Mortas
09-17-2015, 07:21 PM
The reason we haven't commented is we have correlated some of the reported lag to issues with major carriers, and some with a hardware failure with one of our switches. We don't usually comment on that sort of behind the scenes analysis, but it has added time and complexity to gathering server metrics.
Sev~
A short story, lessons learned and a couple of suggestions for a modern social network computer game:
There was an ISP known as Mindspring in the 1990's. It doesn't exist such as an ISP anymore but as a relatively unknown voip service from Earthlink. They were called out by their customers for blocking and purposefully lagging out the ports used for the highly popular DOOM and Quake games, arguably the games which allowed them to enter into business as an ISP. Gamers found out and Mindspring's arrogant argument was that people needed the bandwidth for business, not games. The gamer's left Mindspring in droves and the lessons Mindspring learned as their market-share took a nose dive was that internet games drove the innovators of technology to intense levels of competition such that we can now hold computing power in our hands that before Doom/Quake, was relegated to the size of buildings and military access.
DDO is a business. I suggest you guys present this as a business case to your board like this, your customers have legitimate gripes. Be more transparent about some things and you will keep and most likely gain customers = good thing. If you don't, you will lose them and via reputation, have a harder time to generate new ones for new products. *IF* you feel you are on solid ground with your own house in order, call out the service companies. If this isn't on your side then let the world know so it can change, quit taking the heat for lag that's not yours. Publish the providers and your hardware with the problems. Let your customer base take care of this for you. Who knows, odds are you have a customer here and there with a great deal of influence that can make things happen. If you are in some sort of Non-Disclosure situation, publish what you can and I guarantee the rest will come to light.
Even after the recent court/FCC actions, I have no doubt there are still companies if not blatantly blocking, are still throttle content. Please give us an HTML and in-game heartbeat with the same time codes on the same portal server. We can use this externally to compare, perhaps, what a company will not throttle an HTML port but will a known game port or address and we can do some real digging on our ends. You guys feel you're servers are good ? Fantastic, give us some tools to find companies that are illegally blocking/throttling content. You don't have to be active in that at all, we'll do it – no risk to you. Perhaps hire someone who's only job is monitoring world net lag and updating service announcements with suggestions; don't hire and just making they system automatically reroute customer traffic from strategic access points placed around the world to get around dead spots better.
Consider publishing the crappy service/hardware providers. Consider providing some decent forensic tools that allow your customers to hit this from different angles where you don't have to do it yourself thus avoiding liability and gain some good rep. ****, charge google for your data on worldwide internet lag maps and kick it back to us :)
One last thing to consider which can be a rough one; maybe, consider going open source, at least some of it. DDO is an old enough game that the code is most likely not revolutionary. Perhaps, if given thought to minimize hacks, the quests and other functionality can be modularized so they can be placed in a sandbox and opened for modification, tested and once good re-evaluated internally. Business-model-wise... there most likely needs some control such as no access to store, accounts, network code...basically limiting code examination to content art, geometry, ai, localized to what is instanced. There's more but that's the gist. Also, in a business sense you may consider an open source acceptable and VIP status coming from a server “rental fee”.
Some may argue people will just steal the code and start their own servers. Well, advanced code is readily available from such as Unreal. It is one thing to dream it, another to actually do it. Modifying existing small chunks that your game time is much easier than the whole thing – so go with human nature being lazy on that one.
Some things to consider.
Sev~
A short story, lessons learned and a couple of suggestions for a modern social network computer game:
There was an ISP known as Mindspring in the 1990's. It doesn't exist such as an ISP anymore but as a relatively unknown voip service from Earthlink. They were called out by their customers for blocking and purposefully lagging out the ports used for the highly popular DOOM and Quake games, arguably the games which allowed them to enter into business as an ISP. Gamers found out and Mindspring's arrogant argument was that people needed the bandwidth for business, not games. The gamer's left Mindspring in droves and the lessons Mindspring learned as their market-share took a nose dive was that internet games drove the innovators of technology to intense levels of competition such that we can now hold computing power in our hands that before Doom/Quake, was relegated to the size of buildings and military access.
DDO is a business. I suggest you guys present this as a business case to your board like this, your customers have legitimate gripes. Be more transparent about some things and you will keep and most likely gain customers = good thing. If you don't, you will lose them and via reputation, have a harder time to generate new ones for new products. *IF* you feel you are on solid ground with your own house in order, call out the service companies. If this isn't on your side then let the world know so it can change, quit taking the heat for lag that's not yours. Publish the providers and your hardware with the problems. Let your customer base take care of this for you. Who knows, odds are you have a customer here and there with a great deal of influence that can make things happen. If you are in some sort of Non-Disclosure situation, publish what you can and I guarantee the rest will come to light.
Even after the recent court/FCC actions, I have no doubt there are still companies if not blatantly blocking, are still throttle content. Please give us an HTML and in-game heartbeat with the same time codes on the same portal server. We can use this externally to compare, perhaps, what a company will not throttle an HTML port but will a known game port or address and we can do some real digging on our ends. You guys feel you're servers are good ? Fantastic, give us some tools to find companies that are illegally blocking/throttling content. You don't have to be active in that at all, we'll do it – no risk to you. Perhaps hire someone who's only job is monitoring world net lag and updating service announcements with suggestions; don't hire and just making they system automatically reroute customer traffic from strategic access points placed around the world to get around dead spots better.
Consider publishing the crappy service/hardware providers. Consider providing some decent forensic tools that allow your customers to hit this from different angles where you don't have to do it yourself thus avoiding liability and gain some good rep. ****, charge google for your data on worldwide internet lag maps and kick it back to us :)
One last thing to consider which can be a rough one; maybe, consider going open source, at least some of it. DDO is an old enough game that the code is most likely not revolutionary. Perhaps, if given thought to minimize hacks, the quests and other functionality can be modularized so they can be placed in a sandbox and opened for modification, tested and once good re-evaluated internally. Business-model-wise... there most likely needs some control such as no access to store, accounts, network code...basically limiting code examination to content art, geometry, ai, localized to what is instanced. There's more but that's the gist. Also, in a business sense you may consider an open source acceptable and VIP status coming from a server “rental fee”.
Some may argue people will just steal the code and start their own servers. Well, advanced code is readily available from such as Unreal. It is one thing to dream it, another to actually do it. Modifying existing small chunks that your game time is much easier than the whole thing – so go with human nature being lazy on that one.
Some things to consider.