Homecoming Server Update (April 29th): Stable?

[Jimmy]

Hey folks!

 

Just a few quick updates for you.

 

State of the Servers

As of this morning, everything should be running fairly smoothly. We’ve added another two mapservers, for a total of 9. We’ve also capped the concurrent players to 1,500 per shard for the moment, but we will look at slowly increasing this until we start seeing stability issues.

 

We’ve also made a number of other small tweaks, including setting all zones to unload if they are empty. This means you may get an extended loading time if you try to enter a currently-empty zone.

 

Setup & Finances

We’ve had a bunch of questions regarding what the current setup is, where it is, and what it’s costing, so in the interest of transparency:

 

• 1x Auth Server (4 cores, 8GB RAM)
  
• 1x Web Server (4 cores, 8GB RAM)
  
• 4x DB Servers (6 cores, 16GB RAM) (One per shard)
  
• 5x Big Mapservers (32 cores, 64GB RAM)
  
• 4x Small Mapservers (16 cores, 32GB RAM)

 

It’s hosted in Amsterdam, and overall it’s costing around $4,700 per month.

 

Reconnecting

The previously-mentioned fix for allowing players to skip the login queue if they disconnect has been improved, and should now work under almost all circumstances. Please let us know if you continue to encounter issues with it.

 

And some quick stats: We’re on 31,500 accounts, 107,183 characters, and we currently have just under 3,000 people online.

 

That’s all for today. Please don’t hit the servers too hard!

 

 

Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls.

 

- The Homecoming Team

[PSI-on]

Wow, you guys are going through a lot for this. I can't thank you enough. That's a lot of hardware, I guess this means it wouldn't be possible to run this game for a small group privately, like 1 to 8 people :(

[Bear]

overall it’s costing around $4,700 per month

why in gods name won't you allow us to donate to this cause then?  :o

 

In the sake of stability, that's a lot on volunteers. Effectively also, donations pointed towards support to an individual for their volunteer work doesn't verify as paying towards cause of hosting a server, which would help to the depict any kind of legal action any license would inflict against

[321gametime]

I really hope you guys set up a way for us to donate to help the servers run. That is a lot of money towards running the servers.

[rihatsu]

Wow, you guys are going through a lot for this. I can't thank you enough. That's a lot of hardware, I guess this means it wouldn't be possible to run this game for a small group privately, like 1 to 8 people :(

 

No, the CPU/memory requirements scale dramatically based on the number of active zones. A small server for you and your friends can run comfortably on most modern desktop computers as long as you unload empty zones.

[Samy]

I don't know how many times it needs to be said. As soon as they start accepting donations, NCSoft will be a LOT more likely to intervene.

[Bear]

I don't know how many times it needs to be said. As soon as they start accepting donations, NCSoft will be a LOT more likely to intervene.

This seems to be misread; as the messages condoned to this matter are explicitly clear. Let me clarify;

 

The data we own today for CoH to run as it has is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Source: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

 

specifically referring to commercial purposes; this would allow donations to be accepted to individuals towards their values and cause, not to the product itself.

[_NOPE_]

[ZeeHero]

Really appreciate all you do for the COH community and the superhero mmo community at large, your heroic necromancy has revived the only actually good superhero mmo to ever exist!

[uohaloran]

Do you all have stats of the network traffic of a particular day? Curious what the throughput requirements might be required for a server.

 

Edit: huge thanks, but I guess that goes without saying. You've brought back a lot of happiness for a lot of people. Here's to your efforts being the start of an amazing thing.

[Valverde]

Thanks again for the great work guys!

[Obsidius]

Outstanding job all, please keep up the good work. Thanks for volunteering your time and money to this. I hope we can figure out a way to help monetarily with the upkeep without running into legal issues.

[Water]

The word'AMAZING' now belongs to you guys.

[Sortarican]

You all are incredible thank you so much for working so hard to let us all enjoy this fantastic game.

[Djevercry167]

Got to say i can't thank you guys enough for bringing this game it has helped me through a really difficult period in my life thanks!

[MWDarkAge]

I'm so absolutely f-ing PROUD of MY CoH community and the people who have made this possible. You ALL rock. I do feel a little guilty playing a game that I love with all my heart for free and if the call ever goes out for DONATIONS, I will be more than happy to help.

 

Again, LOVE TO YOU ALL and now I'm off to KILL CIRCLE OF THORNS (those bastards!).

[momentarygrace]

For what it's worth, I just (11:32am CST/US) got dropped  when exiting a radio mission back to KR2. Launched CoH via Tequila immediately, and got put in a queue at 105 of 148 or thereabouts. So the getting back in within 10 minutes without having to queue didn't work in this instance (unless I failed to do something correctly, not sure what it would be but open to the possibility).

 

Offered in the interests of providing info for evaluation. Not complaining about the queue, I can get another cup of coffee and check my email. ;)

 

[insert obligatory and extremely heartfelt thanks and hugs for the heroic Homecoming team]

[Saca]

Tried to do some quick maths on if there would be any cost savings for hosting on one of the big cloud providers but, and I'm a little shocked by this, it wasn't even close. Granted I think that if you did host this on VMs you would be able to manage concurrent user activity a little better and possibly be able to reduce the server count, but even in Azure's cloud, large Windows instances are costly (Depending on size I was seeing roughly $4/hr which comes to about $2500/mo per instance!).

 

Curious if y'all have any interest in adopting cloud technologies for hosting the game. If so I'd love to have a discussion with your infra team just to see if it would be worth it. It terms of management I think thing would get a lot easier but testing would definitely be required and since I'm not familiar with the game's architecture I don't know how much you could potentially scale down to meet the same demand.

 

DM me on here or in Discord (@Sacalicious#0501) if you have questions about adopting a cloud based solution. :)

[Wiz33]

All I can say is thanks for the effort and the time you guys are putting in. I know that you guys have stated that you're not taking donations at the moment but the current running cost is not actually cheap. If there're anyways for the community to help lessen the burden. Please let us know.

[catsi563]

thanks again guys for all the hard work its very much appreciated  :D

[DischargedBolt]

None of the efforts yall have put towards this project have been not, it's great to see the developer/hosting  groups put so much effort into continuing to make this project worth every bit of the wait. Thanks so much.

[desarix]

Yes holding my hand out to pay too. I really want to to help too. Seems very unfair you're paying for this out of your own pockets.

[Samy]

I don't know how many times it needs to be said. As soon as they start accepting donations, NCSoft will be a LOT more likely to intervene.

This seems to be misread; as the messages condoned to this matter are explicitly clear. Let me clarify;

 

The data we own today for CoH to run as it has is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

 

Sorry, but no. Only launchers are "owned" and licensed under CC -- all other data, including the CoH art and audio assets which are absolutely mandatory to run the game are held by NCSoft and not licensed under any sort of CC license.

 

Because the launcher illegally makes use of those proprietary files, you paint a big fat target on your back for doing so in the first place, and increase it by orders of magnitude as soon as you start making money with it.

[PoptartManiac]

Thank you for your work, this is great!

[Chance Jackson]

Thanks!