[Discussion] Upcoming Hot Fix

[Rivienne]

I really hope you're wrong on this. If so, it is a horrendous mistake on the part of SE.

Hopefully they've entered the 21st century and are just implementing zone channels, rather than some idiotic hard cap on the population of a zone.

They need to implement a hard cap additional to prevent additional load after a certain threshold. Sure overflow instances could theoretically be added on top of such a system, whether they do or not isn't the point here. The point is that right now there is nothing at all to prevent all 3000-7000 people in a server from trying to enter a zone and crashing the world. And this has already more or less happened due to the fates. Therefore they from an infrastructure standpoint need this zone limit, right now. They can't not to do it. It is the only sane thing to do right now.

It also is unlikely to cause problems except during odin and behemoth, and then only in those zones: so it is rarely going to effect people, and only for 20 minutes or so even then. Much better than the alternative where behemoth pops and the servers crash, and nobody can play for hours.

This is why it is a hotfix. Not doing it would be a horrendous mistake. Also, fyi hard caps are a key part of any overflow system also. That is the point of an overflow system: when you reach cap, you overflow. Whether SE does the overflow part later or not is irrelevant to them needing the cap. They need it regardless of what does or does not happen later.

I can't think of any good, modern MMO out there that limits the number of people in a zone with a hard cap. It's absurd and absolutely unnecessary.

They all do. And it is always necessary. But let me explain in broad generalities:

There is a limited amount of processing any single server can handle. After that point you have to do one of two things

1) Split servers by task aka instance
2) Scale outwards with clustering

Both are very very different design decisions, and both are fraught with different types of technical problems.

A pure open world will go with option 2, and will not have a hard cap per instance, but rather a hard cap on the entire world.

An instanced world with option 1 must have hard caps per instance because each represents a different server (or virtual server but the point remains).

You haven't seen this in other MMO's that go with clustered worlds where there is a world wide cap. But the hard cap is still there

In those cases they either use a pure queue system that prevents people from logging on at all when cap is hit, or they use an overflow server where people are thrown at a different set of servers. But in both cases you still have a hard cap.

This is not something unique to this game, it is something anyone who deals with large scale systems has to cope with in some fashion or another. The only difference here is that for some reason they didn't implement it from day one, and unlike other instanced games released recently, it doesn't have an overflow system to deal with what happens after the cap is reached.

I also am not sure why you are so hostile to this, given you won't even see it except when behemoth or odin pops. Unless you anticipate that 500 trolls will all get together to troll an entire world, which I find rather unlikely.