Zed38

THIS IS NOT A BUG REPORT. THIS IS A DISCUSSION THREAD. REFERENCE OP: ARK LEGACY: Prediction of he Slow Death of Servers. This DISCUSSION thread is a collection of my predictions for the recently posted decisions post-launch for Ark and the Legacy Server decisions. I will outline what I believe the short and long term effects will be for veteran players of Ark here. Quotes from the OP will be colored Red for clarity. Post your thoughts in a reply here. We’ve got important and exciting news to share! First of all, we’ve finally completed our game for the console disc retail submission! It was a very long and arduous process, our boss fight or so to say, and your feedback throughout this process has been highly valuable. It was a very tight deadline to make the ship date, and the team has been intensively grinding through singleplayer-oriented refinements for the posterity of the disc-based version. All that aside, we were able to resolve many issues, as well as considerably improve the game through various changes and implementation of new techniques and it’s now time to move onto refocus our development efforts on the live game, as well as address some key topics within the community: Having development work on the disc version is expected, but the game will still go through many, many patches over it's lifetime. There is no possibility that the disc will ship free of bugs and such. Console players will (like PC players do now), experience the same issues that have plagued the game. I forsee console players complaining about running out of hard disk space in short order, even if Ark is the only game installed. Essentially this means that since the game is being released on 3 different platforms, the teams will be split amongst these 3 platforms - ie: I predict there will be little to no change over the long term in terms of focus. Short term, there may be some focus work for specific platforms every so often as major problems crop up. Having a game released for 3 different platforms, and the apparent focus on development decisions to cater more towards console players in terms of QoL and ease of play, controls, other means that it is quite likely PC will (as with many multi-platform games) continue to receive the least amount of resources, while taking the brunt of first-patch pay-to-test (PC will get patches first, bug reports will be collected, then some fixes pushed out, after which the consoles will receive the partially fixed version). Since patch submission for consoles is more strict than PC this is understandable. I would imagine console sales will dominate PC sales as well, so financially this is also understandable. Will the Official Servers be wiping? Short answer: No -- but read the long answer! We had previously released a statement a year ago informing players that our Official Servers would not be wiping on the retail launch of the game. We’ve thought long and hard about the decision, taking into consideration the various points brought up by the community, the internal members of the team, as well as the general discussion that has taken place on the internet through various press/media outlets and will be sticking to our initial decision. It is clear that some group of players are for the wipe for, and some are against it, all for legitimate reasons; and we took it all into account. We ultimately decided that we would not wipe and we would rather pay the cost to launch an additional new PvP and PvE Server Cluster network (alongside but separate from the current PvP and PvE Legacy Cluster), where players will get to have a fresh experience on the ARK; across all four maps with no influence from any of the previous servers. At that time we'll be rolling out the new server code and infrastructure necessary to prevent critical issues such as server crashing exploits, duping, and DDoSing, so they will not affect the batch of new servers (as well as the legacy ones, going forward). Thank you for including in brackets that Legacy servers will also get updates. Notice the wording here "going forward". What I predict happening here is the reason why I chose the title of "slow death" for this post. Since the game price has jumped substantially, WCS only real option was to do exactly this - release a brand new cluster that is cut off from the Legacy servers. As everyone knows, a fresh uncluttered server will perform significantly better than those dirty old grungy legacy servers. WCS wants to maintain as good a performance level for the initial sales rush as possible. This will prevent most product refunds, and give newer players an equal footing to start out on. Don't mistake this for it being anything different than current servers however - within a few days you will have experienced players claiming the "best spots" on the new servers. By that time however the new people will have likely passed the refund window. Such is gaming these days. There is an extremely worrying wording in the above paragraph: "new... infrastructure... with no influence from any of the previous servers". To understand why this is a critical point of contention you first need to understand how cluster virtual machines (VMs) work for multi-server hosting. In a typical datacenter you will have groups of VMs running distributed across multiple physical machines. For example, PVE1 to 10 will be running on a cluster of VMs that is operating in Dallas, while PVEoc10-15 will be running in Sydney as an example. Inside these VMs are resources assigned to it based on the amount that WCS has agreed to pay for. This is called Provisioning. There may also be an optional Over-Provisioning