Sanya: This is a little Off-Topic, but I'm just wondering what your thoughts on Mythic's Warhammer are. Just curious as to your feelings on how the game turned out and what you think about it compared to DAoC.

The info displayed upon server selection has always been population and operational status. Perhaps if MMOs listed average ping times, population and operational status, players wanting a high pop will go to those and players who are into smaller groups and soloing and are allergic to server-side lag would choose the ones with the lowest pop and the higher avg ping.

Maybe this way the server load would be a bit more evenly spread upon initial selection. As a given server becomes more popular, players of various sub-types would go to the ones they favoured and the load would be more even.

we just need as many good reasons to go as there are to stay when evaluating those 3 factors.

Originally posted by Sanya

@Bel: hahahahahahahahahaha

I tell people that your sins follow you forever on the internet, and here you are proving it!

I don't regret most of those. Some were me being young and ignorant. Some were me being drunk and maudlin. All of them were funny at the time. Thanks for dredging them up for me, I lost the originals years ago.

I love them, whatever they are. It does explain why only your first rant shows up on eatingbees tho. Glad to have helped :D

Sometimes, one have to wonder what some dev are thinking about, they should at least hire one tech on a 24h schedule with a pager, cell phone fax etc in case something goes boom with a server. Was a nice read and I'm very happy to see you (read you) again, im an old time daoc player and was kinda wondering where you would pop-up again:p

Welcome Sanya!

Good article, it revealed an aspect of the industry I had not given much thought to. I look forward to your next article.

I really hate to be the bad guy, but I am sorry in advance.

This is a medicore piece colorfully decorated with grammatical antics to "unbore" a bland topic. There are alot of better topics concerning "MMOs behind the scenes" that could've been covered with the right amount of time invested in sorting out the facts from the fiction. Every sentence was basically a "captain obvious" moment. These are common sense facts that any MMO gamer who doesn't have his head up his butt already realized by using the next best invention since slice bread, "Google.com." The rest of the sheep will always scream "OMG the company doesn't care" due to a lack of intelligence, we've grown to accept this rather rowdy crowd of new MMO players and promptly introduce them to the ignore feature commonly found in every MMO Game now-a-days. And we move on...

I wish you luck in future endeavors.

Originally posted by Greenfeen

You want to run your company 24/7 then have the support sitting there 24/7 scaled to server load.

As well, companies still think its the cheapest route to outsource 

Word.  Game Companies are Responsible for their product.  STOP MAKING EXCUSES.

Yes Sanya I remember you from the early days, Let me be the one voice here that says :

Stop Being An Apologist For Mediocrity .  

I know they hired you to promote their side of the story but when the SERVER-side lags, freezes, crashes DONT BLAME THE PLAYER.  Blame the f'king Corporation for being too cheap to spend the money to FIX (omg actually FIX something???!!!) the problem.

Originally posted by Copeland

Tell me why companies refuse innovation..

Tell me why every game has the same basic functions..

Tell me why paid beta is the industry norm..

 

Did McQuaid really choose smack over Vanguard???? that's what i want to know!!!

Mind if  propose the following explainations I think you'd hear from Sanya?
 

1) By and large, you say, "Why no innovation?" Look at WoW. All 12 million subscriptions are NOT out looking for the next best thing. A vast majority aren't even on message forums of any kind.  People like safe and familiar, even if it can get dull, whether you chose to admit it or not. That's why it's much easier to do small, incremental EVOLUTIONARY changes, not REVOLUTIONARY ones.

Coincidentally, INVESTORS like safe and familiar too.  A simple equation:

Innovative = Risk (Unproven, Untested).
MMO's = Large dump trucks full of money to make and support.

Innovation + MMO's = Risk + Large dump trucks full of money to make and support

2) I'm assuming you mean controls or interface? That's what I think of when you say "Functions". Or do you mean "Game Mechanics"? If it's the first, then I'd say becauseby and large, the majority of people LIKE those functions.. Because they're familiar, proven, and accepted.  See number 1. Have you ever played UO? If not, please do and try it for a few weeks.. Try to look past the graphics and just get a feel for the game. The functionality in UO can be VERY frustrating. WoW functionality evolved from UO functionality, and it's large steps in the right direction.

3) Seriously, you can't figure out why paid beta is the norm? I'm hoping your being facetious. Three standard answers here, in somewhat releveant order:

A) Money - The longer your developing the game, the longer your sucking the capital from your investors without proving you'll pay them back. That's risk, and it costs. See number 1.

