Discussion: Dbl XP Weekend and Server Performance
By
Agent_X,
Posted on: 2008-02-06 19:48 in News, Events and Announcement Discussion
WOW
(And I mean that in more than one sense! 
)
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
Ok Freedomites and Virtuites, get in before the PL companies and Gold Farmers do and LOCK THEM OUT!!!
@MrsAlphaOne
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If you some how crash, get disconnected unintentionally while these lock outs are in effect. Will one have priority in the queue? I'd hate to be doing a RWZ or something and not be able to get back in.
Guess I'll have to resort to regular missions.
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If you some how crash, get disconnected unintentionally while these lock outs are in effect. Will one have priority in the queue? I'd hate to be doing a RWZ or something and not be able to get back in.
Guess I'll have to resort to regular missions.
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There is not a queue to enter a locked server. What will happen is the server will go grey and unavailable once it reaches a certain player count threshold. As people log off and the server player count falls below another threshold, it will then go back to being available and allowing log ins.
The threshold for locking the server is configurable on the fly without a server restart, so we will be watching and adjusting as necessary. I do want to reiterate that we hope to be able to accommodate everyone who wants to play. The work that has been done over the last months to build up to this point should pay off in that regard. But we won't really and truly know until everyone piles on and starts playing.
Lighthouse
Community Relations Manager
If you have a specific in game, account, tech or billing problem please contact our Customer Support team via The Knowledge Base "Ask A Question" page.
Makes me glad that my main toons are on Justice! 
@Radmind - Justice Server
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Ok Freedomites and Virtuites, get in before the PL companies and Gold Farmers do and LOCK THEM OUT!!!
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Good thing I'm home all day.
Wheeeee!
Next machinama - a tourism ad for Triumph! 
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With that in mind, we want to let you know that it may become necessary for us to lock servers should they reach player counts that result in a degradation in performance.
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Honestly? I hope this happens ... because then, that event can be pointed at the next time someone complains about dead servers, and asks for server mergers. And I say this despite the ract that:
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We want you to be aware of this; especially those who are planning on playing on the Freedom and Virtue servers.
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... Virtue is where the character I most want to play, happens to be: my level 43.7 Mastermind.
Speaking of which - time to go run a couple more Newspaper missions, and dribble some more pre-2XP progress into his pink bar. Stupid lack of 40-45 villain content ... *pout* ...
I seriously hope this doesn't actually happen. I'll be really miffed if what was supposed to be a fun weekend event turns into me not being able to play the only characters I care about, which are on my home server of Virtue.
I tend to play off-peak but still....*crosses fingers hopefully*
I play on Virtue and have all 12 slots full and I'm tired of listing them all here so NYAH!
Oh now I have to play on Double XP weekend just for the accident-waiting-to-happen factor! 
I'm confident in the expertise of the NC^2 crew to have made the new setup pretty robust, but as Lighthouse says, you just never know with these things until you do it.
My only characters are on Freedom (choice of the masses since 2005) so I guess if a lockout was in effect I'd have to go try out some other server and rapidly level up a hero. On a 2xXP weekend it wouldn't take long to do, and if I like them I could always transfer them to Freedom after the event.
It sounds like all is in readiness and the Devs await the onslaught with fire extinquishers in hand. Roll on 2xXP!
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With that in mind, we want to let you know that it may become necessary for us to lock servers should they reach player counts that result in a degradation in performance.
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Honestly? I hope this happens ... because then, that event can be pointed at the next time someone complains about dead servers, and asks for server mergers.
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What will you point to if the two busiest servers get greyed out (which is to be expected), yet the servers people complain about being dead still only have one light?
To be honest I am more worried about the consignment house server than the actual log on server. These past few weeks it has had the worst possible performance. It has gotten to the point where I dont even sell my salvage there unless I got stacks of ten because you practically have to fight it each transaction just to get it to go thru. You have to be extra specially cautions because of the server lag on it you sometimes will enter the price for the wrong item and by the wrong thing or sell something at the wrong price.
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Thank You Devs for Merits!!!!
Will we be able to see the character select screens on locked out servers? I'm thinking along the lines of, pay for a server switch so I can play my focus-toon on 2xpW and then switch back after the event.
Uhhhhh.... yeah. Can't say what I want to say, the long and abusive string of obscene epithets would violate forum rules. So I'll just say that if I get locked out of Virtue this weekend, I will be deeply angry. I mean truly enraged. Locking me out of the only server I can stand to play on during double-XP weekend would tick me off more than any MMO company has ticked me off since a long-ago incident involving Funcom and Anarchy Online, more than what Sony did to SWG ticked me off. No, really; it had better not come to this.
Edit: Speaking of server performance, though, whatever you guys did to the blue-side consignment house servers, it wasn't enough. They're still awfully sluggish, and unless Thursday's downtime is to address that, it will presumably be even worse this weekend.
Thanks for the heads up Lighthouse!
Any and all spelling, grammar and logic errors are intentional so this post will blend seamlessly into the Internet
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Unbelievable. You, [subject name here], must be the pride of [subject hometown here]!
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Uhhhhh.... yeah. Can't say what I want to say, the long and abusive string of obscene epithets would violate forum rules. So I'll just say that if I get locked out of Virtue this weekend, I will be deeply angry. I mean truly enraged. Locking me out of the only server I can stand to play on during double-XP weekend would tick me off more than any MMO company has ticked me off since a long-ago incident involving Funcom and Anarchy Online, more than what Sony did to SWG ticked me off. No, really; it had better not come to this.
