Originally posted by Warjin

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/23/the-old-republics-daniel-erickson-talks-legacy-system-update-group-finder-and-adaptive-gear/

 

 

PCG: Will they be cross-server at launch? Is that planned for the future?

DE: They will not be cross-server as we are coming up on a huge move to servers with massively higher population caps than we have today.

 A huge move to servers with massively higher population caps = Massive server merges incoming. The new servers will probably be more powerful but it's mostly too little population to warrant the huge amount of servers. The only question is if they'll be cutting the number of server by more or less than 10. If the population estimates are correct and the servers can indeed handle a lot more players then maybe they'd be able to run things on just a handfull of players, ermmm, I mean servers.

Originally posted by thamighty213

Originally posted by Wicoa

Under any other name this is just server merger's.  The hero engine cannot handle more than a few people in the same zone let alone 1000s on a mega server.

Nor can the cryengine but AIon pulled it off,  nor can the unreal engine but DCUO pulled it off.

 

Think of a game engine in the same manner as a car engine.

 

Give a stock Ford Focus engine to me and it would remain a stock engine give it to the Focus rally team and it becomes a 400BHP+ monster with the only thing original of it being the block.

Perhaps but my experience with the swtor one is not good and I would hardly call them a rally team of tweaker's more like a bangers smash up last alive wins.

Originally posted by thamighty213

Originally posted by Wicoa

Under any other name this is just server merger's.  The hero engine cannot handle more than a few people in the same zone let alone 1000s on a mega server.

Nor can the cryengine but AIon pulled it off,  nor can the unreal engine but DCUO pulled it off.

 

Think of a game engine in the same manner as a car engine.

 

Give a stock Ford Focus engine to me and it would remain a stock engine give it to the Focus rally team and it becomes a 400BHP+ monster with the only thing original of it being the block.

Nice analogy. I'm not faulting Hero at all. I know TOR took the engine as their own long before Hero had the engine any where near ready. For TOR the engine is Hero by name only. I don't have a clue what TOR did to that engine and I don't think they do either. It's like all they had was the Focus engine's block and tried adding only after market parts to complete the engine and no one knows how to set the timing. It hasn't been hitting on all cylinders at all and I'm stopping way short from blaming the engine before looking for operator error.

Originally posted by thamighty213

Originally posted by Wicoa

Under any other name this is just server merger's.  The hero engine cannot handle more than a few people in the same zone let alone 1000s on a mega server.

Nor can the cryengine but AIon pulled it off,  nor can the unreal engine but DCUO pulled it off.

 

Think of a game engine in the same manner as a car engine.

 

Give a stock Ford Focus engine to me and it would remain a stock engine give it to the Focus rally team and it becomes a 400BHP+ monster with the only thing original of it being the block.

Although I do not have the programming knowledge to address the veracity of this statement, I can assure you theres no way I would let the swtor team anywhere near the engine of my truck.

It just seemed to me as I leveled in swtor that many of the design decisions must have been made to accomodate the limitations of the sorta hero engine.  I wouldnt expect the engine to thrive in a heavily populated server, but I could be wrong. By eliminating Ilum, at least they got rid of the open world pvp which we know it couldnt handle. Just the thought of a truly massive battle in Ilum lags my whole block. I would guess if the engine could handle massive, the game would be more massive

Originally posted by seldomseen13

Originally posted by thamighty213

Originally posted by Wicoa

Under any other name this is just server merger's.  The hero engine cannot handle more than a few people in the same zone let alone 1000s on a mega server.

Nor can the cryengine but AIon pulled it off,  nor can the unreal engine but DCUO pulled it off.

 

Think of a game engine in the same manner as a car engine.

 

Give a stock Ford Focus engine to me and it would remain a stock engine give it to the Focus rally team and it becomes a 400BHP+ monster with the only thing original of it being the block.

Although I do not have the programming knowledge to address the veracity of this statement, I can assure you theres no way I would let the swtor team anywhere near the engine of my truck.

 

It just seemed to me as I leveled in swtor that many of the design decisions must have been made to accomodate the limitations of the sorta hero engine.  I wouldnt expect the engine to thrive in a heavily populated server, but I could be wrong. By eliminating Ilum, at least they got rid of the open world pvp which we know it couldnt handle. Just the thought of a truly massive battle in Ilum lags my whole block. I would guess if the engine could handle massive, the game would be more massive

It isnt always the engine at fault though,    It could be a poor art decision at the core of it.

I'll provide an example from a game I worked on,  we struggled to get more than 50 players on screen without massive performance hits,  this didnt really have much to do with the engine but rather with the art directors decision to have 13000 poly's in our models (thats 4.5 x the amount of a WOW character to give you some context.

If anything the simple fact our programmers then could limit the engine to only show 50 on screen was a great help.

I don't disagree that the Hero engine wasnt a great decision though I'm not convinced that building the most expensive game in history was a wise decision on a unproven engine which NO developers within the company had any experience of.

Not a TOR fanboi far from it I havent logged in days but I can certainly say some strides have been made to make it perform considerably better,  My i7 740QM 8GB Ram GTX 460m laptop no longer crawls to a standstill on fleet can run everything on high now whereas previously it crawled to sub 10 FPS in fleet.

At the moment its single biggest issue is population and I play on The Red Eclipse the 2nd busiest EU server,   end game pop is fine but good luck getting groups for leveling Flashpoints.

This may not even be a population issue SWTOR just does a horrible job of congesting the population so you could have the 4 guys you need for a flashpoint but 1s on his ship,  1 on that planet, 1 on fleet, 1 collecting datacrons,  and with zero means to communicate.

