Pop cap

[Trihuuger]

So has anyone actually run into this cap yet..? Seeing as how I'm having to necro this thread from a few pages back, I'm expecting the answer to be no.

[Hvinire]

Hey everyone,

Sorry it took so long to get the info on this. We checked with the server lead who informed us that the implemented population cap is indeed a cap on the entire area (ex: Coerthas Central Highlands), and that currently we have no plans on removing or reducing the restriction. Depending on different server stress conditions, we cannot say what is the maximum number of players before reaching the cap. We can say however that the number is typically fairly high so there is little concern to worry about being unable to complete content found within the area.

[Hobo]

Hey everyone,

Sorry it took so long to get the info on this. We checked with the server lead who informed us that the implemented population cap is indeed a cap on the entire area (ex: Coerthas Central Highlands), and that currently we have no plans on removing or reducing the restriction. Depending on different server stress conditions, we cannot say what is the maximum number of players before reaching the cap. We can say however that the number is typically fairly high so there is little concern to worry about being unable to complete content found within the area.

So based off what you said... lower population servers should rarely run into this issue? Or do certain "Worlds" share resources with other worlds? AKA does 1 server house 3 "Worlds" and would an overpopulated world paired with an underpopulated "World" bog it down?

[DMCain]

It's not somethign that they can just fix. The capacity limits of the servers are set under the assumption that many people will be in many different areas (each area is handled by different machines in each server cluster). But if everyone dogpiles into one zone, that heavily stresses one part of the servers and can bring the whole thing down, or at least bring down the zone that's overpopulated.

This is something that's true of basically every mmo in the history of ever.

Nope. Can be fixed and managed with hardware and proper coding. Check out the server architecture for Eve On-Line, which IMO, is one of the best, most powerful and most stable game server I have ever played on.

In January of this year, Eve had over 3000 players in one solar system (aka - zone) for a massive fleet battle (some nut mis-clicked). Lets face it, any other MMO server out there would melt into a quivering pile of whiney goo when placed under that kind of load.

[SakuraInoue]

Nope. Can be fixed and managed with hardware and proper coding. Check out the server architecture for Eve On-Line, which IMO, is one of the best, most powerful and most stable game server I have ever played on.

In January of this year, Eve had over 3000 players in one solar system (aka - zone) for a massive fleet battle (some nut mis-clicked). Lets face it, any other MMO server out there would melt into a quivering pile of whiney goo when placed under that kind of load.

So you never watched time dialation happen with 3000 players in one system? Basically everything slows down to 25% normal speed. Thus allowing where once a server could handle 1000 players in a system up to 4000

[Gilthas]

Not to mention that the Eve developers actually prepared for that event.

Had it happened without any warning its likely that things wouldn't have gone as smoothly.

[Alhanelem]

Nope. Can be fixed and managed with hardware and proper coding. Check out the server architecture for Eve On-Line, which IMO, is one of the best, most powerful and most stable game server I have ever played on.

In January of this year, Eve had over 3000 players in one solar system (aka - zone) for a massive fleet battle (some nut mis-clicked). Lets face it, any other MMO server out there would melt into a quivering pile of whiney goo when placed under that kind of load.

Nope. It can't just be fixed and managed with "the proper coding." Don't talk out your behind when you don't know what you're talking about (or please post the code that would fix the problem). I love it when people talk about things like coding without demonstrating any actual knowledge of the problem. It's possible to code a program to launch a missile to detonate on the head of a pin halfway across the globe. It doesn't mean that it's feasible or realistic to implement in a short time.

It's not that it can't be fixed, it's that it's not a simple problem that can be fixed in a day or at the snap of a finger. It is in fact very likely that this measure is in place to allow them to make improvements without making people's game experience a living hell in the meantime. Would you rather A) have the servers crash or B) be slightly inconvenienced on rare occasions and avoid having the server crash?


Your example of EVE is poor, because while yes, you can have giant space fights with ridiculous numbers of players in one area, it handles this by sending updates much less frequently to the players- When battles get that huge in the game, everything grinds to a halt- it's about as easy to accomplish something as if you couldn't enter that part of space while the battle was going on. Imagine Titan with 30 second lag spikes instead of 3. Yes, it is possible to make the servers not crash with huge numbers of people, but that doesn't mean the game experience is going to be more optimal than with the solution they implemented.

In the case of this game, that's not really a good method to solve the problem.

It takes an extraordinary circumstance to hit the population cap- and it's a circumstance that generally only lasts a short time. I'll take the minor inconvenience over the solutions other MMOs have used.

[BotenAnna]

Nope. Can be fixed and managed with hardware and proper coding. Check out the server architecture for Eve On-Line, which IMO, is one of the best, most powerful and most stable game server I have ever played on.

In January of this year, Eve had over 3000 players in one solar system (aka - zone) for a massive fleet battle (some nut mis-clicked). Lets face it, any other MMO server out there would melt into a quivering pile of whiney goo when placed under that kind of load.

EvE has had this exact problem for years, actually, and for a long time basically could only have one area be housed on one physical server at the most, so even when they had some fancy stuff to hotswap the physical hardware based on demand, they still had upper limits to how much could be handled in one area. Jita, the large trading hub (something like Mor Dhona in current FFXIV but even more populated) ran on one ridiculously powered server, and under certain conditions ran into problems because even that hit its limits. Quite infamously, the first large battles (especially after Goonswarm was established) were huge messes of lag, server crashes, and disconnections and incredibly anticlimatic. The thing where it slows down time (let's be clear--this means that they made lag a part of the game design) and that they can throw more than one piece of physical hardware at one area (at least I think they have finally done that) is a really really recent addition, and it took CCP a long time and a lot of hard work by some of the best network and system engineers in the MMO industry, which whether you love or hate EvE (I actually am more in the "hate" category myself) has some incredibly impressive netcode and systems design.

tl;dr just because EvE did it doesn't mean it's trivial. Remember they basically made this game, especially the netcode and server infrastructure, from the ground up in 3 years at best. No AAA MMO has done this, ever.

[Reiterpallasch]

Hey everyone,

Sorry it took so long to get the info on this. We checked with the server lead who informed us that the implemented population cap is indeed a cap on the entire area (ex: Coerthas Central Highlands), and that currently we have no plans on removing or reducing the restriction. Depending on different server stress conditions, we cannot say what is the maximum number of players before reaching the cap. We can say however that the number is typically fairly high so there is little concern to worry about being unable to complete content found within the area.

Genius! So the solution to "too many people being in a zone is causing it to crash" is "we imposed a limit so high that you're unlikely to ever see it".

[Alhanelem]

Genius! So the solution to "too many people being in a zone is causing it to crash" is "we imposed a limit so high that you're unlikely to ever see it".

well yes, you're not going to see it unless the zone is so populated that there is a possibility of a crash- they dont' want to inconvenience people unnecessarily, only when the stability of the servers is jeopardized.