Housing Situation

[Underscore]

I'm not a developer, but if SE can store an unlimited number of player accounts/characters and all their associated data, I don't understand why they can't store an unlimited number of housing wards too.

WoW will apparently be doing just that once their housing system comes out.

[Jeeqbit]

I don't understand why they can't store an unlimited number of housing wards too.

Nothing is unlimited, but they should have enough storage (as in drive space) for "30 million adventurers'" homes.

Wards are different. Wards are persistently-running server programs. If you do the maths, it's not realistic to run enough ward servers for 30 million adventurers.

Fortunately, they don't have to. They could make it so the only people whose homes "display" in the wards are those of ACTIVE players. This would mean your plot/ward would change if you went inactive and returned to the game.

[Catwho]

I'm not a developer, but if SE can store an unlimited number of player accounts/characters and all their associated data, I don't understand why they can't store an unlimited number of housing wards too.

The vast majority of player data is not accessed in real time. Knowing what I know about database design, I'd guess the character tables are stored in a separate view that is copied over from a NAS to the lobby server once you select a character to log in with, and then copied over to the main World database once you've actively logged in. So while a given server might have 100,000 character accounts made for it, it'll only have 7,000 live characters being stored on the world server's tables at a given time.

Changes made to the character are saved to the world server, and then copied over to the character tables periodically. Maybe the character tables remain on the server for 24 hours or some length of time before they're put back to sleep in the separate character database (in case of server crashes to prevent roll backs) but they're copied back over fresh the next time you log in, whether that's on your own server, another server, or on another different devise. It's ugly, but it works.

For the housing, however, there was a fundamental flaw in the design, in that the entire neighborhood would be stored on the server itself, with the INTERIOR of the houses as their own instances, as opposed to having the neighborhood be an instance. That lets anyone wander in to view the houses, but also puts a hard limit as to how many neighborhoods can be stored in the server's RAM.

It's a hole that SE dug for themselves. All housing should have been done as full instanced zones from the start, instead of neighborhoods.