Interconnected Megaserver Branches(IMBs)

With the advent of players surging on these megaservers there is an option that has been rattling in my head for a week or so. This is to implement a “CRZ” like experience with out the “-ServerNameA” and to make character names unique. This feature is quite simple and it would handle a lot of the problems Blizzard has faced with low/high pop servers.

  1. Create a parent server (Ex: Pagle)
  2. Specify the server type (PvE)
  3. Open the server up to the general populace
  4. Server is filled? Create a “Pagle-A” server that interconnected to “Pagle”. Creating a CRZ like situation but, have the character names linked to one another to prevent duplicates. Allow/Force players to transfer to this Megaserver branch (FREE OF COST) to alleviate the main server.
  5. If the “-A” server is filled just create additional servers to accomodate the influx of players.
  6. If one of the servers sees a population drop just force a transfer for the characters onto a previous server. Shut down that spun up linked server to reduce server costs.
  7. Ensure that each server is hardcapped so players are made aware and display those numbers.

Everyone wins by having the largest pool of possible players, character names are unique, Blizzard saves money on servers, and the fear of transferring off to a dead server are no longer there because everyone is linked.

2 Likes

Ok, but it’s much easier if you just transfer to a non mega realm.

8 Likes

That doesn’t solve the problems related to dead/empty servers and wasting time/money to transfer somewhere.

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Apparently you’re unaware of the big blue post discussing megaservers and the problems therein.

From [Classic] The unacceptable state of Classic servers - Community / WoW Community Council - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com):

Relevant section quoted here for convenience:

The Mega-Realms in US and EU are full (also; Layers are not the solution)

We’ll start with the easiest and most clearcut statement to make. The mega-realms in US and EU that are queuing are completely full. This statement is the absolute state of things, and there is no additional capacity we can add to these realms to allow more players on, or to reduce queues.

One common suggestion we get is to “just add more layers”, and it’s very important to understand that layers do not add in any way to capacity. Layers are a Classic-specific solution to alleviate congestion in the game world in densely populated areas. The way they work is that when a certain threshold of players congregates in a small area in the game (say, in Blackrock Mountain) the service will spin up another entire copy of the game world to try to load-balance any new players that log in. This is to prevent a situation where large numbers of players congregating, casting spells, sending server messages and updates to one another causes a severe degradation of the entire service/game world. This functions in some contrast to the “sharding” system that modern World of Warcraft uses which basically does the same thing but spins up additional shards on a per-zone or per-area basis.

Neither of these systems increase realm capacity. Realm capacity is dictated by the total number of connections that the service itself can handle. Every time a player connects to a realm, that connection interacts with numerous services, systems, and adds to the total load on the persistent database that the entire game relies upon to fetch data related to players, spells, quests, creatures, Auctions, etc. When that total number of connections to a realm’s DB and services reaches a certain number, the service will degrade or fail on multiple levels, leading to symptoms like severe Auction House lag or outages, Chat performance degradation, or lag when attempting to loot items. Never in wow’s history had the capacity of realms been as high as they are now, and even with our modern capacity we can still sometimes experience performance degradation when the realms are full and DB load is at its peak.

So put as plainly as possible, we cannot increase capacity any more without inviting additional and likely cascading failures to the service. At present, the best and only way to resolve this issue for the impacted realms, is for people to leave the realm via free transfers. There’s no technology solution to this. There is no hardware solution to this. This situation will not improve when Wrath of the Lich King Classic launches on September 26th, it will only get worse.

Further input from Aggrend in the same thread:

I also just want to reiterate this point though; we’ve raised population caps to accommodate mega-realms to the absolute limit of current technology. I’ve seen a lot of armchair server engineers say things like “just add more hardware”, and I can’t stress it or put it any more plainly, the technology to allow more than we have on realms now does not exist. We’ve added the hardware, we’ve optimized as much as we can optimize, and the current demand on these few realms is just too much. Continuing to push our luck and find ways to reach ever higher realm caps has hit a point where we can’t go any further, and eventually something had to give. That something has given and we are going to be taking different approaches to this problem going forward.

2 Likes

I like how Gosakii gives a terrible answer and then ignores a better answer… because he has nothing.

Cross realm.

The issue is the AH, you will either have split auction houses which would be super clunky for people or it would just not work.

How does mail and the auction house fit into this?

The mail system would scale fine with this but the auction house would not.

If servers that were once full are now dead/empty, hiding the symptom with cross realm garbage is like putting on baggy sweats and not going to the doctor when you lose 80 pounds after finding a mysterious lump. There is something wrong that needs to be fixed. Maybe I am just getting old, but we already went through all of this on retail. Blizz implemented CRZ and guess what? It did more damage by making everyone feel anonymous and forgotten. This already happened once. Maybe this time we should try something new?

I agree that CRZ isn’t a good option. This is a solution to create Megaservers so the need for CRZ isn’t warranted. I wanted all of the linked children servers and the parent to have a shared character name database. That way there is no anonymous feeling such as the “Aethne-Bloodsail Buccaneers” showing up to a RDF and disappearing once the RDF is over. I want it to be just “Aethne” and no one else with that name.

This is kinda difficult to explain considering I’m not aware as to what tooling or how they manage their data directly. The difficult part would be the transactions and dealing with pushes being lumped together while managing the data in memory. Then having a requery being done by the server to refresh the data once a number of pushes/duration has occurred. Is it acceptable for players to be unaware of what has changed in the AH for the past minute or so?

Wouldn’t want them separated.

I’m asking for a CRZ style system but, the naming conventions are entirely linked to each other. That way the player named “Arikana” will be the only “Arikana” you will ever meet. I also want the AHs to be linked to one another but, thats a solution I can’t give without actually looking at their own code.

Blizzard did a write up on this stuff not too long ago. The AH can only grow so large. That means, cross realm is the solution for AH. Unique auction house for each server. Shared population cross server.

Yeah, that seems to be the solution. Though fixing the AH problem could be addressable if they managed the data approiately by still distributing it but, in turn merging them in a master table that handles pushs/pulls to the children DBs. Having players wait to see an AH refresh of data every 1-5minutes would alleviate those problems.

Their point is you /cannot/ link servers in this way with existing code/infrastructure because they would all need to communicate with the same database which is the current maxed out bottleneck.

Correct, that has to be their alteration to make it work. Sitting on their hands and saying it’s impossible is a flat out lie. The tech is there. It’s their unwillingness and their own motivations to try implementing CRZ in WotLK or w/e garbage.

Eh, the dead and empty servers were removed.

no its the only answer your going to get. it’s too bad if you don’t like the answer.

and it’s too bad if people don’t do what you want

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