Blizzard Realms don’t exist on a single “server” or dedicated set of “servers” any more. Its cloud virtualization, using many CPUs from an entire server farm, ramping up as needed, and down when the need ends. They can’t just “upgrade a server”. It’s the software partitioning and infrastructure that limits it. Personally I think most of the “200 people crashes a server” issues come from CRZ more than anything else.
I just assume they’re being stubborn because they’ve lost every other battle.
The server farm is essentially just a collection of servers, correct? So what exactly prohibits Blizzard from upgrading each server in that farm?
Okay? So upgrade that.
So if CRZ isn’t in vanilla, crashes won’t be a problem (or as much of one, anyway). Sharding not necessary!
No, it’s because sharding is awful and has no place in Classic.
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When wotlk launched with 4 starting zones i never saw any problem, why would there be a problem with the technology from 10 years in the future and 6 starting zones
There’s a common example used in Software Development.
If one woman has a baby in 9 months, why can’t 9 women have a baby in 1 month?
It doesn’t work like that, basically.
You can’t “upgrade it” you have to rewrite the software. You can only break actions down into so many parts, and eventually the more you partition, the bigger the overhead and the slower the overall separation becomes because of communication issues.
Sharding is not, and has never been suggested, to avoid crashes. This whole thread’s premise was wrong as mentioned multiple times above. Its about the ability to function with 4000 people in one zone.
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So… what? They can just use hardware from the 80s and achieve the same results as modern hardware? Or can we admit there are upgrades that can be made that will contribute positively to performance?
Okay, replace “upgrade” with “optimize” or “improve” if the word choice bothers you so much. Obviously you don’t just swap out components to upgrade like you do with hardware, but you can still upgrade software; it’s just done differently.
Sounds to me like better hardware or infrastructure would help with that.
Then sharding is unnecessary. Competition is part of vanilla, and especially prevalent during launch. If you don’t like that, wait a few days before playing instead of ruining the game with sharding.
My dude you really have no clue what you’re talking about please stop.
Whose to say those upgrades will fix the issue you are hoping to fix? Please stop acting like you know what you’re talking about you clearly don’t
It still will be considering there COULD be up to a thousand people per zone
It doesn’t, you’re right… for the game after launch. If you really have an issue with it then don’t play the game until it’s gone. Simple as that.
/facepalm you can’t be serious.
No, no they won’t. You can upgrade an engine in a car as much as you want to, if you’re going in the red on the rpms for too long something is going to break.
Yeah this is such an easy thing to do… Not like this can be done in a month or two.
Sounds to me like you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Eloraell is a bit incorrect in a way. They did state that it was being used to help with the problems of launch day loading. But the original intent is for server population. Server crashes are just going to be a product of this.
So let’s split this up into two things.
Upgrade the Hardware :
This is a common, quick-fix way to fix scalability issues. However, this has diminishing returns when you’re trying to vertically scale for handling the traffic WoW has to deal with.
Upgrade the Software:
This is where you get into the gray area (especially for you). When developing highly scalable software, the industry standard way of achieving this is to write “horizontally scalable” code, that is, code that you can run on multiple servers in concert to “share the workload”.
They’ve already done this previously, however, the solution is something virtually nobody on here is ready to accept…the solution is, of course, sharding. Look at any “scale out” solution in the technology world. Virtually all of them rely on some form of sharding.
I’m sorry, my dude, but you can’t just “upgrade” it. Eventually you hit the wall of hardware will allow, and “optimize” it turns into sharding.
Pick your poison.
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Depending on their alternate solutions.
- Long Queues and a 3k cap, no sharding. - Server stability is perfect.
- Minimal queues and a 15k cap, no sharding. - Server stability questionable and the density of players in a zone is essentially unusable for any given player.
- No queues, 20k cap, sharding - Server stability is perfect, density of players can be managed down to a 200-500 person per zone effect while retaining competition.
The only issue then becomes making a mistake on how big a cap you can allow while only using a 3k cap past the starters. i.e. The conversion rate of tourist to player. Guess it too low and servers will be overcrowded. Guess it too high, and servers will become wastelands past the launch period.
