How Are We Going To Add Capacity?

[JusticeZero]

When I first logged in, the record was seventy-something percent full. Now, eighty-something is not uncommon. What happens as people start to swarm in? I assume that at some point, things will have to be monetized somehow to pay for hardware, but more worrying, the capacity we have will run out eventually. I assume that EnB was set up originally around the idea of using shards, which simply do not work.

Why don't they work? Well.. here's a related question. Why would a multinational corporation ever set up their office in NYC when there's plenty of cheap office space in Fairbanks, Alaska? In NYC there are lots of other people in all sorts of fields - there are lawyers, mechanics, and an intricate and thick web of other people that the corporation can call on at all hours of the day. They can walk down the street and find most anything they need, and be able to hobnob with the elite. In Fairbanks, they have none of that. There's a cheap office and lots of room, but no people, no lawyers, no support.

Next: Why would anyone ever play on the server "Desolate" when they can play on "Crowded"? On Crowded, they can get groups at odd hours, they can get items made, they can find people to raid with and if the people they deal with are annoying, they talk to different people and have a whole new set of valuable allies. On Desolate, they have to learn what time the one shield crafter is on, and if they make a comment about peppermint, that one guy will never talk to them. How were they to know about that freak incident with a candy cane? They can't raid. They can't get a group. So when it comes time to make a new character, they don't make it on Desolate - which means the dev team spent a lot of money to keep a vacant server running. Because it's empty, it stays empty.

Is there some way to add server capacity with some sort've cloud setup, so that we can just keep it all in one place somehow? Edited December 1, 2012 by JusticeZero

[Sounjah]

From what I understand the 500 limit is a "soft target" the server can take more, they just have it set at 500.

TL;DR Edited December 1, 2012 by Ozone

[Stanig[IS]]

Yeah as far as my personal limited knowledge of how the nuts and bolts works goes, I do know there is a plan right now to raise the server cap in the very near future. We have came within 5-10% percent of hitting it already on last weeks huge load of weekend/holiday players. We hit 420 according to the portal, and 438 according to an SDEV somewhere in between those snapshots the portal takes,

So weekends we are running near capacity, from what I understand the 500 cap is very conservative and the server can take far more than this. Stability with the memory issues (software side, the hardware is a beast) that have been worked on for the last two weeks is what has been keeping SDEV from raising the cap thus far. They want to be sure it will handle load without the memory crashes with the new code changes implemented. So right now its a sort of stress test at a basic level before they go upping the level.

Expect it soon though, we have had some really good solid runs of 3+days without crashing so I bet it isnt too long now.

[JusticeZero]

OK. My main worry is that i've spent a few years studying the social science behind exactly why shards don't work and really never have very well, but it seems like the first thing people suggest. It's probably something that should be kicking around in the back of the devs' mind, since i'm sure it will be a very non-trivial thing to retrofit.

[Mattsacre]

I understand your fear of shards, and even take your point and little story about fairbanks and NY....but guess what..the old EnB was based on "shards" as you put it, there were 4 "shards". And after a few weeks to catch up, those other servers (as they were called then) did just fine, with their own social infrastructure, and market, and guilds etc etc. In fact there was a interseerver friendly competition as to who could get such and such boss spawned or succeed at X raid etc. there were build tickers and kill ticker etc. so one server had more of Y item built and they could brag about it.

I understand your fears of server splits etc. and can even muster up a little worry about "seperate but equal" myself, but in reality...there are some of us out here that actually LIKE the idea of additional shards if the server population crosses some threshold.

Why, you ask? Competition.

Competition (both bad and good),
1. A little friendly competition is good, people trying to out do others at something in a friendly way is good and healthy, a fellow server exceling at something and even beating you, you can slap them on the back and say "good job! gonna get you next time...better stay on you toes!". thats good

2. Resource competition, thats bad. right now you have X amount of players contending to use the same resource base at any given time. Now there are a great amount of base resource out there, but imagine a time were you need to kill X amount of a set mob, or mine Y amount of ore and someone else is camped on that ore/mob, you are contending for the resource and may have to be frustrated for a while in your efforts whilst they do the same. Now magnify that by a 4x (the old servers were 2k players, with 500 now and old cap thats 4x players) were you may only be rubbing shoulders now, with 4x or even more (there is no real 2k cap now, hardware is magnitudes past the limitations of 12yrs ago) you will be in each others face and more with ever increasing population.

No, ther ARE people that prefer Fairbanks to NY (you may not be one..I am) else why would there be a Fairbanks . There are small towns all over the world (with real live people in them..and businesses!), they PREFER small town U.S.A. and the resultant elbow room and low rental/infrastructure costs. I am not shooting for megamattco, would rather get to know my customers and neighbors, which is not to say JZCORP don't have it's own attractions, just not to some, there is room for both approaches and additional shards are not to be feared if applied correctly.

[glenser]

Has anyone on the DEV Team researched DNAT firewall usage?

 

As a research project many years ago, I set up a Firewall with one external IP address and 6 internal IP addresses on 6 interfaces.

Each internal address card talked directly to a single internal server's Primary port, and each internal server's Secondary port

went to a switch with a seventh server. This server was the MySQL query server and the main controller for the other 6.

 

By having certain ports(sockets) on the firewall routed to the six different servers, then by changing which port communication

with an external client was handled, load balancing allowed a MASSIVE number of clients to be added. The main controller

monitored overall loads between servers, re-allocating traffic to less-busy servers to keep response times quick.

 

It would seem that this layout might allow upwards of 1000 (or more) clients without causing lag. As different sectors

get more populated, a particular server's other sectors could be re-distributed among the other servers.