B) No MMO is ever Complete, bug free, etc. Why? They're MASSIVE, complex systems with a mind-boggling number of "parts" that all have to work together in perfect harmony. They're made by people, so there will ALWAYS be bugs. Why are they never complete? Well... How long would you stick around in a game, particualrly an MMO that never added new content? That never changed?

C) Time. Considering factors A and B, you have to do what you can to please your investors and push a game out before the NEXT generation of games is already being developed, so they have to weigh the pros and cons  in such a way that it answers one very simple question: How soon can we push out a game that people will pay to play and tolerate it's issues so that we can prove to our investors that it's a profitable venture, so they KEEP investing in it and we can keep improving it?

I'd think it'd be along those lines, anyway. My opinion.

And Sanya wasn't involved with Sigil or McQuaid at any point in time, I don't think. But I know a developer who worked when Vanguard was under his control once wrote an article about his experiences (Don't recall where) but yes, I'm fairly certain he had some serious drug issues.
 

It's about time someone  stood up for the people who are trying to earn their paycheck, by keeping our favorite games afloat.

Also, Nice Spinal Tap reference!

Originally posted by Flummoxed

Word.  Game Companies are Responsible for their product.  STOP MAKING EXCUSES.

Yes Sanya I remember you from the early days, Let me be the one voice here that says :

Stop Being An Apologist For Mediocrity .  

I know they hired you to promote their side of the story but when the SERVER-side lags, freezes, crashes DONT BLAME THE PLAYER.  Blame the f'king Corporation for being too cheap to spend the money to FIX (omg actually FIX something???!!!) the problem.

 

Sanya is no corporate shill. Those days ended after Mythic. If you remember her from the "early" days, or followed her since, you'd probably get that vibe.

And because she will never say it, for one reason or another, let me be at least one of the voices here that says:

GET. REAL.

They have money so they MUST be able to fix it?! Seriously??! That's your epiphany? What the fuck do you think they're making here, Lego castles???!!

God damn.. STUPID!  Don't you think if they COULD fix it, they WOULD? You think they want jagoff, mouth-breathing half-wits  foaming at the mouth about their product in a public venue every time their framerate drops? Has it escaped your keen intellectual prowess that maybe, just maybe, there are issues outside of their control, or there are a metric ass-ton of considerations to factor in, such as your computer's specific hardware and software connection, internet connection, ISP's, millions-to-billions of calculations per second that must be made on every SERVER, all of which might be a little difficult to account for? Jesus, it probably takes less processing power and IO operataions  to fly the damn space shuttle than it takes to run an MMO server for an hour.

Sweet jesus man, turn off the nerdrage and use your grey matter. Microsoft has far more money than ANY MMO company, and they can't even make a damn WORD PROCESSOR that always functions perfectly. 
 

I love Sanya! Glad to see her here.

---

Originally posted by Sanya

---

Originally posted by Copeland

This was a blog or a rant?
Sorry but if you feel the need to write an article saying that an IT company (and all mmo developers are an IT company) cares about its backbone, you're probably dumber than the people saying "this company doesn't care about server stability". Or your just ranting.. either way, this blog equates too.. Pepsi really cares about its taste!..
duh.
 

---

 
I feel better now.

---

They told a lot of stories. Misrepresented a lot of things. Tons of cash. Failed results.

Thanks for printing some excellent reality. Certain things need to be said and ultimately those who don't want to see the truth but keep imagining it for what that game (and others) MIGHT have been will always have hurt feelings and lash back at the messenger.

It's been kind of dark in the MMO department for the last year with these offerings. Thank you for bringing a flashlight, Sanya.

Yes they care so much that they buy the cheapest server technology available on the market and in some cases it's old, used and dated.

The big pay to play franchises might be different.

Good read.

Though I wonder if it would be too much for an MMO developer to stick with "current" generation technology, and just make a great game. I mean, given the abundance of MMOs in the industry, the lessons from server stability issues have been taught time and time again.

Yet every MMO dev says, "OUR GAME WILL BE THE BEST EVER WITH THE NEWEST EVERYTHING!"

... Unimpressed.

Probably because it's good for the computer hardware industry overall as people scramble to buy new PC components. Or maybe it's good for the technology industry because people are pushing the envelope. But both industries will still move at the speed of a locomotive because people still need to figure out how to run Crysis at max settings with a super high widescreen resolution while having their AA turned all the way up with lighting and shadows and bloom effects and whatever. Bleeding edge technology works for single player or small scale multiplayer (max of say, 32?) games.

But in the realm of MMOs, players get the shaft, companies go belly up, and games get more and more mediocre as they try to reinvent the cash cow that is WoW.

