Going Worldwide - Regional Servers & Localization
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@prometheus said in Going Worldwide - Regional Servers & Localization:
You'll be able to play on multiple servers if you want(...) You can play on two different servers, if that's what you're asking (...) The horizontal progression of Fractured makes that much more doable - no "new character to grind to level 70" in the "other server".
Does playing another server use a 'character slot' (global amount), or are 'character slots' per server?
All in all, a decent compromise, I'd say, depending on where the line of 'enough players' is drawn and how bad latency really played out in Fractured.
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i understand regional servers as long people can chose to play in usa or eu withouth limitations
or mirror-centralize the database and allow people to log in all servers and have their char/bank there even if their main assets (house-guild are in a specific one) like gloria victis did
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@vortech said in Going Worldwide - Regional Servers & Localization:
I can't imagine your network middleware doesn't have the functionality to utilize a distributed edge model to reduce latency? Albion did it with Unity and Photon, I'm surprised SpatialOS cannot.
A distributed model can be useful and it's something we can implement in the future for parts of gameplay that don't require direct interaction with other players - otherwise it doesn't work.
Albion used to host the game in two datacenters, one in the EU and one in the US. I don't remember how it used to work exactly, I think it would pass control of a region of the world to the EU server if the majority of players in the region were from EU, and the other way round. A weird solution which was the source of many issues - they dropped it long ago.
Since 2016 the whole game is hosted in a single datacenter - located in Washington DC (US East - obvious choice), if I'm not wrong. If you connect from the EU, you get a 100ms ping if you're lucky, no way around that. Which is fine for Albion, because they did a very good optimization job (they have good engineers!) and because the gameplay (combat) allows it. The combat of Fractured is not the combat of Albion. I understand it might look similar at a glance - but really it's not.
@basileus said in Going Worldwide - Regional Servers & Localization:
RIP the idea of a single shard. EVE Online does it perfectly and it stops people from 'hiding' away on empty servers. Dividing the small player base of an indie game from the start is just going to lead to a lot of dead servers (not to mention the costs of running multiple servers at once). After all, what's the point of fighting over territory when if you lose, you could just switch servers? I would rather have 220 ping to one server where everyone plays than 10 ping to an empty one.
I'm sure you understand the difference between EVE gameplay (combat in particular) and that of an Action RPG. You can't just say "it works there, it must work here". I wish thing were so easy myself, trust me.
@basileus said in Going Worldwide - Regional Servers & Localization:
You don't plan a game to be big from the start, you always plan for it to be small, and grow it from there
This statement could be very shortsighted and be the cause of several issues in some cases, but let's not get into the topic eheh. It's a good statement regarding userbase - and that is why we explicitly specified we're going to start with a single US East server until the NA/SA/EU userbase is large enough to sustain two servers. Maybe you missed that part of the update!
@logain said in Going Worldwide - Regional Servers & Localization:
Does playing another server use a 'character slot' (global amount), or are 'character slots' per server?
Global, like skins, premium currency, etc. Would be terrible to ask you to buy premium multiple times on different servers!
I've edited the post making the bit regarding Alpha more obvious and adding some more info.
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Happy to see this. Ping is something that is a must to keep in mind.
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damn it... not one mega server.
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Please do NOT prevent American and European players from playing with each other!
There are large gaming communities out there with people form both sides who get disappointed over and over again by that forced separation.
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Agreed. Forced localisation is a very bad thing.
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I think it will mainly be an issue to get rid of long time lags due to e.g. European servers, were Australian players are connected^^
So that everybody has the chance to join a server close to his location but still has the option to join another server with players he know, as mentioned before
Thank you for all the Information, it is interesting, where the servers are located.
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i can help with locolaztion for hebrew if you are intersted (despite the fact that you don;t plan to....)
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@prometheus There's good ones? Welp ... never have seen them, might be nice to have a good one translated the most stuff. Atleast for the most used languages.
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I really like the idea getting an EU Server.
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Hi,
Is it possible to join the translation team? I'm from Poland and I think I might be helpful.
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From a professional perspective, I'll be very interested to see how server stand-up, teardown, and migration play out during testing.
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@Prometheus How is playing on NA + EU possible if I may ask? Since, in one of your replies you said "You'll be able to play in NA + EU at the same time." Can you elaborate more on that, please?
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Server in Brazil!!! Very nice
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I'm really iffy on this. I hope it doesn't end up too separated. I'd hate to wind up being unable to play with friends.
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tech exist that the character and all unlocks are separate from the game world so that the character can transfer if needed. Whether Fractured uses it is another story. I'll say that they can do multiple servers if they need but I doubt they'll do that from the beginning. I don't them wasting the funding to host multiple servers while in Alpha - Beta.
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@Prometheus here are some resources from David Salz the CTO of SBI:
Secrets of Albion Online, Part 1
Secrets of Albion Online, Part 2
David Salz's Presentations (Slideshare)
Maybe there's something helpful there.
From experience, there's nothing all that bad about 100ms latency in a third person action game like AO. If there are issues with the design of Fractured due to latency and they cause this fragmentation of the community.. then I am worried and hope you revisit this decision. Larger MMO with less niche mechanics do not survive regional servers, do you really believe a full loot game like this will?
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@prometheus Great, great idea. Here in Aus there may not be enough players to fill a server - I hope there will be! - but I'll sacrifice some latency for community and lively servers. That said, World of Warcraft west coast US server from here bounces between 20ms and 150ms latency.
I've never played an online game that relies on low latency. How will the above latency affect game play?
