Clustering development insight

[Fenja]

Sounds great!

[Konwizzle]

So this will solve one problem (lag), but what about all the other equally frustrating issues caused by overpopulation? No plans to address those? For example:

- Getting ganked 5x as much because there's 5x Blizzlike population
- Waiting forever for the chance to kill a quest mob
- Getting overwhelmed by mobs (especially in caves) because you tuned the respawn rates too high
- Never being able to buy limited stock recipes from vendors because they're camped 24/7 and sold on the AH for ridiculous prices
- Never being able to collect rare resources like Blood of Heroes because they're camped 24/7 too

At a certain point, you have to stop ignoring the fact that the population itself is not Blizzlike at all, and these little bandaid fixes (like dynamic respawn rates) create as many problems as they solve.

Have you ever considered maybe you're just not a good player if you can't deal with some of these issues? The only legit one I see if the vendor supplies. Points 2 and 3 are direct contradictions of one another. Point one makes it seem like you should be on a PvE server and point 5 you contradict yourself again ("Rare resources" should be abundant?)

If you don't like the population of the server, then go to another server. The high population here is amazing.

I would like to address on this.

Point 2 and 3 are not contradicting each other if you think of the multiple aspects of the game world. By means of pure rhetorics and just taking what is standing here in the forums you can turn it that way, that it indeed seems contradictory. But if you actually think of what Konwizzle meant to say and not only taking the plain words as they stands like any politician in a talkshow, there is a point he has.
But for the sake of Detail i will unfold his little 2 sentences in a more elaborate manner, so that it won't be so easily attacked by rhetorics:
- Waiting forever for a quest mob vs getting overwhelmed by mobs (caves etc.): There is not one type of mob for the whole fucking game - take the Defias Traitor in Westfall for example - he's constantly non-existent and there are many grps waiting for him, with several chars i already faced the situation of having to wait up to 30mins for this mob, because there were other (full) grps, that just directly picked his quest when he spawned - these problems will increase with further population growth. On the other side there are many caves, where you simply have an abundance of mobs, that aren't necessarily needed for a quest or are simply not farmed so much...
Btw.: Try to farm in the Searing Gorge for the Greater Lava-Spiders or Golems/Fire/Rock-Elementals, that are needed for a quest -> even with the way better respawn-time it currently takes much time to farm (and that when you are 2 or more people, else you're getting killed by no time ).

As for the argument not to play on a PVP-Server if you don't like PvP: It's a complex matter to discuss and i can understand both lines of argumentation. But comperade to the Blizzlike realism you are forced 5times more often into PVP-conflicts. If you're looking for that, then you will like it. But there is also an abundance of players who actually stand in the middle ground between not liking world pvp at all and being a nonstop PVP-Person that kills every red character out of principle the moment he sees him.
Many of these people could identify with the situation you had on retail: Questing with the constant fear, that a horde/alliance player might turn up and therefore planning really carefully the own steps in the world. The current situation in some or even many regions is more like that you have the other faction constantly around you, completely taking away the tension.

Wow, a reasonable, thoughtful response. Wasn't expecting that. Thank you for clarifying

Just to reiterate since Cousy is having a hard time understanding:

- Many mobs still don't respawn fast enough. For example: The other day there were about 20 players trying to kill King Bangalash in STV.
- Other mobs respawn too quickly, leading to on overwhelming number of adds if you're in a cave or any other confined space.

As Marharbal said, there are many different mobs in the game, so these points are in no way mutually exclusive.

With regard to rare resources, "rarity" is not a binary thing. There are varying degrees of rarity, and Blizzard never intended Devilsaur Leather or Blood of Heroes or limited stock vendor recipes to be camped 24/7 such that only the most hardcore players are able to acquire them.

And the same is true for PvP. Getting ganked a few times per zone is normal, but getting ganked every few minutes in every contested zone is not. When you add in the other factors, such as the extreme competition for all quest mobs and resources, you can see how the overpopulation quickly begins to cause more frustration than enjoyment.

[Soyoen]

Sounds great.