Not necessarily, we don’t know if a zone can handle ~500 people all logging in at the exact same point. Blizzard does but we don’t.
Maybe if they had really low caps at the start and then gradually moved it up to 3k then yeah sure I would agree with 100% certainty that it would be okay.
Questionable is quite a stretch IMO. This would decimate the servers. But you are right it would be literally unplayable without doing something really dumb like increase spawn rates to p server levels.
2,500 people in northshire? Christ could you imagine.
I agree on this 100%, and blizzard obviously does too.
Not necessarily either. You can add in que times past launch. So lets say they do something crazy like have 15k cap on each server at launch. After the launch phase lets say the number for concurrent players is still at ~10k for each realm. You can just lower that cap to 3k or whatever they desire and slap on a que time. If you don’t like that que time then go to another server and it will balance out the populations. Or, if you are one of the 1% of players who is super hardcore and don’t want to lose the progress you made over the course of a couple weeks then just stick it out.
And that’s the exact reason they are using sharding right here. Blizzard will NOT make this mistake. They will do everything in their power to not let this happen. Christ this is why they are so hesitant on opening up even ONE rppvp server at launch.
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Okay, but we’re talking about splitting up the player base that is meant to be visible to one another since they’re in the same zone.
It’s one thing to have cloud-based technology (I don’t know what terminology is used, but I assume that’s what you mean); it’s another to implement it in a way that actually affects the gameplay.
I think you’re conflating sharding with something else. I think sharding is definitely one way to implement what you’ve described, but it isn’t the only way.
Take, for example, a game like Planetside 2. It’s a game that no doubt relies very heavily on a cloud of servers sharing the workload. However, when 2000 people show up in the same area, they don’t just start randomly disappearing into another shard like they do in WoW.
Well, since I don’t work at Blizzard, I have no way of knowing for certain they’ve even hit that wall of what hardware will allow. As far as I know, they’ve got plenty of upgrades that can be made in that regard.
Assuming they’ve reached that point (which I have my doubts that they have, knowing the penny-pinching that goes on), there are other methods of optimizing that don’t include sharding.
If there are honestly no other ways to “optimize,” and Blizzard is unwilling to research or develop new methods, and sharding is the only way… then I’d rather take the performance hit.
Optimization at the expense of having sharding is no optimization at all.
I already picked my poison. I’ve been very clear about which bottle I’d chug since the beginning: no sharding.
- Closest to vanilla, although 3k is higher than the cap was in vanilla, so lower that a bit. Easily the best option.
- Cap is way too high. Not at all like vanilla, but still better than having sharding. Servers like Nostalrius had a similarly high cap and were relatively successful considering they were a non-profit private server. I think Blizzard could manage this much better.
- Sharding is awful, so the worst possible option.
Okay, well since you think the premise of this thread is flawed, I’d be happy to rephrase it even though it’s not my thread.
Overcrowding is better than having sharding.
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Given that private servers have managed it with far more, Blizzard has to be at least capable of the 500 mark, I’d hope.
That’s the definition of overcrowded. Having it even out later negates everyone’s launch progress, which is in the “bad things” column.
I agree, and I’m glad they’re investigating sharding. I just hope they do it with far larger numbers than retail.
I don’t like the term “cloud based technology”. The cloud is not some magical black box you throw software at, and now it’s cloud scale. It’s literally just a datacenter you can rent virtualized hardware to run your software on. The software engineer has to implement the code that scales horizontally.
I can’t speak to Planetside 2’s implementation. However, it is safe to assume they are running multiple servers to achieve it. In video games, there are so. much. smoke and mirrors. Let’s be clear though, sharding does not necessarily deserve its negative reputation. I think it’s how it’s been implemented in the past that has warranted the negativity, though.
For example, nobody cares that each instance is sharded, right? That’s something that’s been in there from the beginning. Now, would we be upset if each zone was sharded? That is, if Ashevalle was handled on one shard, Barrens on another, etc. Each “realm”, is not tied to a server, but instead is made up of hundreds of shards. When you walk from Ashenvalle into Barrens, you are migrating your character traffic into a different server, thus alleviating overall data contention.