StarCraft is 12 years old. And people still play it. Why? Because it's awesome.

If an MMO dev didn't shoot themself in the foot by trying to render every single tree as if trees have never been rendered before, then maybe technology would be able to cope with being able to process 500 players in the same place at the same time.

Reasons given by Sanya for poor stability ( my responses in red, closing in yellow ):

The server is at the top of the list of options, alphabetically. No matter how many gentle suggestions appear in the announcement box for new players to please for the love of god choose Zifferelle as their new home, new players wind up picking Abericious. In this scenario, Abericious and Berisia are the only unstable servers. There is no way to fix it besides mandatory server transfers.
The server has a recognizable name. LOTRO’s first two servers are “Arkenstone” and “Brandywine.” Guess which one is overloaded. Hint: It’s the one recognized by the most casual of Tolkein fans.

Easily solved by implementing a simple "cap" which removes the ability to create a character from a new account when that cap is reached. Not enough spaces left for you and all your buddies? Go to the next server with enough room. They could even put a number next to the server representing how many spots are available on any particular server.

The last patch put in a highly desirable feature, one that measurably increased sales. A feature cited by market research groups as THE reason to resubscribe, or extend a subscription, or recommend the game to a friend. In testing, all was well. In release, not so much. Either the test server didn’t simulate the load well enough, or the problems didn’t build up enough to be noticeable for ninety days – sixty days longer than the new feature sat on the test server. Whatever the problem, the studio is now between a rock and a hard place. Remove the feature and lose money, or fail to fix the problem and lose money. Most people choose to work frantically on fixing the problem, but are hesitant to promise when the issue would be fixed… because if it were an easy fix, the players would never have noticed the problem at all.

Again, easily fixed by developers taking the time to work on and test new patches/content/expansions BEFORE even telling the world that it's coming. No rushed release, no disappointments in promised content/features not being implemented, and a generally bug free implementation.

 
The game might be more than a few years old, on its tenth group of server programmers. The resulting layers of code would take a genius with infinite free time to puzzle out. If the game is old enough, the server programmers are the youngest, greenest, newest hires not considered experienced enough to work on the unannounced Future of Gaming product. So the person least able to deal with the legacy is the one who has to try. This would seem to contradict my assertion that server stability is all the company cares about, but it truly doesn’t. In this scenario, the server programmer is one of the only people left on the team at all.
 

If the responses to the two above scenarios were implemented and practiced, along with adding in the simple requirement that all programmers accurately note every change/addition they made next to their code like normal software programmers do ( or the good ones do, anyway ), it wouldn't matter how old the game was or who was programming it.

Fact of the matter is, everything Sanya presented as an excuse for the "poor techs" would be remedied by simple common sense, hiring of competent talent, and a tad bit of effort on the developers part. Although this seems to be the unpopular opinion here, I'm going to have to agree with Flummoxed and others who just saw someone making excuses. To me, this "article" is nothing more than a fluff opinion piece in defense of shoddy business management.

Originally posted by WisebutCruel

Reasons given by Sanya for poor stability ( my responses in red, closing in yellow ):

The server is at the top of the list of options, alphabetically. No matter how many gentle suggestions appear in the announcement box for new players to please for the love of god choose Zifferelle as their new home, new players wind up picking Abericious. In this scenario, Abericious and Berisia are the only unstable servers. There is no way to fix it besides mandatory server transfers.
The server has a recognizable name. LOTRO’s first two servers are “Arkenstone” and “Brandywine.” Guess which one is overloaded. Hint: It’s the one recognized by the most casual of Tolkein fans.

Easily solved by implementing a simple "cap" which removes the ability to create a character from a new account when that cap is reached. Not enough spaces left for you and all your buddies? Go to the next server with enough room. They could even put a number next to the server representing how many spots are available on any particular server.

This is the type of "fix" that empties games. Start telling your customers where they can and can;t make characters and who they can and can't play with and many of them will rapidly find things they'd rather do than play your game. If you're going to control their behavior, you need to do it either invisibly or in such a way as they see it as "being given autonomy".

There's another factor that comes in for choosing a server, which I have heard many people mention over the years: how easy is the server name to remember and/or pronounce. Some games offer a dozen server names of which only one or two look like recognizable English words, which is just asking for trouble.

Personally, as a player whose playstyle nowadays is mainly duoing with some soloing, I tend to look for the low population servers. In a PvE game, this has way more benefits than disadvantages, because with a solo/duo/small group playstyle your prime concern on busy servers is big groups muscling you out of the way of content you want to do. Also, when you do want to group up, on a low population server people tend to be much less picky about who they'll take. Also, my experience is that low-pop servers are a lot more relaxed and friendly.