[Imbaslap]

Dear community,

As announced previously, the development team started working on a clustering system for our PvP realm.
A clustering system will allow us to distribute the load of a realm over a cluster of servers.



The first advantage of this system is scalability: it would split the computations over different servers, thus allowing the realm to be more responsive when we are over 10k players.
The second advantage is flexibility: since we're getting more players, we would only have to plug new servers on the system, instead of having to buy a completely new hardware each time.
And the third advantage is resilience: if one node crashes, only the players logged to this node will be disconnected. The other players won't even notice it. If the master server crashes, the nodes will still be able to save the players to the database, which will mean the end of the rollbacks.

https://youtu.be/RL06DdydiC0

This video show a succesfull transfer of a character from master's server to a different node/realm. Technically, from a player point of view, it's the same mechanism as when a character enter/leave a donjon.

This is the first time that a clustering system is developed for WoW emulation at this level. To our knowledge, no-one has ever created a clustering system used in a production by a server. Why ? It is not an easy thing to set up, and it requires a true programming expertise in different fields (security, network, performance, wow emulation ...) to code it.

Now that this first step is done, next one will be to deploy this system for donjons at first, then raids, battlegrounds and finally continent as a whole, resulting into a no lag server no matter the number of players logged in.

In our implementation choices, we kept in mind that this system could allow us - in the future - to create cross-realms battlegrounds

Once again, thanks for your support, and get ready for more interesting news !

Nostalrius dev team.

I'm sorry but I couldn't help but wonder what a DonJon is? does it have correlation with those shoe Gobelins?

+1 for the news and happy to hear about cross realm Bg's being a possibility!

[deepdishk]

Here is a guide how to success in coding complicated things without bugs/errors or even typos within the first try.
Hype is real!

[Doofoos]

I'm sorry but I couldn't help but wonder what a DonJon is? does it have correlation with those shoe Gobelins?

same as dongeons

[Heldunder]

Seriously… This is just AMAZING! #Nostalrius4TheWin

Here is an example of a guy who did such a thing on another server.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdZZF2qtZyA

this was really cool, but when they were showing the load times between zones, when he would walk from ungoro to siphilus it was actually kind of scary, the shammy couldnt see the priest for like 5 seconds waiting for him to load when the priest seemd to be able to see the shammy the whole time.

[Phyle]

Greetings,

I'll try to answer and clarify few questions.

1) "This will ruin world PvP since people will hide on a different node"

No. We will not implement phasing or instancing on the same map. That would indeed destroy the feel of vanilla WoW. Each node/server will handle either a continent, battlegrounds or dungeon/raid instances. If necessary, these can then be divided further, so a single node handles BWL, another node handles AV, yet another handles Kalimdor and so on. There will not be a situation where two players are in Elwynn Forest and cannot see each other. The video used Elwynn just to prove that the chat works between nodes.

2) "Will this bring in queues?"

No. After a server crash there has always been and will be a short queue as the login server cannot handle thousands of players logging in simultaneously. Outside of that specific case, there won't be any queues.

3) "Will this help with my lag?"

Yes and no. It won't improve the connection lag caused by distance from France or if you have a poor Internet connection. It will improve (possibly completely eliminate) the server delay that can happen with 10k+ players online.

4) "Will view distances improve?"

Yes. View distance is one the most taxing things for the server to handle. Reducing it is thus one the more effective methods to combat server delay. With the burden divided between multiple server-nodes, it will be possible to increase view distances.

5) "CROSS-REALM BATTLEGROUNDS!!!"

Clustering will make Cross-Realms BG a possibility but no promises there as there are more hurdles to overcome.

Hope this helps.

The GM Team.

Big Big thanks for this. This is going to be my best WoW experience of all time!

The high population is annoying at questing but the huge possibilities for world PvP are amazing. I think this is more valuable. The limited recipes at vendors should be added to the Dynamic Respawn Rate.

To fight for limited mats is just an additional option for World PvP at least to reduce the farmers of one fraction at least.

[Canro]

yea, it sounds ok!

[Busdriver]

I'll believe it when I see it

Server peaks at what, 12k? China population is 1.4 billion so there is still a lot of work to do there