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Disorderly Queue Article
MMO PC Article by Rob Fahey
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Published as part of our sister-site GamesIndustry.biz' widely-read weekly newsletter, the GamesIndustry.biz Editorial is a weekly dissection of one of the issues weighing on the minds of the people at the top of the games business. It appears on Eurogamer after it goes out to GI.biz newsletter subscribers.
Like any other medium, videogames have developed certain conventions as they have evolved - conventions which were often first set in place by technological limitations of the time, but which can persist long after those limits have been removed by the march of technology. Gaming conventions come to form part of the language of the medium, giving designers (of both software and hardware) touchstones which they know will be familiar and comfortable for their audience.
On occasion, however, there's a sense that a convention has remained in place not because it's useful, or comfortable, but just because replacing it would require thought and effort that developers don't want to commit.
One particularly infuriating example of that exists in the MMO realm, and has had a particularly nasty airing in the past fortnight thanks to the launch of NCsoft's Aion. Much has been written about the game itself, and it's unquestionable that it's a stylish, polished implementation of the genre - indeed, it's arguably the first rival to come close to the quality mark set by World of Warcraft.
You might be disinclined to agree with that sentiment, however, if most of your experience of the game in the past fortnight has involved sitting in queues waiting for a space on your chosen server to become available - an aspect of the game's launch which has coloured almost every piece of coverage it has received.
Aion is not, of course, alone in facing this problem. Most MMOs launch with queues to access their servers - worse again, many of them then end up offering players barren, half-empty servers when the player population falls after the first few months.
The fundamental reason for this problem lies in a basic convention of massively multiplayer games. From the earliest successful graphical MMOs, such as Ultima Online, games have been divided up into "shards", or "servers" - identical copies of the same game world, each carrying a portion of the game's overall population. A game such as Aion (or Warhammer Online, or Age of Conan, or any other normal MMO) launches with a number of servers available, each of which can only handle a certain number of concurrent players.
The game service operator then faces an extremely tricky balancing act. Too few servers will result in enormous queues for the game, which frustrate and upset players - not a good move when your business model relies on them being so pleased with their experience in the first 30 days that they'll happily subscribe for the long term. Too many servers, however, results in some of them turning into ghost towns later on, as the initial surge of interest in the game slows after the first few months.
When the uptake of the game is higher than anticipated, companies can respond to the demand by opening new servers - but this is a blunt, unfocused tool at best, and in many cases, is utterly useless as a solution. Players who have already invested time in a character don't want to start afresh on a new server. More importantly, players who have started the game with a group of their friends will find it very difficult to move en-masse to a new server. Instead, you see the spectacle of a game with a cluster of servers afflicted by huge queues, while new servers sit half-empty.
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Comments: 1-34 of 34 in total
Poster
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+8
It's this that EVE manages so well. Everyone in the same place. If they can do it, why on earth can't the other huge players do the same? However I guess partly it's that the EVE universe is so large, so you can spread 40,000 players about a bit easier? I've not played WOW in ages and I've no idea if its world is big enough to have 40,000 people running around in it:)
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 10/10/09 @ 10:46
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+1
I quite like the Phantasy Star Universe setup. There's a whole bunch of servers to play on but characters are stored on a separate server. You can then connect to any available server as long as it isn't full. It's a generally quieter affair these days, but I like having the option of joining busier servers when I'm feeling sociable, or hiding away in a less populated one when I want to go it alone.
It's not really an MMO I guess, as the game mechanics for actually playing are more comparable with Halo and the like. The world lets you wander around and find people, but missions are usually 10-20 minutes long with up to six players involved. But I do like not being tied down to a server in particular, especially since the population is dwindling. |
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actionfitz
10/10/09 @ 10:18
+1
great article.
