There is a difference between seeing content and getting gear. The reason 40 mans could be considered bad is because not everyone had the ability to raid. So your missing a crucial in some cases game play style. Now look at how WoW has delt with their raids, they added LFR. Now everyone who is anyone can "raid" albeit dumbed down, everyone can experience these dungeons that have big boss encounters.
Now if WoW still had 40 man raids and they were "hardcore" raids and there was a 10 or 20 man version of these raids for the "non-hardcore" players then that should be fine. Everyone gets to see the content because the only thing that changes is difficulty and maybe rewards. But we dont play games for rewards do we?
What are these alternatives?
Vanilla WoW wasn't raid or die because there weren't other alternative things to do, in fact there was probably too much to do given the newness of the game, running dungeons, battlegrounds, grinding gold to buy an epic mount (1000g was a lot back then). The problem was these things were all inferior to raiding, so people were forced to raid. The way WoW solve that problem was to offer separate PvP and PvE gearing paths, and allowed everyone to see the raid content in easier modes.
Unless Wildstar offers alternative routes to the best items (e.g. PvP and PvE), as opposed to just additional endgame content, then it will have the same problem: people being forced into 40 man raids in order to progress, and being introduced to the logistical nightmare that is 40 man raiding, which will be made worse by the fact that most people aren't that good at the game. And unless there's a easy mode, it's developers will be spending, say, 60% of their efforts on content that 5% of their players will ever see.
If there are alternative endgame content, that would at least be a start, because it seems that new MMOs focus too much on leveling content as opposed to endgame content (e.g SWTOR). Or least that's where they're PR campaign is focused on. But leveling content is transient and mostly inconsequential. So I look forward to hearing this alternative endgame content Wildstar has.
Last edited by paralleluniverse; 2013-04-12 at 06:12 PM.
Different sizes of raids, small group content, real solo content, new group PvP content (warplots), personal housing that is more than just a cosmetic whoopdie do and actually progresses your character, etc.
It's too early to discuss how each particular avenue will reward your progression, but we all know gear is king. It sounds like you will be able to get plenty of gear without having to raid, but it really remains to be seen. However, stating that 40 man raids is instant failure is ignorant of their intentions and features already detailed/demonstrated.
False. It was exactly that. You did things in a progression, once you got to raiding your progression stopped. We're talking about content, so let's be clear. Farming gold is not content. PvP and PvE are separated forms of content.
So really you had dungeons -> raids. Then nothing else.
Last edited by Kelimbror; 2013-04-12 at 06:11 PM.
BAD WOLF
The larger problem with how wow did 40 mans even more than putting them together in the first place was the way gearing was structured. You had to do things in a certain order to get gear to move one. Which sounds ok but what ended up happening is in highly progressed guilds would lose people sometimes due to burnout, life changes, whatever. To replace those people they would either have to find people who were as progressed already or people who were geared up enough to jump from their gear to a larger guild. The end result were lots of guilds that would work really hard to gear their people and move on to new content, only to have those people leave to join larger more progressed guilds. That part of it was a bad system.
My understanding is that the content of the raids in the different sizes will actually be different. I don't know if they have said that for sure yet, and beta is just starting after all so many thing can still change.
Actually, WoW continued to grow throughout all of classic, so it may very well have been sustainable. Is the model they have now more accessible and better for reaching a broader audience? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that the 40 man raid concept can't be successful or sustainable in the longrun.
And you seem to be arguing "If WoW stopped doing it, it must be bad." which implies that WoW should be drawn from heavily if you want success. That just leads to more WoW clones which people complain about and talk shit about.
So is their "real" (whatever that means) solo content and small group content going to reward items on par with 40 man raids? Presumably not, it's just part of progression. Like "dungeons -> raids", which as you said doesn't fix raid or die. What happens when you've done the solo and small group content? Does this content run parallel to raid and PvP content? By that I mean, every raid tier, PvP season, and small group content tier is introduced at the same time with corresponding rewards. If not, it's just progression, people end up required to do 40 man raids.
Now, there may be some hope that PvP will offer an alternative path with rewards that are on par with the 40 man raids. That's the standard that is expected. Even so, that doesn't fix the core problems with 40 man raid that led to it being cut from WoW for good reason, the logistical issues, the guild poaching, the inaccessibility of such a large amount of game content.
Also, your claim that my statement is false makes no sense. I suggest you read it again, because your "counterargument" is basically agreeing with me: there was other content to do, but it didn't matter.
Presumably...there's a definite word.