Edit: Speaking of server performance, though, whatever you guys did to the blue-side consignment house servers, it wasn't enough. They're still awfully sluggish, and unless Thursday's downtime is to address that, it will presumably be even worse this weekend.
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Uh, what would you propose NCsoft do, exactly? Let performance go down the tubes for everyone on Virtue to save you getting deeply angry and truly enraged?
A server can only hold so many players simultaneously before performance drops. LH is giving us a heads-up that temporary server locks might happen. I don't think they will, myself, but I appreciate the notice. And if my preferred server got locked, I'd play on another or do something else for awhile. It's just not a big deal to me. I can't really understand getting upset about it.
So in other words Lighthouse your admitting that your server upgrades were not adequate.
Wow glad i play on a server that is not normally red on those weekends.
Servers have finite capacity, even upgraded servers. That's all. They don't know what kind of player load they'll see on the weekend so LH thought it might be prudent to warn players of possible server locks happening.
Ye gods, people are cynical.
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Will we be able to see the character select screens on locked out servers? I'm thinking along the lines of, pay for a server switch so I can play my focus-toon on 2xpW and then switch back after the event.
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Normally when a server is grayed out it becomes unaccesible you cant choose it at all. But since there is a character transfer option it wouldnt be a bad idea to let us at least get to the character options and buy a transfer.
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With that in mind, we want to let you know that it may become necessary for us to lock servers should they reach player counts that result in a degradation in performance.
[/ QUOTE ]
Honestly? I hope this happens ... because then, that event can be pointed at the next time someone complains about dead servers, and asks for server mergers.
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What will you point to if the two busiest servers get greyed out (which is to be expected), yet the servers people complain about being dead still only have one light?
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As for the lights? Same as I do now: "that's LOAD, not POPULATION."
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Will we be able to see the character select screens on locked out servers? I'm thinking along the lines of, pay for a server switch so I can play my focus-toon on 2xpW and then switch back after the event.
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Normally when a server is grayed out it becomes unaccesible you cant choose it at all. But since there is a character transfer option it wouldnt be a bad idea to let us at least get to the character options and buy a transfer.
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^^^ This is an excellent idea ^^^
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Uh, what would you propose NCsoft do, exactly? Let performance go down the tubes for everyone on Virtue to save you getting deeply angry and truly enraged?
A server can only hold so many players simultaneously before performance drops. LH is giving us a heads-up that temporary server locks might happen. I don't think they will, myself, but I appreciate the notice.
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How far "down the tubes" are we talking here? They just put in all-new server hardware, and subscriber numbers have been no better than stable since the last double-XP weekend. If they didn't lock servers, how bad could it get? It's not as if the zones themselves don't instance every so many players in, and it's not as if the back-end database servers didn't just get three years' worth of hardware upgrades all at once.
Lineage and Lineage II, both run by NCsoft, still have about a million customers each, according to the last data I saw. CoH and CoV have about 140,000. It's not as if NCsoft doesn't know how to manage the network and server load even if every subscriber logged in at once. Given how much money they're ploughing into it this year, given what they're obviously hoping the subscription numbers are going to be like in a year, this year's brand new servers had better be able to handle the kind of capacity we're going to see Saturday afternoon.
Otherwise, with no queuing, and no way to copy characters off once the server locks, what are they suggesting those of us who play on Virtue or Freedom do? Pay $10 per character we want to level on Thursday evening to move them over to some other server, then pay another $10 per character on Monday morning to move them back? Those are my choices? If I want to play 5 of my characters over the double-XP weekend, either give NCsoft another c-note in ransom, half of it up front, or hope that they're bluffing when they threaten to lock the servers?
Yeah, I don't think I'm being out of line being angry about this.
I'm usually a big supporter of the Devs but I have to say this kind of blows. All my main characters on Freedom. So if I get locked out... what does that mean? That the money of the people who didn't get locked out is better than my money? Someone else has more rights than me?
If I'm paying... I should be playing... end
they are not stopping your ability to make a new toon to play.
Does not always detect CoH
Please use this thread to discuss the below announcement:
Hi everyone,
I wanted to discuss with you the latest in our efforts to have the servers in tip top shape for this coming Double XP weekend. As we announced in the 2008 State of the Game, we recently made a considerable re-investment back into the game through upgrading our server hardware. The upgrade process has been completed and the servers are all running smoothly. On Thursday, February 7th, we will have an additional maintenance period (as announced here) to make some additional optimizations in preparation to turn on Double XP on Friday.
For those who havent been around for previous Double XP weekends, these events have great turn out a significant portion of our subscribers turn out to play, and they play for longer periods. The above improvements have been done in part to prepare the servers to handle the expected load. Ideally, we want everyone to be able to log into the server of their choice and have a great time playing the game. However, the servers still do have upper limits. We expect that we can accommodate more players than we have ever before, but if, for example, 10,000 players all decide that Freedom is the place to play, the server simply wouldnt be able to hold them all.
With that in mind, we want to let you know that it may become necessary for us to lock servers should they reach player counts that result in a degradation in performance. We will be watching the servers closely throughout the weekend and if gameplay starts to suffer because of load, we will lock them from additional players logging onto them. We want you to be aware of this; especially those who are planning on playing on the Freedom and Virtue servers. It may not become necessary - and we hope so with the improvements and work done.
Well keep you informed of the situation as the weekend progresses. As always, thanks for your continued support and patronage!
Lighthouse
Community Relations Manager
If you have a specific in game, account, tech or billing problem please contact our Customer Support team via The Knowledge Base "Ask A Question" page.