Give players 5 mins to reconnect before tossing them into the queue

[ehbiwtf]

It's the reasonable thing to do.

It is extremely frustrating after waiting through the queue, to get in game just to d/c, and be forced back into an even larger queue. Even more frustrating is getting into a duty after waiting some time, and then getting the d/c. That's not fair and that's certainly not fun. It's not for the player who d/c's, or anyone else in that duty that's now short a player. Heck if the wrong people d/c from a BA, DRS, or a static, it might be the end the run for that group.

SE needs to focus on what they can do now to help ease the frustrations of their customers. This is another way to do that which doesn't require new hardware. Especially with the new raids soon, this would be a much appreciated change by all in the community I would think. The queues aren't going away like most thought they would. Primetime weekday mateus is still over 2.5k and that's a low pop world apparently.

This is standard practice in just about every other MMO popular in NA I think. It's not realistic to fix all disconnects, so this is a nice compromise. WoW's had it since vanilla, but I but doubt the game studios like Blizzard are just being nice. There are some technical benefits such as less strain on their hardware when reconnections are spread out over some time. If there were any downsides I doubt they would do it that way, but if you think of any feel free to share.

[Packetdancer]

While I agree wholeheartedly, this probably isn't as simple to implement as you'd think. Keep in mind that the lobby server is shared between all worlds, and in many systems designs you tend to silo information as much as possible—i.e., no component should have more awareness of any other component's state beyond the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect "the bare minimum" (as defined when the login servers were created) does not include "how long has it been since this character last disconnected", so it's probably not just a five-minute change to make; it probably entails adding a way to pull information from the world servers to the lobby server in order to have the lobby server know that it needs to shuffle you towards the front of the line.

And any time you make changes like that, you really want to test them before rolling them out...

...but according to their note from a while back when they upped the lobby server's capacity from 17k connections to 21k, the devs repurposed their dev-test deployment systems as extra lobby server capacity. Which means they don't have the capability to test that sort of change as thoroughly as you'd want to.

(And if they made a change that broke the login system under load in new and terrifying ways, players probably wouldn't be happy with that either.)

It's the sort of change I hope they make, honestly... but it's also probably not one that'll happen overnight, especially since they're down a lot of the deployment test hardware that would provide a safety net on rolling out a sweeping change to the login system.

[Kes13a]

This is standard practice in just about every other MMO popular in NA I think. It's not realistic to fix all disconnects, so this is a nice compromise. WoW's had it since vanilla, but I but doubt the game studios like Blizzard are just being nice. There are some technical benefits such as less strain on their hardware when reconnections are spread out over some time. If there were any downsides I doubt they would do it that way, but if you think of any feel free to share.

since Vanilla you say...

"New Reconnect Button Added to WoW Login Screen in Chains of Domination
posted 2021/06/02 "

I say Vanilla isnt that recent... you can search for that title on the internet if you dont believe...

is it frustrating, yes it is. should they look into doing something, they likely are, development cycles are rarely made public so how do you know they arent looking into it?

Given WoW only did it recently, I imagine its likely coming in some form, but probably after redoing their login servers... which is a way out in the timeline I suspect.

[Larirawiel]

Normally it should not be that hard to implement this feature. The world servers can notice a disconnect. You see it in the chat when a player from your fc goes offline. So there is already a "player goes offline"-listener. Now this listener should contanct the lobby server and send the player id and the disconnect timestamp. The lobby server could now prioritize those players.


Cheers

[Kes13a]

Normally it should not be that hard to implement this feature. The world servers can notice a disconnect. You see it in the chat when a player from your fc goes offline. So there is already a "player goes offline"-listener. Now this listener should contanct the lobby server and send the player id and the disconnect timestamp. The lobby server could now prioritize those players.

not sure its as easy as you think. I mean if you are experienced with mmo server architecture you would know better than I but...

if your internet drops, you are in the game for a period of time before you can log in. if the server see's no error on its side, how is it supposed to know?
if the game itself errors, then it should retain a record of that I imagine, and be able to send a message, but then you have to code in communication back to the login server, and I am not sure how much coding there is for that currently, and how hard it would be to implement.
thats only going to work for anything not coming from a client side issue though
anything server side, its still going to have to wait until the game actually logs you out, and thats already a variable to to actually "log out" in game. your "listener" only reports when the player character actually goes offline. currently we dont know if it logs a disconnect going offline different than an intentional going offline, or you think it should log ALL going offline events? storing that information may impact login server performance since it has to now retain all logoff information for anyone in game for a period of time.

so, basically, sounds a bit more complicated than a simple, send info to the login server to hold on to for a set period of time, but like I said, I am not an expert in mmo server communications or coding.

even the WoW implementation who knows how well it works with a packed login queue

so, nice future implementation? sure would be. but hard to see an immediate implementation

[Faafetai]

Please, I would love you long time devs if you give people the chance to reconnect if they are kicked especially if it to no fault of their own. The amount of times in the past a bunch of people were kicked at the same time and they are booted to a queue that is not way larger than it even would have been. This happened months ago when the ntt node was in its rebellious phase. It would kick a bunch of people from whatever they were doing and guess what? They all ended up in the queue preventing everyone kicked from getting back into their duties. Some were lucky and got back to their dungeon because the people within it were precious and waited the whole time until they came back.

