Rikti Invasions & Shard-Specific XP Boosts! (Update: Jan 16th)

[Lunar Ronin]

36 minutes ago, Excraft said:

Great that you're all trying this out and thanks for doing it.  Something isn't adding up though.  Why try to drive more people to other low pop servers when people already there may be there specifically for the quieter experience as you all mentioned here?

 

 

 

 

Because Excelsior has been overpopulated and experiencing database issues for the past two years.  The Homecoming team has done a great job of trying to mitigate the problem (by moving some of the database directly to the server's RAM for example), but haven't solved it.  See the shard's occasional database lockups causing queues during peak activity times like Rikti mothership and Hamidon raids even if the shard has under 1,000 players on, and regular server lag.  That became greatly exasperated over the past couple of days.  For the good of both Excelsior and Homecoming as a whole, some players need to move off from Excelsior to other shards.  Better to offer a carrot of double XP and Rikti invasions than a stick.

[HunterIV4]

I must admit, I had no idea that Indomitable was a low population server, it's where I started my first characters and just stuck with it. I admit I've played mostly solo, though, as all you crackheads high speed players tend to finish missions so fast I'm still trying to figure out where to go.

 

I guess this benefits me, as I get the XP and events, but I genuinely had no clue that my server was low pop. Now I know, lol.

[Jimmy]

8 hours ago, Excraft said:

Great that you're all trying this out and thanks for doing it.  Something isn't adding up though.  Why try to drive more people to other low pop servers when people already there may be there specifically for the quieter experience as you all mentioned here?

 

This isn't really about trying to make the quiet servers not-quiet, it's about saving Excelsior from itself 🙂

 

Excelsior frequently (possibly always, can't say for sure) had more players online than all the other shards combined. This was just about manageable before the license announcement, but we still had occasional hiccups as mentioned in this thread. Obviously we've had quite a bump in activity due to the announcement, and Excelsior was really struggling on Thursday and Friday evening. Everlasting wasn't included as it's already in a very healthy spot population wise, we didn't want it to suddenly have the same issues that Excelsior is having.

 

And it's working. Last night Excelsior was around 40% of total population, and right now it's hovering around 45%:

 

 

Much better compared to Excelsior being nearly 60% of our total online players on Thursday!

 

While overall our infrastructure can easily handle this number of players (and many, many more), each individual shard can only support so many players before things start to hit a bottleneck. Something to keep in mind is that Excelsior is quite busy compared to most shards from the retail version of the game as free server transfers have resulted in so many players coalescing there. On live, players were generally stuck to the shards they started on - and there were 16 shards in total at that point. Now we have 5.

[Excraft]

9 hours ago, MelleXJoe said:

So you're implying that they should keep under-performing servers active to appease the very small number of people that want to play a massively multiplayer online game on an unpopulated server? I'm sorry, there's no response that can be given to you that will satisfy whatever your concern is. The fact is that the game was made to be multiplayer, and so underpopulated servers are being given attention to bolster them. That's all anybody can tell you, as that's the very nature of the game itself. Best of luck.

 

How do you define "under performing"?  Aren't you implying that people who want to be in a crowded space are somehow more important than those who want a more casual, less populated setting?  You're basically telling them that it's a multiplayer game, so deal with a heavy population even if there's an option for them not to.  There's no right or wrong and I wasn't implying anything.  I was asking for clarification since the HC folk had said they wanted to provide players as broad an experience as possible by having both heavy and low pop servers.  The double XP and Raids on a couple of lower population servers - which according to them might be low population by choice of those on them - seemed to contradict that philosophy, so I asked for clarification.

[Excraft]

@Jimmy Thank you very much for the clarification.  I hope you all can find a more permanent solution to fix the stability issues with Excelsior and as always, thank you and all the HC folk for the work you put into the game.

 

 

[Excraft]

9 hours ago, Lunar Ronin said:

For the good of both Excelsior and Homecoming as a whole, some players need to move off from Excelsior to other shards. 

 

That's fair, although don't most people have alts on various servers?  From what I can tell, people who didn't want to wait in a queue just switched to a character on Torchbearer to avoid the login queue.  Seems that at least some would be doing that organically.  Probably not enough though.