The big disadvantage of low-pop is that younever know when your server is going to vanish from the list to be merged with some other server you never heard of, leaving you stranded on some new, high-pop server full of angry, competetive, displaced/imposed-upon people.

In a PvP game like Warhammer, which we just started, choosing low-pop really isn't an option. we stuck with the server the game selected for us during the free trial and its both busy and slightly unstable. Also I couldn't tell you the name of it to win a bet.

Actually, this kind of FIX worked pretty well with Aion back  when it released in Korea, and this kind of FIX is MANDATORY for ANY RVR game, something Mythic miserably failed to do. There are plenty of options for developers to avoid overpopulated servers, there are also plenty of options to avoid unbalanced servers. Biggest problem is the one making the calls often lacks the knowledge. 

Great new column!  I'm looking forward to reading more about the underbelly.

Originally posted by Nevulus

I really hate to be the bad guy, but I am sorry in advance.

This is a medicore piece colorfully decorated with grammatical antics to "unbore" a bland topic. There are alot of better topics concerning "MMOs behind the scenes" that could've been covered with the right amount of time invested in sorting out the facts from the fiction. Every sentence was basically a "captain obvious" moment. These are common sense facts that any MMO gamer who doesn't have his head up his butt already realized by using the next best invention since slice bread, "Google.com." The rest of the sheep will always scream "OMG the company doesn't care" due to a lack of intelligence, we've grown to accept this rather rowdy crowd of new MMO players and promptly introduce them to the ignore feature commonly found in every MMO Game now-a-days. And we move on...

 

I wish you luck in future endeavors.

So bitter. It's called laying the foundation. Every thesis I have ever read begins much the same way. There's a reason for that. As for people who respond emotionally to frustration they're neither being stupid or lacking in intelligence. They're just behaving as most humans do when in an emotional state. Not everyone is the Buddha. The ones that annoy me are the ones who persist after they have had time to have thought it through, and not done so. Even with them it's simply a matter of education. You have to walk them through the terra incognito.

Originally posted by Bhagpuss

Originally posted by WisebutCruel

Reasons given by Sanya for poor stability ( my responses in red, closing in yellow ):

The server is at the top of the list of options, alphabetically. No matter how many gentle suggestions appear in the announcement box for new players to please for the love of god choose Zifferelle as their new home, new players wind up picking Abericious. In this scenario, Abericious and Berisia are the only unstable servers. There is no way to fix it besides mandatory server transfers.
The server has a recognizable name. LOTRO’s first two servers are “Arkenstone” and “Brandywine.” Guess which one is overloaded. Hint: It’s the one recognized by the most casual of Tolkein fans.

Easily solved by implementing a simple "cap" which removes the ability to create a character from a new account when that cap is reached. Not enough spaces left for you and all your buddies? Go to the next server with enough room. They could even put a number next to the server representing how many spots are available on any particular server.

 

This is the type of "fix" that empties games. Start telling your customers where they can and can;t make characters and who they can and can't play with and many of them will rapidly find things they'd rather do than play your game. If you're going to control their behavior, you need to do it either invisibly or in such a way as they see it as "being given autonomy".

There's another factor that comes in for choosing a server, which I have heard many people mention over the years: how easy is the server name to remember and/or pronounce. Some games offer a dozen server names of which only one or two look like recognizable English words, which is just asking for trouble.

Personally, as a player whose playstyle nowadays is mainly duoing with some soloing, I tend to look for the low population servers. In a PvE game, this has way more benefits than disadvantages, because with a solo/duo/small group playstyle your prime concern on busy servers is big groups muscling you out of the way of content you want to do. Also, when you do want to group up, on a low population server people tend to be much less picky about who they'll take. Also, my experience is that low-pop servers are a lot more relaxed and friendly.

The big disadvantage of low-pop is that younever know when your server is going to vanish from the list to be merged with some other server you never heard of, leaving you stranded on some new, high-pop server full of angry, competetive, displaced/imposed-upon people.

In a PvP game like Warhammer, which we just started, choosing low-pop really isn't an option. we stuck with the server the game selected for us during the free trial and its both busy and slightly unstable. Also I couldn't tell you the name of it to win a bet.

If I may interject here...

Anyone remember the world pass system from FFXI? It's basically the same idea as this. They force you to join a particular server (undoubtedly one with a lower population for balancing purposes) unless you have a code from someone on another server and you can enter that and join the other world with your friends. I'm not sure if this has changed, but it was used when the game was first released and it worked well.