I suggest you read both your own words and mine again. There was no other content to do in the same realm (PvE). Farming is not content. You had dungeons and raids. There was no other content as you claim.
Blizzard chose to 'solve' their problem by adding an automatically formed, watered down version of the same content for progression. It doesn't matter what levels the gear takes you to to be honest as it allows you to continuously make your character stronger.
The other solution is to provide alternate avenues of accomplishing the same thing. Wildstar has expressed that is what it will do, but we will see whether the rewards merit comparison.
BAD WOLF
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/03...w-and-housing/
Not only does it seem to take Rift's dimension features and one up them in terms of accessibility and aesthetic, but you will be able to actually give yourself things to do on your property. Everything from creating crafting tables, gathering plots like farms and mines, but also things that open up quests/dailies to be completed based on how you tailor your property.
Additionally, you can make it public so that others can join you in the fun and even have your friends be able to 'tend' you property gaining rewards for both of you. It's honestly one of the coolest things to learn about for this game.
BAD WOLF
Well we can't know the counter-factual, but given that you admit that what WoW is currently doing increases accessibility, it seems we would agree that WoW could have had more subscribers.
I believe that almost everything that WoW has stopped doing, they have stopped doing for the right reasons. So I'm not impressed when MMOs repeat what's been tried and failed in WoW.
But that does NOT mean that everything needs to be a WoW clone. There's plenty of room to innovate where WoW hasn't touched. For example, dynamic zone events in GW2 or active ability dodging or alternative character progression systems.
There's also room to innovate where WoW has stopped doing X for reason Y, but reason Y doesn't apply to the new game. For example, WoW stopped doing talent trees because they're easily solved for optimal DPS, then they're copied. If a serious MMO like Wildstar did talent trees, they would be taking a failed design. But if a casual and easy MMO copied talent trees, that's fine because the content is so easy that optimal DPS doesn't matter.
Rift has talent trees, and they're phenomenal, so do many other games (Champions Online added them in and they're actually pretty good). Talent tree's are fine, Blizzard just wants to remove as many choices as possible to prevent people from fucking up (see D3's lack of meaningful choice with character progression) so that people don't get upset with the game. It's all part of the "broad appeal" direction.
And you know what? I'm perfectly happy with a game going for a more niche audience than trying to be mainstream and hit it big. In fact, I prefer that. I'll take TL2 or PoE over D3 any day. I'll take CS 1.x or Tribes over CoD any day.
More accessible =/= more subscribers.
Can you show us some sort of proof that anything 'failed'. You're just throwing the word around. I wager many people from Blizzard wouldn't consider many things they moved on from to be failure, but that moving to different ideas is adapting to the changes in the market on top of wanting to continually modify their game.
I guess everything we improve is instantly a failure when something better is made.
BAD WOLF
The reason why talent trees were removed was not because people got upset when they picked the wrong talents (when's the last time you saw someone get upset over their own talent choices?), it's because the fact that there were bad choices and good choices means that there's a correct choice. Basically what I said. There's a thousand word GC post about it.
The point remains, I would not be impressed if Wildstar were to copied this failed "customization" experiment, which we now have moved beyond.
There's still plenty of room to be innovative and different from WoW. The Wildstar housing video linked above is another good example.
Last edited by paralleluniverse; 2013-04-12 at 07:17 PM.
From: http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/ne...ut_servers.php
LET'S TALK ABOUT SERVERS!
By Loic "Atreid" Claveau - April 12, 2013
Hello, my name is David Ray and I am the Lead Network & Database Engineer here at Carbine Studios. A mini-bio for me is that I’ve been in the game industry for the last 19 years, having worked for some major studios such as Dynamix, Interplay, Activision, and Blizzard prior to starting at Carbine nearly 5 years ago. Prior to entering the game industry, I worked in aerospace (on the space shuttle project) and the cellular industry (working on bringing internet to cell phones).
A post was pointed out to me over on Wildstar-Central today with user “Mizpah” asking about how MMO servers work. I thought it may be nice to give you all a general overview. Obviously I’ll need to be vague about certain things, due to proprietary design, but this should serve to give you a basic idea of how things work.
Before we begin, some quick definitions for the less techy amongst us:
Daemon: In multitasking computer operating systems, a daemon (pron.: /ˈdeɪmən/ or /ˈdiːmən/) is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user. (I stole this definition from Wikipedia.)