Doubt it will change anything for Aion, NCSOFT still haven't admitted fault for the 'Queue Fiasco', instead blaming unprecedented demand and 'stubborn' players for not abandoning friends, guilds and characters already in the high 20's to start again from scratch on a new server. They still wont admit liability for the fact that thousands of people have barely been able to login to the game during their prepaid 1st month. They still haven't offered any form of compensation. I doubt they will. The queues have started to ease up at any rate. but whether this is from people spreading to the new servers to start over or from people giving up on the game... it's anyone's guess :S |
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johnlenham
10/10/09 @ 10:27
0
Maybe Aion is leaving it till after the first month as because like many many many others have said thats when it really starts as all the free players that dont want to continue will drop off and your left with empty/ far lower populated servers. All the queue complaints will vanish within the first 3-4 days of the free month being up.
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+2
An insightful article. You've hit the nail on the head about Aion - I got into the headstart and created a character on a server before the servers were even opened. I want to stay with that one, as I'm in a legion with a few other people from EG, but if I want to actually play the game when I want to I ahev to log in on an alt on another server to avoid the queues.
I hope they get their char transfer sorted out quickly. |
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0
This comment thread should be good. A lot of people who have played MMOs think they are experts on everything about them.
AhSoul - Quick question, how does EvE actually work? When I briefly played it I was on the 'Tranquility' server which sometimes I had to queue to get on at peak times. I always read that the 250,000 players share the same universe, but from 45,000 people onwards I would have to queue to get on my server. Whats the difference between that and a more standard server set up? |
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BrokenSymmetry
10/10/09 @ 10:57
+3
@dudefella: Exactly. There are already quite a few MMOs around where you can play with anyone in the world (Eve, Guild Wars, Champions), and none of them are mentioned in this article.
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+3
I agree Brokensymmetrty.
The article is interesting in it's criticism of the shard model, but should examine games that are provoding solutions. Guild Wars was (and is) an excellent example; with regional instances of locations, as well as an international instance that will let you play with anyone in the world. The flipside, however, is immersion and community. A smallish server community can help foster server personalities, help the high level players get to know each other. Guild Wars can feel a bit impersonal to a new player. This leads to Eve, with it's single shared universe solution; but it's worth remembering that this might not be practicable to a popular fantasy mmorpg. You can't put vast numbers of regions with directed content online the same way you can a sprawling sandbox in a vacuum. |
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+1
I confess that I didn't know that Champions was operating on a different model. It's a game that's largely slipped under my radar, since superhero spandex has never appealed to me - I'll have to check it out and see how it works.
Eve and Guild Wars were ignored in the article simply because they operate vastly different gameplay models which accommodate their server models. Neither of them is really a traditional MMO - in essence, Eve is more of a sprawling sandbox game, Guild Wars a much smaller-scale multiplayer combat game. They're both fantastic (I had to uninstall Eve recently because it threatened to destroy my social life) but they're beyond the scope of this article, which needed to be a 1200-word comment piece rather than a 3000 word essay :) |
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+1
It's interesting though, in that as you leave the split server model, you inevitably move towards either a higher level of instancing or a single server model. It's hard to envisage how traditional stuff like Aion and WoW would move away from single shards without a similar GW dropdown instance. The side effect is that immersion gets killed, the feeling of a shared community evaporates and you're left with an almost FPS style clan-network playing a game.
Oh and you say that Eve isn't a typical MMORPG because it's a sprawling sandbox - I agree and it'd be nice to see more of them! |
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0
I find it ironic that this article is talking about sharding as the 'old' solution that doesn't work well for MMORPGs and is looking for a solution that can have a single universe, when the business world of development is going the other direction.
The problem comes down to scalability and performance, and these are bloody hard to do no matter how great the developers are. Someone mentioned that EVE offers the single universe, but I've heard from numerous players that certain hub systems are incredibly laggy due to the volume of players in there at one time. |
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0
Oh and final comment on this (pretty interesting) article.
