Servers and how they work.

    Ok the server is the brain that connects everything.

    The Server must perform many millions of tasks at once.

    A player is a bunch of binary code. When the game connects a player to the game. It sends information constantly from the brain to the player every time we push a button or move the camera, the server has to think What am i looking at now? What is it that i need to do?


    When the server is overloaded. it's just like us. We breakdown, we cry and whine, that something needs to be done, but you can't quite wrap your head around it.

    This is the when you should really start thinking about dividing the processes to separate servers (2 brains are better than 1. 3 brains is absolute brilliance.)

    The less one server has to perform, the easier it can think.

    Server 1 says to Server 2 and Server 3. I can no longer perform this amount of tasks on my own. Its too much to handle. Would it be alright if you two can take some data off my hands, i need to be able to think. Server 2, you handle this part of the game and Server 3, You handle this part of the game. if you two can do this for me that would be great. It will take a huge weight off my circuits.

    Hey, I'm Tiger. Nice to meet you. In game my character is MatoKuroi


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    Edited once, last by TigerBunny ().

    I think this doesn't apply to well to the NA server, if you want to call it that. The NA server is the oddest game server I've spent time looking at, it does not seem to follow the same design as other games. My guess is that Gameforge didn't plan on actually having a NA server hosted in the US until way late in their planning stages. So what we have now is some strange set of sorta-servers hosted on a Cloud. But my networking-foo is minimal, so I'm probably wrong.

    Quote from TigerBunny

    Ok the server is the brain that connects everything.

    The Server must perform many millions of tasks at once.

    A player is a bunch of binary code. When the game connects a player to the game. It sends information constantly from the brain to the player every time we push a button or move the camera, the server has to think What am i looking at now? What is it that i need to do?

    With these games, they almost without exception (Path of Exile being the only exception I know of) are not server based games, but client based peer to peer games. In a big open world MMO, where many actively play together in the same zone, every action gets passed to the server like you describe. Although in a client based peer to peer game, the servers when in a dungeon are there more as cloud storage, when you make a kill, or collect loot, it registers that with the servers, and stores the info, but your movements, and hit detection is handled by the client, or as in the case of playing with others, the client of the player hosting. When you're in town, that's handled by the servers, but with no combat being allowed there, much less work needs to be done.


    Being a client based peer to peer game does take a lot of the work off of the servers, but it still does need to manage many things, so can be overburdened if enough are playing. Until just recently the servers didn't even show they were under a heavy load, they just showed them as "Normal," since that change, things seem to have improved. They're likely reluctant to add new servers though, as the typical thing is that after a month, or so, the population of the game will have been reduced by about half. If they add new servers to deal with the existing population, they will look rather empty once the population drops in about a month, and with no cross server interaction, that will be a problem.

    Quote from StrawberryPunch
    Quote from Amalthius

    Explained well. So u think we need more servers?

    Unless they do a full wipe though everyone on this server is staying on this server lol.

    Well if the game were to have more servers but still be able to process in the same server as the other, that would make it much better for all of us. This is why i said dividing the processes.

    Putting maps across each of them splits the load, decreasing the load the first server had to handle. Say the maps for candus city is on the first server they have been here for a bit. we will let server 1 take care of them, but there is still people coming out the ass of the server, they just keep coming.

    then a bunch of players move to the next area, while others are still coming. therefore there server is thinking this this is a lot of players we need to push some maps to another server. particularly ones that are using a lot of players.

    Hey, I'm Tiger. Nice to meet you. In game my character is MatoKuroi


    Lily_Sig_2.png

    You guys mix up a architecture and a way of communication. I have not seen a P2P MMORPG up until now. P2P per definition means every peer has the same rights. Well, there are super peers sometimes. Data is only stored on the peer, not a server. This is obliviously not the case, as we have a login (does not exit in P2P) and data is stored on a server. This game has the standard Client-Server model. It even verifies your actions on the server. It probably also uses client side prediction.


    There is also a bit more to scalability the just "add more servers". Also server does not mean it's a physical device. A lot of servers nowadays run in virtual machines or even containers like docker. There are also load balancers which actually decide if a "brain" is overloaded. However redundancy only works under specific circumstances, e.g. if there is no state.


    Load is something that is probably monitored. It's like the most basic stuff. Unfortunately there is more to handling a application then just handling network. For example I have a oracle database for development which constantly spawn to many processes and ends up soft locking itself. There are about 2-3 people working with this DB, while the production one having up to 16.000 has no issues.


    Long story short. "Adding more servers" may not solve the problem. Before solving a problem you need to now the cause. A Beta is actually exactly for find those problems, their cause and fixing them. In other words, just wait and let the guys and girls responsible of this handel it.

    this is new info for me except the first and last part. Sure opimization is key to smooth gaming, but don't let the game do a BnS. i can't even play it now, because my server is so packed.

    Hey, I'm Tiger. Nice to meet you. In game my character is MatoKuroi


    Lily_Sig_2.png

    You probably have to wait until the beta is over to officially complain about it. Your best bet for now is to fill a bug report and be as detailed as possible with your problem. Hopefully this will get analysed and resolved. It's funny actually, when I ask my customers if they filled in a bug ticket it's often "we just wanted to mention it here first", although it's so much easier and faster to resolve issues if they just report them via the ticket system.

    We already added many new (physical) servers since the start and when we started there were already multiple servers for each server name. Just because there is only one server name shown per language does not mean that there is only one server per language ;)
    Setting up new hardware is not that difficult, but we do have some more performance issues we are working on at the moment