Number Six

Global services like the auction house, chat server, etc. work by the service itself connecting to each shard, and if one of the shards are down it tries to reconnect every few seconds. But it does this synchronously, freezing the entire process, and causes lag on the other shards if they are waiting for a reply from the service. Also accountserver is not the most well written piece of software and instead tends to get really crashy if shards are down.

Counterpoint is that with 8 badges you can get them all in Atlas and then you have a new shiny teleporter than only goes to... Atlas. Where you already are. You still have to get at least one more badge to unlock any other destinations, which isn't a great feeling for a new player. 10 badges ensures that it actually has some use when you unlock it. Either way, feedback on that particular feature should go here:

Where's this 25% coming from anyway? I see no indication that it was ever supposed to be 25%.

Rereading your post, the only thing that looks like possibly a bug is Critical Mass and Fallen from Grace sometimes spawning as EBs. The villaindefs for those only exist as bosses and don't define an EB rank, it's weird that they're somehow getting their rank upgraded.

Not a bug. Bank missions have always spawned a named boss, much like a lot of storyarc missions do. This is normally a boss rank enemy. Different bank missions have a different pool of bosses to choose from. The high level missions (looks like Founders and PI) also include a chance for a signature villain to spawn, if and only if there are 4-8 players on the team. Only if one of the signature villains is chosen does it spawn as an EB or AV, depending on notoriety settings, and only then because that's the only rank that exists for those villains. The spawndef doesn't specify a rank so it would normally try Minion, Lt, Boss in a random order. Couldn't tell you exactly what the chance is supposed to be at a glance. Safeguards are a bit of a house of cards when it comes to the way the mission is built, and there's multiple layers of randomized variables that are chained together. I do remember it's always been a fairly low chance as far as I can remember, since they were added way back in issue 8. It may be worth checking the page 7 beta to see if the rate is any better there. It wasn't explicitly looked at, but one of the underlying changes in page 7 was cleaning up some legacy code, and that included switching out the old rule-30 RNG that was still used a few places for a higher quality random number generator.

There's a teeny tiny little X in the bar on the top (or the bottom, depending on where it is, which can make things confusing) of the window. That will close it without undoing the changes.

The red dots have nothing to do with the cap. The red dots are hardcoded to appear once there are more than 1,100 players concurrent on the shard. That applies regardless of what the cap or queue threshold is set to. As far as I can tell that's always been the case and has never changed. Yellow dots appear above 250.

Slight update, I checked to verify and we are actually at just over 64,000 active accounts over the last 30 days. 36,000 active in the last week, which is also not an atypical ratio for us. Highest concurrent users across all shards since the announcements has peaked at about 4,950 a weekend ago, highest concurrency on weeknights running around 4,100 to 4,200. Just for funsies, let's assume player habits haven't changed in the last 20 years, which is probably a bad assumption. Let's also assume that of 125,000 paying subscribers, every single one of them logs in at least once a month. Also a bad assumption, I know plenty of people who left their sub active even when not playing for a while, especially if they prepaid for the discount, but anyway this is for entertainment value only. That means I would expect a peak concurrency of... 9,660. Spread across 13 shards. That's fairly in line with both the recommended settings for player cap in the config files as well as the behavior that starts to exhibit once you go past 1,500 concurrent, and become debilitating once you're past 2,000.

Also in 2008 it's quite likely that the difference in hardware capabilities was compensated by having much smaller character records at the time (less database load, much less complex queries hitting it), as well as a significant difference in playstyle -- more people street sweeping open zones, less rapid fire task forces, no league content, etc.

125,000 subscribers does not equate to 125,000 concurrent by any stretch. People play at different times of the day and do not necessarily log in every day even. For example, right now we're hitting about 4,200 CCUs on weeknights, but our MAU is in the 40,000-50,000 range. That's not an atypical ratio in the MMORPG industry.

Uh, what? Not sure where that came from but it's incorrect. Best guess based on supporting evidence is that the cap was set to 2,200 for most servers on live... though in the 2011-2012 time frame they never got close to that, except for the last month of course. With the limitations due to the way the code works I'm not sure how stable they would have actually been in practice with 2,200 concurrent. Those limitations were not unknown to them as there are even comments pointing out areas likely to become a performance problem, but they didn't have a clear solution to fix them. Their hardware was probably less consolidated than ours is, so it's possible they could have sustained that. Based on our experience I can't see it ever being stable for long with more than 2,000 or so on a single shard. We lowered the cap on Excelsior to 1,500 prior to the license announcement as a precautionary measure, as the shard had already been having hiccups almost nightly whenever the big raids disbanded.