[Judasace]

10 hours ago, MelleXJoe said:

So you're implying that they should keep under-performing servers active to appease the very small number of people that want to play a massively multiplayer online game on an unpopulated server? I'm sorry, there's no response that can be given to you that will satisfy whatever your concern is. The fact is that the game was made to be multiplayer, and so underpopulated servers are being given attention to bolster them. That's all anybody can tell you, as that's the very nature of the game itself. Best of luck.

 

What does "under-performing" even mean on a free to play game?

 

For all you know, the people on those "under-performing" servers are a significant percentage of the donators and are keeping the lights on. Just because a server has a high population, it doesn't mean that those people are paying the bills.

[Glacier Peak]

3 hours ago, Judasace said:

 

What does "under-performing" even mean on a free to play game?

 

For all you know, the people on those "under-performing" servers are a significant percentage of the donators and are keeping the lights on. Just because a server has a high population, it doesn't mean that those people are paying the bills.

Under performing means the Homecoming team said it [MelleXJoe poster said it]- it's the Homecoming team's servers, they decide and do what they see practical. I trust they take in to account what you described - they've been at this for nearly half a decade now. 

Edited January 7 by Glacier Peak
There to their and attribution correction

[Judasace]

1 minute ago, Glacier Peak said:

Under performing means the Homecoming team said it, it's there servers, they decide and do what they see practical. I trust they take in to account what you described - they've been at this for nearly half a decade now. 

 

Except that it's not about upping those populations - Jimmy just posted this - it's about driving Excelsior's numbers down. Kind of the exact opposite of the "It was a multiplayer game so everyone must group all of time and constantly do group-only content" mindset that seems to drive this idea that you can't have servers with smaller populations than Excelsior.

 

So many changes have been made to the game to make soloing and having a low population easier that the fact that this was originally an MMO is completely irrelevant. In fact there are multiple servers out there that aren't homecoming that might get 50 players logged in on a good day, and they've been plugging right along with regular development for years..

[Number Six]

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.

[Excraft]

Might be a good idea to update the dual boxing policy.  That could help curb all the people who are dual, triple, and quadruple (and more boxing) to take some more of the load off. 

[JKPhage]

I'm just gonna clarify for the record, I don't care about the Double XP. I just think it kind of sucks that Excelsior and Everlasting don't even get the invasions to celebrate. Like, can we at least do that without the XP? I'd quite enjoy being able to use all of my Everlasting native toons to rock some Rikti face in Atlas Plaza for the week, but instead we get nothing at all. That... kinda sucks to be blunt. You're leaving people out of the celebration.

[uninventive]

1 hour ago, JKPhage said:

I'm just gonna clarify for the record, I don't care about the Double XP. I just think it kind of sucks that Excelsior and Everlasting don't even get the invasions to celebrate. Like, can we at least do that without the XP? I'd quite enjoy being able to use all of my Everlasting native toons to rock some Rikti face in Atlas Plaza for the week, but instead we get nothing at all. That... kinda sucks to be blunt. You're leaving people out of the celebration.

 

Speaking for Everlasting, we have enough people to be able to run MSR and Hami at least twice a day.  I think we're doing fine.

[golstat2003]

6 hours ago, Number Six said:

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.

 

Ummm . . . wow

 

[Jimmy]

2 hours ago, JKPhage said:

I'm just gonna clarify for the record, I don't care about the Double XP. I just think it kind of sucks that Excelsior and Everlasting don't even get the invasions to celebrate. Like, can we at least do that without the XP? I'd quite enjoy being able to use all of my Everlasting native toons to rock some Rikti face in Atlas Plaza for the week, but instead we get nothing at all. That... kinda sucks to be blunt. You're leaving people out of the celebration.

 

The invasions aren't exactly meant to be a celebration. They (and the 2xp) are meant to be an incentive to play on Indom, Reunion and Torchbearer 🙂

 

And it's working - down to 37.5% on Excelsior now!

 

 

[Bionic_Flea]

But Jimmy, why can't you run some LGTFs in Excelsior and Everlasting to trigger the same Rikti invasions?  It shouldn't matter that players can do that on their own.  We want you to do it.

 

[lemming]

I'm semi-tempted to run a bunch of my characters thru Heggenberger (sp) to the the last mission.   Then run that last mission as fast as I can for a dozen characters.  I can do that on both the E servers...

[Falling Stargazer]

7 hours ago, Number Six said:

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.

 

(Note, I'm just a rando who's dealt with these kinds of problems in my work.)