So, I think I have to agree with the "nay-sayers" to an extent. Some of the points made in the article seem like poor excuses for a lack of imagination regarding design. Other points are well made and to me pretty clear facts. I think in the end all you need to do is look at games that have had more success in this area (of server stability) and then look at the ones who have failed in this area and find the difference and branch out from there. That's a good, logical way to move forward in regards to fixing this issue in my opinion.

In conclusion, there's always a solution so to say things are impossible to fix is just about as ignorant as saying you can fix them right away. So start by looking at systems in games that have worked well, take the good ideas, throw out the ones that don't work and start building better and better foundations to eliminate these problems before they start. There will always be issues, but it's the way you solve them that you have control over.

Originally posted by WisebutCruel

Easily solved by...

Again, easily fixed by...

I love when people use those phrases, especially when their 'solution' shows a clear lack of understanding of the scope of the problem and the factors involved.

The 'easy' fix of caps, especially during the first few months would seriously affect the ability for guilds and FAF to coordinate servers they get on. It also does little to help retain new players later who join later in the game and are being sent to a low pop server. One of the biggest questions you see posted here or any forum from prospective players is "what is the population like?" Players dont want to be kicked to the dead server. They want to be in the most packed one. They more than likely won't talk to anyone outside of LFG for their entire time there but that doesn't chang the fact that there is a higher chance of retention of they are starting on a 'bustling' server.

Originally posted by LynxJSA

Originally posted by WisebutCruel

Easily solved by...

Again, easily fixed by...

 

I love when people use those phrases, especially when their 'solution' shows a clear lack of understanding of the scope of the problem and the factors involved.

 

The 'easy' fix of caps, especially during the first few months would seriously affect the ability for guilds and FAF to coordinate servers they get on. It also does little to help retain new players later who join later in the game and are being sent to a low pop server. One of the biggest questions you see posted here or any forum from prospective players is "what is the population like?" Players dont want to be kicked to the dead server. They want to be in the most packed one. They more than likely won't talk to anyone outside of LFG for their entire time there but that doesn't chang the fact that there is a higher chance of retention of they are starting on a 'bustling' server.

 

 While I am not a developer, 20 years of gaming does give me some "insight" into the "scope and factors" regarding the issue at hand.

If the servers are setup this way well in advance so that most know about it, there is little reason to bitch about it. As has already been pointed out FFXI uses a similar system and it has not impacted their sales or "retention" at all. If your game is good, those servers won't be "dead".

For one thing, you don't open the game with 40 damn servers. You open with 4, for example, with more at the ready to "plug-in" when required. When those servers reach cap, you have the next server on standby where it will then appear in the selection list when the previous servers are at least 90% of cap. Then the 6th server, etc., etc. A big part of server "deadness" comes from pushing out 20-30 servers at launch, which spreads everyone all over the damn place, and then causes the aggravation of server merges, which also gives a negative view of your game when people start with the "server merges after only 3 monhs". Look at AoC and WAR for prime examples.

And when I use the term "easy fix", I am not saying it's just write one line of code and then pop off to lunch. What i am saying is that there are solutions which are far easier to do from the beginning than the impact of trying to stabalize and optimize a game when you're already 6 months to 4 years into the games' life.

It's time developers stopped relying on the "it's like this with every game, blah, blah, blah.", and start planning stuff from the beginning. Most developers have gotten too damned used to "push it out and patch it later", rather than having a real plan of attack from the beginning. And yes, i will concede that publishers are a problem in this area. But developers can change that, as well.  A game which is ready to publish will find a publisher. A publisher unwilling to negotiate with the developers, if the developers will start standing together in terms of making the games ready first, will find themselves out of business. While publishers willing to let the developers make the game correctly will have business hand over fist.

And I also know that developers are making the games first and fremost to make money. What they need to understand is if they start making the games correctly from the beginning, they'll make a whole lot more money in the short term as well as the long term when they are having to only spend money for ongoing development, rather than to fix crap they should have fixed before launch while also having to develop content to keep the customers they have, as well as the money not only saved but earned by not having to worry about 20k beta testers on forums everywhere letting people know not to play the buggy POS.

great write up. love articles like this and can't wait till the next one.

Haha! Sanya's back! effin ay i miss the old days of the Grab Bag for DAoC. Back when the game wasn't killed by that infernal creation that blizzard released upon the world. DAMN YOU BLIZZARD!

Sanya, so... what was the reason ya left soon after EA acquired Mythic? it was too close togethor to not be noticeable XD You can tell me... i'll keep it a secret D:

Continue publishing articles and columns like this and less viral marketing for companies like SOE and this site may become relevant again.