for extra resources during peak times, or when some major event occurs (large war, or something). This provisioning covers connectivity bandwidth, cpu, memory, storage and a host of other optionals that may or may not be paid for. When WCS says that the new servers will be completely separate from the Legacy servers it could very well be that the VMs that run the new servers may exist on the same physical machines within the data centers, but that are separate and opaque to the legacy servers (essentially they cannot see eachother or interact in any way). Data center VM level infrastructure (often called Distributed Compute) is designed this way to allow multiple clients (Wildcard, others) to run their desired servers in tandem, while all sharing from a huge resource pool and Pay-For-Performance service model by the hosting providers (eg: Amazon Web Service, owner of the data center physical machines). Now that i've explained somewhat about this, I can now explain what my predictions are for "slow death of Legacy". Server performance is based on how much money WCS chooses to pay for whichever cluster in question needs. If WCS wanted to make official servers perform better, they simply would have to pay more money for the resources (to a point, game code also has a large influence in this). Quite often you will see OfficialServerX with 30 people online and a generally equivilant development and age to OfficialServerC with the same people online have vastly different performance levels. If you look closely, you can see where the server is actually being hosted. Odds are that the 2 servers are not located in the same area geographically, or perhaps simply not part of the same group of VMs (cluster) so they do not share the same level of resource pool. WCS, by their statement above appears to be giving more priority for the non-legacy servers. This makes sense financially, because paying for resources to upkeep those dingy Legacy servers is far more expensive than fresh shiny new serers that are still in Thatch Age. VM resources can be adjusted on the fly without restart, and it is transparent to those playing the game. What I predict happening here is that over a length of time, the Legacy servers will continue to be "resource pool starved", causing the performance to drop ever so slightly over time (the same way human food and water consumption is stealth nerfed by minute ammounts over months right now in Ark). This will cause players to leave the servers slowly over time, and leads to the next paragraph below... Our current set of Official Servers will be rebranded as “Legacy” and indicated as such on all platforms. We will also be taking steps to remove some of our ‘ghost town’ servers, where the player population has remained near-zero for an extended duration of time. We’ll take a look at the statistics and will be repurposing 10% of the lowest count servers across all platforms. Once we know which servers these are; we'll preserve the save files and upload them, so if you so wish to use them, you can. Players will also have time to move through Cross-ARK to a different secure Legacy server. Every three months we will be taking a review of the Legacy Officials to see what the numbers are like and may consider repurposing more ‘ghost towns’, however, the goal will be to preserve any place with human activity. By starving the costly old dirty legacy servers, they push more and more of them towards the arbitrary "10%" mark. As the servers reach this mark, they will decomission them. Some of the old players will move to other servers, many will not and simply stop playing ark. In either case, it is financially prudent to do this. Older players already paid for the game, and are significantly needier in terms of support tickets as well as cost of VM resources to operate their server's mega-lag-bases. I don't fault this, its really the only way they can proceed. Supported further by the comment about revisiting and culling the botton 10%ers every 3 months or so. What I predict here is that when new players join Ark for the first time, you can be assured that the servers listed nearer the top of their server listing will absolutely be the Non-Legacy servers. In fact, it could be that the Legacy servers simply do not show up for new players at all, that they would have to keyword search for them to find them (if they can join them at all, who knows). Of course, WCS wants to promote their shiny new servers to the newbies. That's not the issue. The issue will be lack of fresh blood to keep Legacy servers populated. What new player - given the choice between a shiny new ferrari, and a crappy dirty pinto with keymarks spelling "Pillared lel" scratched all over it would in their right mind choose to join the "pinto" server? It doesnt take a stretch of logic to know the answer to this. Legacy will have their old time players. Those players will slowly stop playing. No new players will join the legacy servers. Legacy servers will regularily be purged due to low population. This cycle will be repeated again in the future I assume, with the current Legacy servers being a long distant memory, and the new legacy servers being the servers that are opening up in August on retail launch. The rest of the dev post is irrelevant to this DISCUSSION. The TLDR Prediction is: Legacy servers will be purposely resource starved, to cause and causing player exodus and new players will join new servers, causing Legacy servers to be culled over time due to low population. Long term vets should be prepared with an exit strategy for when their Legacy server is designated for culling.