Ssg: Will you be upgrading orien server?

[Eantarus]

Your defense to people want SSG the company hosting the server(s) to have better hardware is

No.

I said "better hardware is not going to solve the problem".

That's not how it works.

SSG hired consultants. They dug into the code. They made hundreds of changes at the cost of thousands of man hours. They have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to fix the lag. Freaking OBVIOUSLY if improving the hardware could fix the lag, they would have done that 3 years ago.

If anyone here still believes SSG can fix the lag by giving the virtual server more ram, well... PM me. I've got this bridge in Brooklyn I'm trying to sell, and you sound like a savvy consumer.

[mbartol]

Actually we should, as most of the player base is on this server. Make the "majority" of your player base happy.

How long has it been since they considered making the player base happy a goal?

[Eantarus]

How long has it been since they considered making the player base happy a goal?

2016. The 10th anniversary event. So almost exactly 7 years to date.

[Nebless]

Created a toon in Orien as a prelude to transferring my main - server is busy, easy to find groups but it is also lagging to the moon. I do not want this to become another Gha-lag-landa, so what is your plan for this server? Will you be upgrading the server? allocate more resources to it? Did you plan this out properly or this is going to be another F-up?

Well considering the plan was to open up the transfers so Hardcore Server characters that weren't able to transfer to Orien or Sarlona could transfer now and INSTEAD players decided to jump on the Mega Server band wagon and move all their characters I'd say it's the players fault and not SSG.

As such NO, they shouldn't go out of their way and upgrade the Orien server unless it was in conjunction with upgrades for ALL the servers. All the players that transferred caused the problem KNOWING it would cause more lag. Not sure why you think they should be rewarded since they're the one's that caused the problem.

[Maldorin]

Well considering the plan was to open up the transfers so Hardcore Server characters that weren't able to transfer to Orien or Sarlona could transfer now and INSTEAD players decided to jump on the Mega Server band wagon and move all their characters I'd say it's the players fault and not SSG.

As such NO, they shouldn't go out of their way and upgrade the Orien server unless it was in conjunction with upgrades for ALL the servers. All the players that transferred caused the problem KNOWING it would cause more lag. Not sure why you think they should be rewarded since they're the one's that caused the problem.

Gonna have to disagree here. The why doesn't matter. They announced free unlimited transfers without conditions. You're blaming the players because they want to play together and took advantage of the opportunity? That people were planning to move was discussed openly on the forums in advance and nary a word of warning that it was only for hardcore toons.

I truly don't see the players as the issue here.

Also the players on Orien that were already there have been impacted. How exactly do they put this genie back in the bottle?

What they should have done? Proper server merges years ago.

[Marshal_Lannes]

Orien does not have unplayable lag. Not even close. There are minor instances of stuttering, pretty much what you see on Hardcore. If you don't want to come and play with 400-600 people (what we are averaging for 12 hours a day) then don't. But I can assure you, Orien is not coming to a standstill because of lag. I've not met one person in the game who has transferred that hasn't been happy with the new grouping options.

[n00bishpker]

Your defense to people want SSG the company hosting the server(s) to have better hardware is "Well you shouldn't of tried to make a server with 650+ people ha ha ha!"
This is an MMO in what world is 650+ people MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER and high load. I get that this is an older game. People wanted more players to play with and your solution is "no go back to servers with less than 200 players online concurrently" I get that this is an online forum but this is just mind-blowing illogical.

At the end of the day Orien does have more than 650+ players often. Players are content players being online means more people are doing things like buying XP pots, raid timers and actively PLAYING the game rather than signing on and looking at the LFM panel and signing back off. If SSG really doesn't want people excited to log in and play with others and see a vibrant populated (for this game) server they are in the wrong business.

Just one issue with the 650+ players causing issues, judging by the date of your account creation you played the game when it was in it's PRIME and know that there were at times more people than this online at one point and there were not these same server lag issues. The real question we should all be asking is, WHAT has SSG done to the game to screw up the servers so much?

[thomascoolone64]

So in other words players trying to create a DIY mega server is biting them in the butt?