If it is possible give people a saved spot in the server for an allotted time before putting them on the queue list. It may be tough to do, so I am sorry if it is unfair to ask, but oh my gosh this quality of life change would be amazing. I will wait as long as it takes for it to happen because it would be so amazing. Also provent people from being KO'd from heaven on high or palace of the dead when the only two people in the instance or even worse case all 4 are booted due to being booped from the server. I enjoy potd but it is painful getting yeeted at floor 170 because of a server hiccup. I have learned to accept this unfair defeat but it would be awesome if it didn't just count as a death.

Edit: Oh! I almost forgot this may also happen with treasure maps but have not had it happen yet wear if two people are in a treasure map and all are gone from the instance it might close, but unsure.

[Larirawiel]

not sure its as easy as you think. I mean if you are experienced with mmo server architecture you would know better than I but...

if your internet drops, you are in the game for a period of time before you can log in. if the server see's no error on its side, how is it supposed to know?

The server knows. You can poll the status of a player periodically and if you get no response then you can assume that the player is offline. That is the reason why players get a disconnect icon after a while when they go offline for some reasons. And this functionality, that gives the players a disconnect icon could also contact the lobby server with the player id and a timestamp when the offline status was noticed for the first time. And then the lobby server could prioritize those players.


Cheers

[ehbiwtf]

While I agree wholeheartedly, this probably isn't as simple to implement as you'd think. Keep in mind that the lobby server is shared between all worlds, and in many systems designs you tend to silo information as much as possible—i.e., no component should have more awareness of any other component's state beyond the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect "the bare minimum" (as defined when the login servers were created) does not include "how long has it been since this character last disconnected", so it's probably not just a five-minute change to make; it probably entails adding a way to pull information from the world servers to the lobby server in order to have the lobby server know that it needs to shuffle you towards the front of the line.

And any time you make changes like that, you really want to test them before rolling them out...

...but according to their note from a while back when they upped the lobby server's capacity from 17k connections to 21k, the devs repurposed their dev-test deployment systems as extra lobby server capacity. Which means they don't have the capability to test that sort of change as thoroughly as you'd want to.

(And if they made a change that broke the login system under load in new and terrifying ways, players probably wouldn't be happy with that either.)

It's the sort of change I hope they make, honestly... but it's also probably not one that'll happen overnight, especially since they're down a lot of the deployment test hardware that would provide a safety net on rolling out a sweeping change to the login system.

Have to remember the hardware they sacrificed was their backup dev servers, as per the Response to Congestion (as of Dec. 11) post:

Please note that we were able to successfully raise this cap on the queues as a result of deploying our backup development machines to the lobby servers on December 7.

So they still have a full set to test on. And yeah it's definitely not a quick fix.

[ehbiwtf]

since Vanilla you say...

"New Reconnect Button Added to WoW Login Screen in Chains of Domination
posted 2021/06/02 "

I say Vanilla isnt that recent... you can search for that title on the internet if you dont believe...

is it frustrating, yes it is. should they look into doing something, they likely are, development cycles are rarely made public so how do you know they arent looking into it?

Given WoW only did it recently, I imagine its likely coming in some form, but probably after redoing their login servers... which is a way out in the timeline I suspect.

If you read the news post from wowhead it's literally just that, a reconnect button added to the client. Before you had two options upon a disconnect, retype login info manually and press connect, or exit the client and open a new one via the launcher which skips having to type that stuff to login.

It's kind of hard to find old blue posts about this stuff. The world servers crashed a lot back in the day. Everybody logs back in at the same time, crash the login server, now nobody else can play. I believe the 5 min grace period was part of a fix to that issue, and it happened early. You're right they might be cooking something like this up and just not telling anyone. Maybe it would be a massive undertaking that would take months I got no clue. Would be difficult for anyone not familiar with their particular setup to gauge that I would think.

Just really disappointing not to see anything else shared in those announcements about what they can do or are doing further out. Focus thus far in that regard seems mainly about the hardware shortage (which nobody can do anything about) and fixing the login server drops, which they nailed I think. Haven't had a queue problem in a long time. Hopefully some more good news is on the horizon, we'll see I suppose.