NoRA

Now THIS I can say you might have wrong. I HAVE gone to contacts in Nova Praetoria as the "wrong" alignment, and they DO talk to you, because all your contacts initially in Nova are "Loyalist" and they're supposed to be available to everyone. I DID make resistance characters without doing any other "morality" stuff, and still got missions from Cleopatra.

Ok, I doubt that, but maybe I'm wrong, so I'll find another contact to try things with. I DO think it's really weird that I got a mission to go meet him and then he didn't give me the time of day...

When trying to play undercover as a resistance member among the Loyalists, I was given a mission to meet Dr. Hetzfeld. I did the mission, but he didn't have any missions for me. So I filed a "support" report that it was bugged and made another character to test and make sure it WAS bugged. While I was getting that character up to his level range, GM Willow asked a few questions including what alignment I was, and I had forgotten that was a thing. So I made another new character on another server to see if THAT changed anything. It did. I think Dr. Hetzfeld is bugged to not give missions to any "Resistance" players, even if they're actually "Loyalist" working undercover.

The missionserver, as its called, is a separate piece of software that stores the mission data as created by players. It does use some resources, but that part is not a big deal. Once you start an AE mission, it's loaded in a mapserver, like any other mission. They are not treated any differently. The problem is that players can build missions that are a lot more resource-intensive than normal missions from the game. When enemies spawn in normal missions, most of them have their AI in an "idle" state until they are aggroed, which doesn't require much processing power. But most AE farms rely heavily on ambushes or patrols, which spawn the critters with fully active AI. And that's the problem. Missions are run on 9 servers with a total of 224 cores. For the most part you can run lots of zones and missions on a single core without a problem; but AE farms tend to max out a core all for themselves. If there's just 100 AE AI-intensive farms running, that eats half of the mapserver processing power for all 4 shards. Fascinating. Do we have any info on how NCSoft handled this? I can't believe they were just throwing money at the problem over and over instead of figuring out a way of making the AI requirements from AE missions draw on elastic resources... If I'm remembering right, the way NC dealt with the problem was removing the missions when they found them. No farming missions, no problem. Of course, they weren't transparent about WHY they were so against farming, but at this point, I'm guessing it's because the farms were taxing their server cpus.