Gee, there was noooo waaaayy anyone could have seen THAT coming...

This right here is what i tried making a Post here about....

[Gljosh]

Your defense to people want SSG the company hosting the server(s) to have better hardware is "Well you shouldn't of tried to make a server with 650+ people ha ha ha!"
This is an MMO in what world is 650+ people MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER and high load. I get that this is an older game. People wanted more players to play with and your solution is "no go back to servers with less than 200 players online concurrently" I get that this is an online forum but this is just mind-blowing illogical.

At the end of the day Orien does have more than 650+ players often. Players are content players being online means more people are doing things like buying XP pots, raid timers and actively PLAYING the game rather than signing on and looking at the LFM panel and signing back off. If SSG really doesn't want people excited to log in and play with others and see a vibrant populated (for this game) server they are in the wrong business.

That is the older definition of MMO the newer hip version of MMO stands for Minimal Multiplayer Online.

[LightBear]

No.

I said "better hardware is not going to solve the problem".

That's not how it works.

SSG hired consultants. They dug into the code. They made hundreds of changes at the cost of thousands of man hours. They have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to fix the lag. Freaking OBVIOUSLY if improving the hardware could fix the lag, they would have done that 3 years ago.

If anyone here still believes SSG can fix the lag by giving the virtual server more ram, well... PM me. I've got this bridge in Brooklyn I'm trying to sell, and you sound like a savvy consumer.

You can virtually assign all the ram you want, not going to matter if the underlying irons come from the Pentium era.

[Fisto_Mk_I]

That's not how it works.

It's exactly how it work, lol.

A long, long time ago, when the trees were large, the grass was green, and the Turbine was rich, each server had dedicated hardware.

Later, a long time ago, when the Turbine became not so rich, all servers were transferred to common hardware and became virtual. The Turbine vowed that this would not affect server performance and player convenience in any way and, of course, lied.

Now that the game is funded by an even less rich SSG, the hardware is not getting newer - quite the opposite. No code optimization is able to improve the situation - you need new modern dedicated hardware for each server.

Freaking OBVIOUSLY if improving the hardware could fix the lag, they would have done that 3 years ago.

Of course, newest hardware could fix lag... but why you think SSG have enough funds to do this? They really would have done it long time ago.. but you think they could?

Just in case, I remind you that SSG right now has serious problems selling its content due to the fact that the old squalid site has undetectable technical problems that prevent buyers from buying content through this site! And this is not a problem of recent months, it lasts for years!

If anyone here still believes SSG can fix the lag by giving the virtual server more ram, well... PM me. I've got this bridge in Brooklyn I'm trying to sell, and you sound like a savvy consumer.

Oh, lol, so you see the essence of the problem, right? Of course, expanding virtual memory for the server will not solve this problem in any way, you need new modern hardware for each server.

[Onyxia2019]

Speaking as a programmer with many years of game programming, mostly emulator servers for popular MMO's I can say new hardware does not always equate to better performance. The core code has to be able to utilizes the new hardware instruction set.

Here is a really basic example.

You by a brand new gaming PC which is 64bit with 512GB of ram. Now you have an old game but it is only written for 32bit, yes it will run on your new PC but it will never run a good as a version of the game built for the 64bit architecture. Now you can run multiple copies of the game and watch some Netflix at the same time but the single instance of the game will only run as fast as the core code will allow regardless of the hardware.

Virtualization is not a bad thing. In fact it can make things batter. With statis hardware if you have to many resources that are not used then it is a waste. If the hardware has to few resources well you are stuck unless you buy better hardware and then you run the risk of having to much and its a waste. With virtual you can have the system allocate recourses to the virtual that needs it. Every service is going to have its peak times. So the system will reduce resources on the server that is not peak time and give it to a server that needs more. But this will only go so far as mentioned above, all the resources in the world will not overcome old code.

Again this is all very basic and we could go into clock cycles, buffers and read/write optimization but that is out of scope for this discussion.

[Raithe]

Speaking as a programmer with many years of game programming, mostly emulator servers for popular MMO's I can say new hardware does not always equate to better performance. The core code has to be able to utilizes the new hardware instruction set.