I think what people don’t want is for one zone to be broken up into multiple shards. And hell, for all I know, maybe this is already how they do it!
Stop right there. Don’t compare these two even remotely. They don’t even use the same form of server structures. Not to mention private servers have been proven time and time again to have lied about their numbers in order to boost their popularity is enough to never take anything regarding this subject as a standard to follow.
This has nothing to do with server structure and there is nothing you can do to avoid this. If 50k people choose to go on one server and 1k people choose to go on another, there is nothing you can do besides add que times in order to get people off that server without forcing them off. It may be bad, but that’s why you should be wise, as a person to do some research on what kind of server you want to play on before you play it. (for example, don’t choose asmongolds server if you don’t want to be in ques).
We can only hope!
I was more talking in terms of the external constraints. There is enough data bandwidth, and client PCs can generally handle it etc. The back ends are completely different, but the UoD is roughly the same, excluding implementation specifics.
That’s an extreme situation, and Blizzard intentionally auto-picks low pop servers for people who haven’t got a preference, of which there will be a lot. Yes, it might happen, but they already have mechanisms in place to level off entry.
It for sure will happen, obviously maybe not as extreme as the numbers I gave, but it will happen just like it does in every mmo ever. Some servers are full capacity while some are dead.
But, if you were talking about the possibility of every server being ‘crowded’ after a long time after launch that’s when they can open up new servers for people to go into.
And yeah I know what you’re thinking “who will want to leave that server with all that launch progress!!”. You have to realize how bad/slow/casual at leveling the average wow player is. Everyone on here is already in the minority of people who discuss strats and gameplay on a game that isn’t even out yet, chances are you and I are way above the average player.
The majority of people would be just fine with switching realms to get out of ques because of how casual they are. They might not even have been able to log in yet tbh.
Okay, what would you prefer I call it?
I didn’t say anything like that.
Yes, that was my point. However, unlike in WoW, people don’t disappear in front of me. If several hundred people all gather in the same spot, they are all visible. It doesn’t split them up into “shards.” It doesn’t dynamically create multiple instances of the same area to handle the mass of players.
Instances were around well before sharding. Ignoring any debate about whether instances should be instanced and not public/open, no… no one cares that they are “sharded,” because that’s how it was in vanilla, and they were specifically designed to be run by groups of a certain size. They weren’t part of the open world.
Yes, and sharding wasn’t.
That depends on whether we’re talking about Classic or retail. In retail? Probably not, but it does sort of defeat the purpose of an open world where all the zones are connected.
In Classic? You bet I’d be upset, because that’s not how it was in vanilla.
… that’s literally exactly what it does. Have you played retail recently? That’s what sharding is.
Edit: I don’t mean to be condescending. I’m genuinely asking if you’ve played it recently. I suspect that if you haven’t, it might explain why you don’t know why people hate it so much.
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ah ok, so I think you’re under the incorrect assumption of what “sharding” is. Sharding is in itself a very broad term in the software world.
- Realms use a form of sharding
- Instances use a form of sharding
- Battle Grounds use a form of sharding
Sharding is literally the practice of taking one large object and splitting it up into smaller objects, based on some sort of arbitrary grouping logic. Let me give you some examples.
- Breaking up millions of subscribers based on the group Realm Name into their own shards called Realms
- Separating thousands of parties based on the group Party ID so that they can run in their own shard called an Instance
- Separating thousands of players based on the group Battle Ground Match ID into shards so that players can have a WSG match is called a Battle Ground.
My point is, you’re already okay with sharding in some aspect. You just don’t like intra-zone sharding.
Intra-Zone sharding is okay to me as long as it’s done for zones 1-10 (as they said it would) and is turned off once the initial wave starts at launch. I’m not here to argue my opinion though. I’m just educating you on what the term sharding actually means…
Intra-zone sharding is the concept that we all use the term Sharding for, in WoW.
The realm/zone breakups aren’t really relevant when someone says Sharding.