time. Simple facts. There are engines that exist and in development that can handle this type of game. The fact of the matter is, the players hardware must be able to handle the amount of data, etc. thrown at it. I may be a bit out of line here, but if you want to play the game, you gotta buy the toys. In other words, if you want bleeding edge games to run at full tilt, you need a bleeding edge system. If you don't have a bleeding edge system, then don't get your hopes up. Should gamers be forced to buy a new PC every 6 months? Of course not. Must they? At the current time, probably. Why? It's all about the money for the devs and all about the eye candy for the players. When it comes to hardware, you get what you pay for. If you bought a Pinto, don't ***** about not being able to outperform a Ferrari.

I'm afraid I must agree with developers on this one. Graphics cards that are coming out are badass today, but they get pushed to their limit by the software being made. True, some developers haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the cards' capabilities and that is why alot of games perform poorly even after a video card upgrade, so we bide our time while improvements are made and we enjoy what we can. If you want to make a difference, become a developer. Make your mark. Ranting about the "poor programmers" and "lame client and engine" on a forum of other players is not going to entice a game developer to cater to you. Anyhow, I hope I answered your question above. The remainder of this post was not directed at you personally. It was meant as a continuation of my previous post.

~Soukyan