One major reason the Aion servers were lopsided, with a few getting major overcrowding, was that they opened preselect and let people create characters on any server ahead of launch. There wasn't any balancing done at this stage, and people quickly get invested in their characters. Casual players and people without guilds might have quickly shifted to the quiet servers if they hadn't already spent an hour designing the perfect avatar.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 10/10/09 @ 12:36
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Lord_BeeJee
10/10/09 @ 13:18
+1
Tabula rasa had a good way of handling this, you could jump to less crowded or busier shards at any time.
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I think context is the important thing, like someone else mentioned above.
I HATED the CO system. Logging on and then trying to get everyone you know onto the same shard was a time consuming pain in the arse, especially with the low player limits. MMORPGs already suffer from a severe lack of the 'RPG' element and constantly swapping shards to meet people doesn't help. I much prefer single servers. On a WoW server you are hardly playing by yourself. I don't want or need to meet all 2.5 million EU players. It gives a better sense of a social circle as you learn names (even if its just by the odd off hand comment) and importanly, there is a sense of self policing amongst the server. if one particular person displays dickish behaviour, there can be serious repercussions in a community that is fairly closed. The 'MMO' part of MMORPGs is focused on too much these days. Having hundreds of people on the screen at once might be great for FPS games, but it simply isn't needed in a fantasy or sci fi setting. |
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Norfolk'n'Clue
10/10/09 @ 15:19
+1
"Tabula rasa had a good way of handling this, you could jump to less crowded or busier shards at any time."
You mean less crowded or even lesser crowded.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 10/10/09 @ 16:20
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Silvervein
10/10/09 @ 15:59
+1
About the line in the article saying that when you and your friend are on different servers, you can't communicate in game.
Well, city of heroes allows you to do just that. And friend lists there will also show you online status of your friends, regardless of the server they log on to. But then, city is very social friendly game, from the teaming up system (known there as sidekicking) to the ability to see number of people on the server right at the server list, allowing you to pick less busy servers if necessary. It's strange that so many game puts artificial barriers between any kind of in game interaction of people. Most notable of those is effects levels have on people you can or can not team up with. I'd hope that by now the ability to team up would be independent of levels or other restrictions. |
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YourMessageHere
10/10/09 @ 21:05
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I can't be the only one who sees a link between the number of copies sold and the capacity of servers, right? If you know your servers can only cater to 50,000 players, selling more than say 60,000 copies before you know if it's economically feasable to improve the infrastructure basically isn't sensible. The economic model just doesn't make selling far beyond server capacity sensible. Once you know if you need more capacity or if people are drifting away and freeing up slots, release more copies to market. Yes, you potentially lose sales, but you also lose sales when Johnny MMOplayer whines to all his friends about how he has to queue for ages and the game sucks because of it.
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+3
"lol, rob you are a fucking clueless newb, its a joke you write about mmos."
Now steady on, that is a bit harsh. Okay, it perhaps hasn't been put forward brilliantly but there is a grain of truth in the tagline, Aion is a new game and overcrowded servers and several-hour queues are actually a good way to turn off your audience. Although this is down to more reasons than the game being popular - that exploiters, RMT and botters have found means and ways of hogging server spots whilst clearly AFK the whole time means there is dramatically less room for legitimate players. The thing is, this is one issue where NCSoft can so easily take action. They have thrown their hands up and run around proclaiming they aren't sure how to stem the flow of illegal players from the far east but in reality, Cryptic and Funcom and surprisingly even Blizzard recently have found the means and ways of holding back the tide - excluding Asian IP's from their US and EU servers. This means that to access the game, RMT and the subsequent botters who supply them have to go through via proxy servers - which works on two distinct levels. One, proxy servers are easier to track and put down. The second is the legalities of this, more