@Cipher had to clean up the calendars, as someone, or possibly multiple someones, had created quite the number of perpetually repeating events and it was causing significant performance problems for the forums. I'm not sure what the current plan is for those, if there is one.

I mean... I think it works, tbh.

It's not something we've changed, it's still AL0. It's used internally by the buff UI when you cancel via right-click so removing it would be fairly involved. It does require you to know your entity ID however, which is not visible anywhere and changes every time you zone... I don't see how it could possibly have ever been useful for players to call it directly.

Hotfix for an issue that a few players are having with the game crashing immediately upon launch due to incompatibility with some third party software.

Check the "Windows" tab if you're already in-game.

It really is a great crew, there are times I wish I had people with that level of capability and professionalism working with my at my real job. Not that the people I work with are bad by any stretch, but it's unusual to have so many folks who are truly next level working together. And so many people who are very very good at what they do but have no problem working as a team, no issues with egos or butting heads, it's just been amazing. Going to shout out @Telephone for now for all of the awesome work they've done building and documenting our infrastructure (internal documentation is something a lot of people overlook but is critically important!). From the servers to the automated deployment systems, the auto-triage system for the crash reporter, for taking the time to teach me what the heck kubernetes is... and so much more. There are several others as well who haven't had much of a public persona but have contributed hugely, and I hope in the coming days may be able to be a little more visible now.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with "under-performing" servers or anything like that. Like Jimmy said, it's 100% a measure to keep Excelsior stable, and to keep Everlasting from going down the same path. We'll continue to work on technical solutions as well, but ultimately are fighting against some design choices by the original team that cause scalability issues and non-linear resource consumption once you get above around 1,000 concurrent players on a single shard. Excelsior is consistently bigger and busier than Freedom was on the retail servers, if that tells you anything -- but players had more shards to spread out on then.

TBH half the reason the launcher exists* is because I was annoyed that all of the existing launchers like Tequila used .NET or Qt or some other heavyweight framework that's almost as big as the game itself. Especially .NET since it's a pain to get it working in Wine for mac/linux folks. Running a launcher and waiting 15 seconds for a ton of .NET assemblies to load just to get the list and start verifying files is not great. So I decided the new launcher needed to be written in straight C** and not require anything that the game itself doesn't, that way if your system can run the game either natively or through something like Wine, it can run the launcher. And it should prioritize fast startup and optimization to get the game to a playable state in as little time as possible. Thank you so much for the kind words. It makes me very happy that it seems to be meeting the design goals of being fast, just working, and getting out of the way so you can play the game! * The other half is of course outlined in the license announcement. ** Sort of, the core and updater is C, and the UI is implemented in Lua with C bindings as an experiment and proof of concept of some things we want to do with the game client's UI.

Because you like high pop servers and play on Excel, so you never interact with anyone who prefers a quieter experience. Typically they don't phrase it like that no, but just today I heard from someone with a friend who no longer plays on HC because of the, and I quote "toxic behaviors from the PLing and LFG crowd". We have free server transfers, people can play on Excel if they want. There's no financial benefit as I've explained before, since the shards share a hardware pool. So again I ask, why should we force people to move who don't want to, just to satisfy your desire for "more bodies to fill out task forces at all hours"?

But why? What possible benefit could that have? Force people who like low-pop servers onto the high-pop server instead so you see a couple extra people wandering around during prime time? (until they quit because they hate all the noise)

If their health gets below 10%, their AI makes them become invincible and untargetable - so no enemies can fire powers at them and they aren't affected by AoE. They'll then run back to their spawn point and wait 2 minutes to regenerate health before being able to enter combat again. Even if there was something that could one-shot them to bypass that, they're also flagged CannotDie and they literally... can't die. Their health has a minimum value of 1. And if something somehow bypassed THAT, like a GM (game master not giant monster) outright deleting them from existence, since they're persistent NPC's they'd respawn a few seconds later.

Geo is also a custom format unique to the COH engine. You're not going to find anything about it on the Internet. If you want to create tools to work with them, the only place to go for information is the source code of the game itself, which is findable in the same places I mentioned earlier. Ask around on Discord if unsure. Experience coding in C is advised.