 

This is often a difficult thing to conceptualize for people who've never had to deal with load balancing problems in software. A somewhat-helpful analogy is a conveyor belt. Want the conveyor belt to go faster? Okay the most obvious thing is to buff up the motor. But we hit a point where the friction of the wheel turning starts to damage the belt and it rips. The motor exceeded the assumptions made by its designers about how much force the belt material would experience at a rate its elasticity can tolerate.

 

A code limitation might sound like it should be as equally-mutable as a display bug you notice in the game, but the assumptions in base-level elements like hosting have roots in everything else. Devs create code that sits on top of the hosting protocols, expecting those quirks to work in their specific way. So changing hosting logic means breaking a hundred other elements all throughout the system.

 

In the end, everyone gets to play more and get their beauty sleep if we just have several pretty-good conveyor belts and use some incentives to help manage them wisely.

[ZacKing]

7 hours ago, Number Six said:

Excelsior is consistently bigger and busier than Freedom was on the retail servers...

 

That's a stretch IMO, but I suppose it's possible.  You have more people with better, more powerful rigs now that can handle dual boxing than there were back in the day.  Free server transfers and unlimited character slots on free servers are a Homecoming decision, not design decisions from Paragon Studios thing.  Those are contributing factors too.  Guaranteed a very big chunk, if not all of the "players" being shown in the stats are people dual or triple boxing to PL alts.  Yeah, this double xp thing will work in the short term as a band aid, but its just creating a situation where players are taking advantage of the free above and beyond XP boost to pl alts even faster that they'll eventually transfer back over to Excelsior or Everlasting once things quiet back down.  Hope you all can figure out a more permanent fix.  Must be quite a challenge for you all to pick through 20 year old code that will need to be rebuilt in order to fix a lot of these problems.  I wish you good luck with it.  I'm sure you'll think of something.  

[Scarlet Shocker]

Is part of the problem one of nomenclature?

 

I'm talking here about the shard's names and how evocative they are. Excelsior! We know and love that word but most of us probably first encountered it through the musings of the late, great, Stan Lee who would use it to sign off his Bullpen Bulletins.

 

Similarly Reunion is considered to be "the EU shard" by dint of its name - and the other shards don't have such a grip on the imagination - even if they perhaps should. Everlasting sounds more like a battery than a testament to the game and Torchbearer can evoke not only the eternal flame being carried forward in time but also angry mobs with pitchforks

 

It's probably a bit late to do anything about it now, but maybe in an ideal world more "neutral" sounding names might have made things easier to balance loads, such as colours or animal names etc - especially if those names are selected to be less than inspiring.

 

But that might be self-defeating in itself.

 

Guess the only thing for it is to close the AE on Excelsior instead! 😎

[DarionLeonidas]

Is there a way to move SG bases to other servers?

 

Our own player group has about six SG bases, some of them award winners, and we really don't want to have to re-create them.

 

If there was a way for people to transfer their bases as easily as their characters, I think a lot of people would be willing to relocate to other, less-populated servers to lighten the loads.

 

Just a thought...

[Injunuity]

Why not unlock the server transfer limit (with a forced que to move alts, and save the server from overloading to do so) even having this option only via the game account page here on the website.  be like waiting in line to board a plane to travel kind of thing. the sg base is the only real channel i guess though

[Injunuity]

11 minutes ago, DarionLeonidas said:

Is there a way to move SG bases to other servers?

 

Our own player group has about six SG bases, some of them award winners, and we really don't want to have to re-create them.

 

If there was a way for people to transfer their bases as easily as their characters, I think a lot of people would be willing to relocate to other, less-populated servers to lighten the loads.

 

Just a thought...

not that i've heard of, the process  would be time consuming for sure i think. i've heard there's a way using demo record, but never figured out how that could be done though lol

 

[lemming]

33 minutes ago, DarionLeonidas said:

Is there a way to move SG bases to other servers?

 

Our own player group has about six SG bases, some of them award winners, and we really don't want to have to re-create them.

 

If there was a way for people to transfer their bases as easily as their characters, I think a lot of people would be willing to relocate to other, less-populated servers to lighten the loads.

 

Just a thought...

No current way.  I'm not even sure there's a method for the devs to be able to do it easily.  

[UltraAlt]

On 1/6/2024 at 7:16 PM, Gerswin Jr said:

Yeah why don't u just go read a book nerd