notably in China where much of the trade comes from - let us remember China has some pretty serious censorship laws and bypassing their systems via a proxy is actually illegal there. Once that is dealt with, then you get to server capacity for a big-selling new game and again, there are ways of dealing with this. Surprisingly, most players forget Aion -DOES- have instanced zones (go to Help and Support - Change Instance) which makes areas less laggy if you share the love around a bit, but you need to know this - and now Aion players do. You are welcome. This spreads out the population when used right, which it currently isn't, and that is something NCSoft could work on. The other is of course an extra server, but this is where it gets necessary to have perspective. It's easy to tell people to reroll, but as we now know it took 17 days of a good 20 hours per day to hit the level cap. This is a lot of work considering you can do this on World of Warcraft in half that time. If you open a new server, as Aion did, the one thing you shouldn't do is expect populations to just shift and balance out - Blizzard learned this the hard way. If a new server is necessary, Blizzard would offer players on an overpopulated server a chance of moving their character, money gear and all, across to the new server, before new characters can be made. This keeps populations balanced whilst being fair on people who have spent some time with their character. Aion has not gone about all of this terribly well, which is a shame because you would assume that NCSoft would have been over this long before now, knowing now what it didn't when they released Lineage 2. Maybe the success of it has taken them by surprise, but it really is a case now that they have to really get out of this hole they are entrenched in. It's going to damage their game considerably more if they don't sort it out. Given time, Aion may settle down, but for those who think forgiveness comes easy - Age of Conan. It is a warning to all, and NCSoft should be bricking it hard. |
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0
Its amazing how Aion got things so badly badly wrong re capacity.
I am at level 14 on my templar which was a reroll on a new server and have enjoyed it enormously so far. I hope they (NCsoft) change their tune a bit (particularily their European PR head, who frankly sounds clueless) and get more procative to the bases needs. We need a real competitor to WoW as I fear blizz are losing the plot a bit. Lich King seamed great at launch, but 3.2 was a terrible lazy patch. They need to be looking over their shodlers more! |
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-4
While I disagree with the feeling of the article, it's as if the writer is just trying to stir up drama for the sake of attention, there are downfalls not mentioned of the system suggested. Yes, it's possible to do what you want, to have this new system working, sure, but if you're complaining about Aion doing this, then lol, I don't think you understand the game at all.
Aion is a back to the roots MMO, and one of the major features of this is the idea of a server as a HOME. Each players server is there home, it's where they live, it's where they meet new players. If all you do is randomly log onto a server each time you decide to play, always picking one with friends, there is no sense of incorporation with the game, you don't feel as if you're a part of a greater world, you just feel as if you're entering some game to play with your few friends and not actually meet anybody new. That's part of what it means to be an MMO game in the first place. That's why those shooters mentioned in the article aren't actually MMO games. The article writer either has no clue about MMO games, or just wrote this in order to try and stir up drama while sounding like an idiot.
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 11/10/09 @ 04:26
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0
I have to say I prefer the instances of Champions Online. There are generally plenty of other 'heroes' around but not so many so that it feels they are the bulk of the population. Also, it makes it much easier to meet up with you friends because you just go to their instance.
How they guy above can say it's a pain in the arse to meet up is beyond me. All one of you does is go to an instance with plenty of space on and the rest just head there too. It's not exactly hard or time consuming and you can easily see what instance your friends on from the friends list AND (more importantly) the travel menu. You must be forming some bloody huge groups if you can't find an instance with space.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 11/10/09 @ 09:03
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0
At launch, everyone, wants to play at the same time. A few weeks later it's a completely different picture. If they put up enough servers at launch they'll likely have to merge half of them after a month, if they put up a reasonable amount of servers at launch they'll have queues.
