(02-21-2015, 09:23 PM)Naunet Wrote:(02-21-2015, 01:06 AM)Kage Wrote: But when I go to a restaurant and it's full I regularly have to decide whether or not I will wait in line and find the most opportune moment or I go find a place that isn't so crowded.
This is a rather poor analogy. While I rather dislike internet analogies, at least something that would make it more accurate would be if... All your friends and peers and community had chosen a particular restaurant, but when you get there, the hostess is turning people away at the door and doesn't give a rat's ass that she's telling you to go spend your evening alone and isolated from all the people you care about interacting with.
Suddenly, just "find[ing] a place that isn't so crowded" doesn't sound quite so simple, does it?
Let's add to this though. Because if we keep this restaurant analogy, it'd be important to note, it's not that the hostess is blocking you from your friends, it's that she's blocking any new people from the restaurant, and rnadom new person has no way of verifying they're "part of the group". Server transfers would be like showing a past receipt. Like a "see? I belong here," message.
As a person who has worked in a restaurant, I can easily tell you that if there are no seats to give, people are not going to be seated at a table, regardless of how many people they know in the restaurant. It doesn't work that way. As a "paying customer" to many other restaurants, I've also been to many places that will also say "we will not seat you if your full party is not present." And if they call the party name and the full group isn't there? Too bad, so sad. Bottom of the wait list.
Rather than deciding on a restaurant typically PACKED with people, wouldn't you normally try to plan an outting at somewhere where you'll get the same service without the long wait? Assuming the SE Server-Restaurants are IDENTICAL in service, why would SE try to build some with more seats if it's going to have the same number of competent staff working? All that would happen is overworking the waiters, and then you'd get bad service.
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It's important to realize that SE isn't doing this to keep people apart from their friends. SE is doing this to maintain a service that people already complain about in regards to server stability. Why would they ever open up a server that's telling their admins "hey, I'm really full right now. And I have too many connections to safely support adding more people in bulk."
But what about the people who already have a created character? How come they can login? Great thing to think about! Individual zones can get overloaded too! (I blame patches for spikes in population). So not only can the server hit a threshold of "there are too many exisiting people logged in", which we know is not the same number of people it can support, but each zone does have a hard limit of how many people can be there before nobody can enter it.
Pure speculation here, but this is how I think they might be handling how many characters per server.
Server:
- Zone 1
- Zone 2
- Zone 3
- etc
- instance/map 1
- instance/map 2
- instance/map 3
- etc
We know that when 100% of X is full, nobody is allow to move to that map/instance.
And we know that the total sum of zones "should" match the theoretical capacity of the server at 100% load.
Here's where it gets fun. How would you accommodate if say, X1 was at 90% and X2 was at 80%, and X3 was at a mere 10%, but then a massive amount of people from X1 and X2 wanted to head over? Let's say half the existing people there. X3 would then have its 10% + 45% (from X1) + 40% (from X2) all heading over, which locks it up. But it would be a massively bad idea to let something have 105% its capacity, right? Should be possible, right? But what if some of those people were viewing a cutscene or in an instance and had to be returned? So let's then assume the 10% in X3 was actually those people. ...like a saved seat or something. X3 would need some sort of "safe buffer" against this. As would all the other zones. So let's assume SE locks out a zone when it has 90% active capacity, to allow for bizarre circumstances, like someone popping up from a cutscene or something.Â
Add up all that "safe space" from every zone, and it's clear the server has much more capacity available than what could be used. But now take into account that an existing character could login at any moment. Maybe the server has to deal with that too. So it makes ANOTHER buffer for those people. Let's say 20% of the maximum capacity is reserved for these players, just in case. Now we have more slots that "could be used" by new players, but are there for the existing players who -might- login. Based of off usage statistics and whatnot, SE probably takes this into account and can adjust the zones and server buffers to account for it.
But how does this affect when a server might be open? More speculation. Let's assume a server normally has about 30-70% of its capacity in use. It would make sense for it to be open on the lower scale, since not many people are logged in. But if it's hitting that 70% or other magic number? Close down new characters. What if existing ones decide to login based off of all these logs that say "the highest population is supposed to be in a few minutes"? Close creation. Get ready for existing people. ...if they don't come? Adjust the stats. Maybe we can account for more people online or less people online at this time.Â
So what do we, the players see? Open/Closed. What does the server have to take into account? A lot more. For the game to be successful, it needs to be reliable AND have people playing it. This gets taken into consideration. Seeing a server closed is never fun for new people, but it's a sign that the server has enough work to do. Short of trying to offer some bonus to people to move to a less-populated server, SE cannot balance load without restricting character creation and zone limits. Is it the best approach? Debatable. Can they simply expand their servers and increase it? Who knows. My guess is that it's not financially worth it, because adding servers is expensive. Load balancing those servers is expensive. Have too many servers for a given zone/instance/cluster, and you'll have an impact in its performance because something has to handle all those machines and designate resources. Throwing money at the datacenter isn't going to solve the problem.Â
This is high-performance computing here. It's not simple. It isn't solved simply. And really, getting mad isn't going to change anything about it. And if by some chance every existing server SE has becomes full at a datacenter? I highly doubt they'll expand our servers. Rather, they'll open new ones. Maybe offer incentives, and call it a night. We don't know how this is sorted out. And we're not their network engineers.