Realm: A collection of WildStar servers that collectively represent a full planet of the game. Each realm effectively represents its own planet, even though all of the realms are effectively identical. Some realms will have special rules that apply only to them, like PVP. In other MMO’s this is sometimes called “Server” or “Shard” or a wide variety of other names that all means the same thing.
SERVER ARCHITECTURE
Our server architecture is currently made up of 11 daemons running across several server machines. For some of our daemons, there’s only one per region (i.e. country), where others there are dozens, or maybe even hundreds, per realm.
When you connect to play our game you first connect to our “Auth Daemon” (auth is short for authentication), this is the process that accepts your username and password and decides if you’re allowed to play. Authentication information is always kept secure, even in our databases. Once the daemon has decided that you’re allowed to play, it fetches your security permissions. Based on your permissions it will present you with a list of realms you are allowed to play on. Once you select a realm, you will be handed off to other sets of daemons, and the Auth Daemon is fundamentally “done” with you.
After that you connect to a “User Daemon”. This daemon is responsible for keeping track of you as a playing entity, it tracks all of your character data, including but not limited to; character stats, inventory items, quest progress, and pretty much anything else from within the game. There is one of these daemons per realm. This daemon also handles the character creation process. You stay connected with the user server for the entirety of the time you are playing.
Once you have selected or created a character, the “User Daemon” will then also connect you to a “World Daemon”. This daemon may have already been running, or in the case of instances it can be launched just for you and/or your group. This daemon is responsible for the bulk of what people would consider gameplay. It handles all the creatures and their AI, the loot that is dropped, any combat and spells cast by players or creatures, pretty much everything else that is “game” happens here. Whenever something changes about the players, the World Daemon reports it back to the User Daemon to record it in our databases.
That is pretty much the fundamentals of how the game works. All in all we have 11 daemons currently. I’m not going to go into detail about each of them, but they all have specialized tasks, one of the daemons only job is to figure out what machine each of the other daemons runs on based on CPU and memory load. And that’s really important, because of the way we have broken up our daemons, it should allow us to add more hardware to handle additional load whenever we need it. If we want more players on a realm, we can add more server machines to run more World Daemons.
SOME Q&A
And now let me answer some of the specific questions that were asked in the thread from Wildstar Central:
- What might the split be between worker infrastructure and storage look like ? How many server components and services are involved ? chat, login, federation, logic etc.
This is too big of a question to answer fully, but some details.
Our storage is MS SQL Server. We have a “few” realms per SQL server, this is one of our scalable components.
Chat can be handled on one to three of the daemons. If it’s a direct message from one player to another, then it can just be handled on the user daemon. If the chat is a say or a yell, it needs to go through the world daemon to figure out who is in the area to “hear” it. And then if the chat message is for a user who’s not…. Well I’ll leave that feature for a later announcement.
- Where are the most likely bottlenecks - db access?
The database is where we’re expecting our bottlenecks to be. But a lot of our daemons were written with scalability in mind, so if we find out bottlenecks are indeed the database we can rebalance that load and add more database servers with relative ease.
- What db techs might be relevant ?
As mentioned above, we use MS SQL server.
- I would love to see a topology of a 'real world' mmo server infrastructure and an article that covers a deep dive't this is what's going on'.
Well, you got what you asked for, at least the high level view above. If you want more details about what the other 9 daemons are, we do have an open network programmer position on our jobs page.
- I am also interested in how much innovation has impacted the mmo space sever and datacentre side in the last 5 years. If it follows the trends in the enterprise data centre, then the scalability and, provisioning and burst variations should have helped a lot...
Oh, lots of things have changed since I worked on my first MMO. The biggest in my opinion is the fact that all of our servers are running 64-bit now. It was a pain staying under 2 GB back in the day. Also, CPUs and hard drives are unbelievably faster than back then. I’m an old timer, when I first got into the game industry we were targeting 16Mhz-33Mhz machines with 1-4 MB of RAM, and distributing on floppy disks. So yeah, things have changed.
Thanks so much to David for taking the time to talk about servers. Do you have an idea for a cool blog post you'd like to see here in the future? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or one of our many fansite communities!
Last edited by SirRobin; 2013-04-12 at 07:26 PM.
Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot.
Who had nearly fought the Dragon of Angnor.
Who had almost stood up to the vicious Chicken of Bristol.
And who had personally wet himself, at the Battle of Badon Hill.
It's not that people were upset about the choices they made, it was people upset about not being able to play the way they want to because the optimal things were hugely more optimal than the other options. People were forced into making the same choices as everyone else because if they didn't they were doing it wrong.