As a highly experienced programmer, you should realize that the server side of a DDO gaming instance doesn't have a huge amount of processing tasks. It isn't supplying a graphics card with 3D data, it isn't generating 2D overlays, it isn't processing audio, it isn't multitasking with Chrome and 27 Windows services. The tech for DDO is nearing 2 decades old, it isn't maxing out hardware from a decade ago, let alone modern systems, virtualized or not.

I would reiterate that it probably isn't technically the server hardware at issue, though having way more instances than cores might definitely pose a problem eventually.

As for bandwidth, I can double box DDO just fine on a 256 kilobit connection. My side is extremely low maintenance. The issue is the other side, the server side. Say there are 2000 people on a server (was definitely possible in days long past), that 256 kilobit connection now needs to be closer to ~100 Megabit and every connection needs to be low latency for a 3D shooter like DDO. I don't know about you, but when I have bouts of lag in DDO, the chief problem is that the server is still processing the freakin instance while my screen is basically frozen. It's the communications channel that has been jammed up, not the processing queue.

[Phoenicis]

Just one issue with the 650+ players causing issues, judging by the date of your account creation you played the game when it was in it's PRIME and know that there were at times more people than this online at one point and there were not these same server lag issues. The real question we should all be asking is, WHAT has SSG done to the game to screw up the servers so much?

Racial past lives
reaper points
heroic past lives
epic past lives
epic destinies
iconic past lives
level cap raise
pet classes
companions

Those are the things I can think of that would probably add server load on a per character basis that didn't exist back in the day when lag was minimal at worst.

There are probably others that slip my mind at the moment, or have no clue even exist.

[DoctorOfLiterature]

I find it offensive that players who concocted their own scheme to create a mega server and exploit a transfer intended for HCL toons that couldn’t transfer, to now demand new resources. As a player on another sever, I don’t think it is fair to give more resources to Orien. You chose to go there knowing that the server was not designed to be a mega server and anyone would know this would create more lag.

The solution is to make another server the default server and in a few months Orien population will go down and lag will improve.

[Brac]

I find it offensive that players who concocted their own scheme to create a mega server and exploit a transfer intended for HCL toons that couldn’t transfer, to now demand new resources. As a player on another sever, I don’t think it is fair to give more resources to Orien. You chose to go there knowing that the server was not designed to be a mega server and anyone would know this would create more lag.

The solution is to make another server the default server and in a few months Orien population will go down and lag will improve.

I find it offensive that the players announced for weeks that this was the plan and SSG did nothing to halt, slow, or deter it from happening. SSG allowed it to happen. My guess is their greed could not resist how much would be spent on new guild ships and astral shards since they do not transfer. SSG knew this was coming and chose to stay silent the entire time. The players cannot be blamed at this point.

[Eantarus]

I find it offensive that the players announced for weeks that this was the plan and SSG did nothing to halt, slow, or deter it from happening. SSG allowed it to happen. My guess is their greed could not resist how much would be spent on new guild ships and astral shards since they do not transfer. SSG knew this was coming and chose to stay silent the entire time. The players cannot be blamed at this point.

I think the players can still be blamed. They were warned. If not by good old common sense than by Me and many others. Of course SSG deserves plenty of blame themselves for sitting back and allowing this to happen.

But, really, if this kills the game, what difference does it make whos fault it is?

[Martininice]

I find it offensive that players who concocted their own scheme to create a mega server and exploit a transfer intended for HCL toons that couldn’t transfer, to now demand new resources. As a player on another sever, I don’t think it is fair to give more resources to Orien. You chose to go there knowing that the server was not designed to be a mega server and anyone would know this would create more lag.

The solution is to make another server the default server and in a few months Orien population will go down and lag will improve.

There is no morality involved here. SSG are neither my parents nor my reverend, neither is some forum rando. They had years and years to consolidate the playerbase and they did nothing at all. They are a company offering a service and we are customers. They have an option to deliver or not deliver.

[Hobgoblin51]

o you sweet summer child.