 

The research was designed to use older, slower servers to "imitate" a single faster server.

No reason it could not be recreated with more modern hardware.

[Kyp [LDEV]]

When I first logged in, the record was seventy-something percent full. Now, eighty-something is not uncommon. What happens as people start to swarm in? I assume that at some point, things will have to be monetized somehow to pay for hardware, but more worrying, the capacity we have will run out eventually. I assume that EnB was set up originally around the idea of using shards, which simply do not work.

Why don't they work? Well.. here's a related question. Why would a multinational corporation ever set up their office in NYC when there's plenty of cheap office space in Fairbanks, Alaska? In NYC there are lots of other people in all sorts of fields - there are lawyers, mechanics, and an intricate and thick web of other people that the corporation can call on at all hours of the day. They can walk down the street and find most anything they need, and be able to hobnob with the elite. In Fairbanks, they have none of that. There's a cheap office and lots of room, but no people, no lawyers, no support.

Next: Why would anyone ever play on the server "Desolate" when they can play on "Crowded"? On Crowded, they can get groups at odd hours, they can get items made, they can find people to raid with and if the people they deal with are annoying, they talk to different people and have a whole new set of valuable allies. On Desolate, they have to learn what time the one shield crafter is on, and if they make a comment about peppermint, that one guy will never talk to them. How were they to know about that freak incident with a candy cane? They can't raid. They can't get a group. So when it comes time to make a new character, they don't make it on Desolate - which means the dev team spent a lot of money to keep a vacant server running. Because it's empty, it stays empty.

Is there some way to add server capacity with some sort've cloud setup, so that we can just keep it all in one place somehow?

 

No monetization. We accept donations to purchase/maintain servers and buy software for further development, that's it and that's all it will ever be.

 

If you'll notice, a vast majority of games still use the "shard" model, it's all about balancing your populations, this is why they offer rewards for server moves and that sort of thing. You can also simply adjust rules to account for population, make some things easier for a time, and ramp them up with the population growth. 

 

A cloud server isn't feasible without a complete rewrite of the client, this is something we'll never convince programmers to do for free, sorry to say.

 

I understand your fear of shards, and even take your point and little story about fairbanks and NY....but guess what..the old EnB was based on "shards" as you put it, there were 4 "shards". And after a few weeks to catch up, those other servers (as they were called then) did just fine, with their own social infrastructure, and market, and guilds etc etc. In fact there was a interseerver friendly competition as to who could get such and such boss spawned or succeed at X raid etc. there were build tickers and kill ticker etc. so one server had more of Y item built and they could brag about it.

I understand your fears of server splits etc. and can even muster up a little worry about "seperate but equal" myself, but in reality...there are some of us out here that actually LIKE the idea of additional shards if the server population crosses some threshold.

Why, you ask? Competition.

Competition (both bad and good),
1. A little friendly competition is good, people trying to out do others at something in a friendly way is good and healthy, a fellow server exceling at something and even beating you, you can slap them on the back and say "good job! gonna get you next time...better stay on you toes!". thats good

2. Resource competition, thats bad. right now you have X amount of players contending to use the same resource base at any given time. Now there are a great amount of base resource out there, but imagine a time were you need to kill X amount of a set mob, or mine Y amount of ore and someone else is camped on that ore/mob, you are contending for the resource and may have to be frustrated for a while in your efforts whilst they do the same. Now magnify that by a 4x (the old servers were 2k players, with 500 now and old cap thats 4x players) were you may only be rubbing shoulders now, with 4x or even more (there is no real 2k cap now, hardware is magnitudes past the limitations of 12yrs ago) you will be in each others face and more with ever increasing population.

No, ther ARE people that prefer Fairbanks to NY (you may not be one..I am) else why would there be a Fairbanks :). There are small towns all over the world (with real live people in them..and businesses!), they PREFER small town U.S.A. and the resultant elbow room and low rental/infrastructure costs. I am not shooting for megamattco, would rather get to know my customers and neighbors, which is not to say JZCORP don't have it's own attractions, just not to some, there is room for both approaches and additional shards are not to be feared if applied correctly.

 

Matt is right, some people have very different preferences. Social players for example, gravitate to crowded servers, and achievers gravitate to less densely populated servers because they get more personal accomplishment faster and don't have to wait on peers to move on. They just build a small and powerful group and go at it.

 

Has anyone on the DEV Team researched DNAT firewall usage?

 

As a research project many years ago, I set up a Firewall with one external IP address and 6 internal IP addresses on 6 interfaces.

Each internal address card talked directly to a single internal server's Primary port, and each internal server's Secondary port

went to a switch with a seventh server. This server was the MySQL query server and the main controller for the other 6.

 

By having certain ports(sockets) on the firewall routed to the six different servers, then by changing which port communication

with an external client was handled, load balancing allowed a MASSIVE number of clients to be added. The main controller

monitored overall loads between servers, re-allocating traffic to less-busy servers to keep response times quick.

 

It would seem that this layout might allow upwards of 1000 (or more) clients without causing lag. As different sectors

get more populated, a particular server's other sectors could be re-distributed among the other servers.

 

The research was designed to use older, slower servers to "imitate" a single faster server.

No reason it could not be recreated with more modern hardware.

 

In some ways, that is how our server already works internally. It handles the IP addressing for the internal "sector servers" in this way. This is all handled in threads in the code. That being said, our servers are nowhere near stressed at present. We could easily increase the cap right now, but we intend to do it slowly.

 

Like Stanig said, we'll be raising it pretty soon.