Both ways are bound to make people look upon the launch as unprofessional, but what can they really do? That being said I do find it somewhat silly that a game like Diablo 2 and battle.net offers players a better way to hook up with their friends for instant gaming. There is no waiting to fill your party because the difficulty scales, there are regions but aslong as your friends are in the same reigion as you, you can play with them. Heh. I play eve-online now and have been for quite a while and I just love that everyone are on the same server, but I did play world of warcraft in the past and back then I had friends on 4 different servers... In the future I really hope more MMO companies are going to either keep everyone on one server eve style or at least allow you to travel between servers with relative ease and without having to pay a ridiculous amount of money. |
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+1
With cross-server battlegrounds in World of Warcraft for a while now and cross-server instances coming in the next patch, WoW is going a long way to breaking down server barriers. Admittedly you are still restricted to your battlegroup (cluster of servers) but it's much more likely that you will happen to share one of the handful of battlegroups with someone than the hundreds of servers. I imagine Blizzard will eventually get rid of battlegroups anyway when it becomes more techincally feasible and affordable for them to do so.
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+1
@Lord_BeeJee; I didnt like the Tabula Rasa version of just jumping to another shard. Sure, it was great to find your quest mob or you could jump to (or away from) attacks on the bases but for me it had two major drawbacks; it broke any immersion I felt to a persistant world and it reinforced the 'singleplayer' feel I got from nearly all aspects of the game.
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Matthew_Hornet
13/10/09 @ 00:59
-1
EVE Online, fuckers. Whatever it is, EVE thought of it first.
Maybe someday people will actually stop obsessing about WOfuckingW and get with the time. The time being Icelandic Standard. |
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+1
You know, I think that the current MMO model with shards is not so bad.
It's not necessary to play against anyone else in the world, part of the beauty of PvP realms is the rivalries that develop, between players and guilds because you're playing against a limited set of people who you encounter repeatedly. The real killer was that they didn't have realm transfers implemented at launch... |
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Norfolk'n'Clue
14/10/09 @ 14:36
+1
Single shard is the way forward - but only for smaller games. CCP makes a big song and dance about having over 300,000 active accounts - but the maximum online at any one time rarely exeeds 45,000 prime time. There was a maximum at last years Alliance Tournement of 52,000-odd - not sure if it was beaten this year. What does help them is that it's very niche, and has grown organically from humble beginnings. Tranquility would also grind to a halt if the number of people who bought Aion wanted to play all at the same time.
Pehaps a real issue is the marketing drive at launch. The same method of promoting sales is used for MMOs as to market a conventional 'offline' game, where server capacity is not essential to play the game and maintain a world but merely to record high scores or provide a one-use environment (a map) to have a MP battle in. Maybe the number of copies of the game that server capacity can cope with should only be released at first - demand may be high, but at least those who get on will be able to play - release more copies piecemeal and grow server capacity accordingly. Not the best solution (at all probably, as people will lose interest before even buying it, and there are costs to be covered and cash flow generated), but the authors definitely need to think more creatively about account management.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 14/10/09 @ 15:38
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krisskross
22/10/09 @ 20:53
-1
It looks like NCS has thrown shit in the fan with latest server lag "feature".
Enjoy damage from dead mobs, loot after a few minutes waiting around the dead mob that attacks you, see walkin dead, click and take a 5 min break to get that lousy quest, and so on forever and ever. The game is fked up as hell and remembet that WE PAY FOR THAT SHIT! Not to mention hundreds of BOTS, bot farms as legions and the usual spam in main and PM.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 22/10/09 @ 21:55
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+1
"Eve and Guild Wars were ignored in the article simply because they operate vastly different gameplay models which accommodate their server models. Neither of them is really a traditional MMO - in essence, Eve is more of a sprawling sandbox game, Guild Wars a much smaller-scale multiplayer combat game."
I disagree with GW. You go into a town (quest hub) and you look for groups, and can look for groups across multiple instances on the fly. Sure you can't leave town with any number of people, but then the most fun content in LOTRO for example are instances where you have a limit on players entering, i.e. raids/skirmishes/epic quests that require a fellowship. You can thus meet up with all kinds of people on GW, and to counter another point, you do get to know the personalities if not of individuals, of the guilds from their guild capes, and through that start to recognise names. The guys doing the Nightfall end content and the FoW soloists and groups all knew each other from camping in those locations so frequently. |
Comments: 1-34 of 34 in total
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