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

[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.

[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.