Originally posted by NorseGod

Originally posted by Gorilla

Am I the only EA sceptic here that thinks that this is a really cunning way to put a positive spin on server merges?

I guess I may not be as I did not read the whole thread having only a passing interest in SWTOR nowadays.

It's worth checking out the posts.

Done I'm tiring of D3 so thought I'd waste some time. there was I thinking I was 'special', apparently not. :)

it's a catch 22. With optimization and engine performance where it is, mega-servers will lead to mega-lag. It's terrible but it's unfortunately true.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=427878 

Originally posted by Greyhooff

SWTOR "super server" = SWTOR normal server + more than 10 people actually playing.

Oh, I get it! You do not like SW:TOR so you speculate wildly to make your point.

Originally posted by Mixxathon

Originally posted by Greyhooff

SWTOR "super server" = SWTOR normal server + more than 10 people actually playing.

 

Oh, I get it! You do not like SW:TOR so you speculate wildly to make your point.

 

Or perhaps you should realise all this talk of "mega servers" is nothing more than PR spin to avoid having to say what it really is: "mega server merges".

[mod edit]

Originally posted by Chrisbox

Agreed, if they can do this it will save the game.

Only thing that will save this game is if they add in some "mega-content" along with the Mega-Servers" :)

Im afraid noone of you grasps exactly how this whole thing developed.

See we all thought EA fired those 200 people working on SWTOR, but thats not what they did, they actually got sold(wether to other devhouses or illegal organ trader rings in turkey is unknown at this point). And from the profit they bought brand new technology, the stuff of dreams like dual core CPUs etc. Also developing games is like sailing a ship over the ocean, by firering(selling!) all those people on the "ship", and thus getting rid of ballast, they are actually picking up speed! So expect content and new technologies to come ever faster, BW and EA are truly at the cutting edge of technology with SWTOR. As a small peak into the future i can share with you that they are already working on ULTRA Servers behind the scenes. Ah what an advanced world we are living in.

Originally posted by ignore_me

it's a catch 22. With optimization and engine performance where it is, mega-servers will lead to mega-lag. It's terrible but it's unfortunately true.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=427878 

 There are sooooo many servers that don't ever get above light load these days that they could easily cut the number of servers by 5 and still not get above very heavy load. The mega server thing is most likely only PR-spin to try to cover up the fact that population is dropping fast for those that prefer to believe that. It seems to be the new PR speak, with improved server technology we can reduce the number of servers!

The new servers won't be a lot more mega than the current ones. They will try not to direct more players towards the new servers than they can handle on those servers. The lag shouldn't be worse than it is now on the few current servers that still have a healthy population. It should be a good thing for the people playing on nearly empty servers though. Nobody likes to pay monthly for an empty online game.

I didn't realise that there were enough players to warrant a super server:/

Originally posted by Scummyman

I didn't realise that there were enough players to warrant a super server:/

You do know Swtor is still the second largest sub based MMO in the World right?

1. WoW with 10.3ish

2. Swtor with 1.3ish (2 would of been Aion Global but now it's free to play and most of those subs were in Asia)

http://www.mmodata.net/ Proof.

People act as if Swtor is on the same bracket as the other MMO's, it's not it's in the big leagues when it comes to MMO subs, so in other words unless you are playing WoW, Swtor still out subs any other MMO in the World by a country mile.

Originally posted by Warjin

You do know Swtor is still the second largest sub based MMO in the World right?

ok now name me another MMORPG that LOST over 1 million subs after 5 months after release...

go on...name one.

I can...SWTOR.

2.4 million units sold, 1.3 million subs retained with a 30 free day offer...

Originally posted by jtcgs

Originally posted by Warjin

You do know Swtor is still the second largest sub based MMO in the World right?

ok now name me another MMORPG that LOST over 1 million subs after 5 months after release...

go on...name one.

I can...SWTOR.

2.4 million units sold, 1.3 million subs retained with a 30 free day offer...

Lol name me any other sub based MMO that even HAD a million subs other then WoW?

They only had 1.7 subs now down to 1.3, yes they sold 2.4 units and by sold that could mean small stores that payed for many copies of Swtor but havn't resold or gold farmers that do buy more then one copy incase one gets ban, to tell you the truth I really don't know, but what I do know is they only had 1.7 active subs at any given time.

Wow, they have over 1 milion subs for SWTOR, really good indeed!

/Z

Originally posted by Scummyman

I didn't realise that there were enough players to warrant a super server:/

Guess if you have huge egos and can't admit the truth you invent something up, like Mega servers. All the dead servers they have, this is just what it is, a server merge. PR spin to save face as they close down dozens and dozens of servers. Helps them feel better when they're left with just a few servers of people, I guess. No one is fooled by this except those poor die hard SWTOR fans left.

Originally posted by Warjin

Originally posted by Scummyman

I didn't realise that there were enough players to warrant a super server:/

You do know Swtor is still the second largest sub based MMO in the World right?

1. WoW with 10.3ish

2. Swtor with 1.3ish (2 would of been Aion Global but now it's free to play and most of those subs were in Asia)

http://www.mmodata.net/ Proof.

People act as if Swtor is on the same bracket as the other MMO's, it's not it's in the big leagues when it comes to MMO subs, so in other words unless you are playing WoW, Swtor still out subs any other MMO in the World by a country mile.

 

WoW have more than 10.3 mill of sub with the Asian Market, dont know how many subs they have in the west but probably less than 3 mill or so. Swtor is not even in the asia market yet.