Now I don’t have a master’s in computer sciences, but please hear me out.
What if they put all character data such as mail, inventory, gear, etc. on dedicated servers, and make all game data on separate servers?
That way (in theory) each game data server is essentially different realms. And if your character data is on separate servers they can load into the least populated (at the time) realms. Also, since all trade, mail, and inventory are on the character servers trade shouldn’t be hindered by loading into different realms.
I know this may sound stupid and very basic, and maybe they already do this idk. What do you think?
It doesn’t solve the fundamental problem that’s going wrong, which is that the 20 year old game is built around a database solution that’s 20 years old, and can’t be easily replaced because literally every line of code was written with that solution in mind. The database can’t handle more than 15k connections at a time, and can’t be replaced without an extensive rewrite of the source code, and once you start talking about that as an option, making a new game would probably be easier and cost less.
If 15k was the absolute limit then they severely lacked foresight in allowing 30k+ players to transfer to an already full server.
Regardless of the limit, it shouldn’t be the players’ responsibility to figure it out (especially players who have been on the server before it was ridiculously bloated)
This is Blizzard’s lack of planning and they want the players’ to pick up the pieces.
Absolutely, and I’m not arguing that point, but given that they managed to get the players into a situation where they simply can’t just upgrade out of it, trying to get people to move is currently their only option. It’ll be interesting to see what they do to help the guilds that were moving that got cut off halfway yesterday, and what they do to try to incentivize large communities to move intact once all the solo players without attachments to large friend groups have moved.
For sure, at this point we can hope communities and guilds figure out the best way forward
Myself I want to play with my guild, they want to stay so I’ll work around that and hope it gets better.
Obviously I don’t like the queue but this is our current situation. Myself I have my main alt on Sulfuras and if the queue is too rough on Grobb I play that character instead.
I still hang out with my buds on disc, just sucks when they need my help and I’m stuck behind a 3 hour queue.
Maybe, but if people really, really wanted to go to those realms, and most of the time there’s not much issue because they aren’t all online at the same time.
Not to mention, the numbers on Ironforge.Pro represent unique raiding characters, not unique accounts or people.
But yeah, beyond the free transfers off for people who are impacted by queues, I’m curious if we’ll see any alternative approach to dealing with it.
I agree their tech is severely outdated. They probably haven’t updated their hardware since 2004, despite what they say.
But also, what if guilds are a big part of the problem as well? What if they can’t load characters into different realms easier because they are in a guild that is inextricably tied to game data and not character data?
Right for sure, just thinking launch will be more popular than prepatch but we’ll have to see in the coming weeks. I know Grobb has the best server balance (horde vs ally) and I get why people would xfer here.
I do hope it gets better (the queues) but yeah hopefully by launch the queues will be at least more tame (hopefully non existent but it’s not like I haven’t had queues before, just not 3+ hour ones).
Yeah, I think this may be the case for the non Fresh start realms. But hopefully with the free transfers, people who really don’t want to deal with queues will transfer with their guilds/raid groups, and it won’t last too long.
For the fresh start realms though, I think there’s a lot of pre-patch tourists, and I don’t think there will be a sudden spike in new players at launch, but as you say…
They almost came out and said it. But this entire thread is a good example of people who are not in IT, certainly not the hardware side of things.
People extrapolate how easy it is to upgrade their itoddler, or big box sold laptop, to how easy it is to upgrade the underlying technology that allows 15,000 players to connect to a complex game. Never really understanding that they’re totally different animals.
Blizzard went out of their way to explain why there is no technological solution, at least if they don’t compromise on how the game plays, and with any sort of reasonable budget to make it work.
I think it sounds like your forgetting the security side of things. This system would introduce more ways for people to exploit the code all for the benefit of providing free server transfers at any point. No it’s a bad idea. Just advocate players switching realms for free if that’s what you want but don’t advocate the computer switches realms for the players on login to manage player pop.