I16 Closed Beta

The bolded part is how to interpret Castle's statement. The code that was supposed to block non-I16 beta testers isn't working so they took the servers down to make it work.

When you say "it was always working as intended", are you referring to a specific Dev quote or just your own guess?

Nope. But starting your reply like that is certainly going to help me to listen to you, yup. *nods sagely*
Not all of us use friends lists and global channels, and not all of us are part of the "clique" or "community" as a whole. A good portion of the Virtue "Community" I don't associate with, as a matter of fact.

To quote my former boss, "That sounds like a personal problem". NC put things in place to help you remedy that situation, cross-server global chat, and character transfers (only 9.99 a pop).

Go try to RP in CO, and see how well that works out for you. They can't form a cohesive RP community because there's one massive server and tons of constantly changing never-defined instances. Many suggestions have been offered to "fix" it and still go with their rediculous "serverless" environment but have been met with deaf-ears, so we intend to meet them (or at least I and my friends do) with no purchases.

NC has a chance to maintain something unique, and something to differentiate it from "the other game" besides just being there first, and better. Hopefully they'll see that and stick to it.

I applaud your ability to argue, I disagree, and should I see evidence to actually support the gaming going serverless, I'll start a massive petition campaign to get it changed, that's my right as a citizen of the community. it's also within the Dev/company's rights to ignore that, and then within my rights to go elsewhere. There'a a LOT of games on the horizon, and at least 2-3 of them are comic book Superhero games...

The only way to pull off a "Single Shard" game. Severless if you will. Is to create instances. You know how Atlas spilts into AP1, AP2, AP3, etc?

Right. Picture that for every zone. Only instead of 1/2/3 We're talking 14/15/16. For the unpopulated zones. Zones would have to max out at around 30 people per instance, at best.

PUG? Not really gonna happen. Good luck trying to get all your guys into the same instance too.

Why do I suggest this doomsday scenario? Because it's really the only way to pull it off. And it's the only way I've ever SEEN it pulled off. Because we have... what? 12 severs? You realize those are actual machines? Each one. To "merge" them... well. You can't stick them together like Voltron. You'd have to move all the data onto ONE sever. And this server now has to be strong enough to handle 12 times what it was before.

It's... it's just a mess.

Plus, if they do that. No way they'll ever drop the war walls. You can't do open world + one sever.

I'm sure WoW could have only one sever if they felt like it. But they'd have to start instancing everything.

Lastly... With only one sever. If it goes down, we ALL go down. There's no backup to jump to.

Having seen the One Sever games… It would really murder some cliques

Alright, you got me there. Are you blind?

Okay, not blind and apparently able to reason as well. If you are currently able to engage in a community while simultaneously ignoring other communities, why are you afraid something bad will happen to your community if there are more communities to simply ignore?

Those are available and have been used. Serverless would be better still.

I'd rather stay here, thank you. Global channels and global friends should allow for thriving communities.

I am not sure why this would be an issue in CoH. It should be easy enough to use global channels to meet up and role-play and game-play with your community.

I am not sure what is unique about game Servers. All they do is fracture a community (which is their intent, for stability and performance purposes). There should now be ways to maintain stability and performance without chopping your players up into forced communities, instead allowing them to form their own communities.

I don't have a specific quote, but it's not just speculation. At one point one of the devs came out and said something along the lines of:

We don't really like it, but there isn't anything at the moment we can do about it. It's how it was designed.

which says, while it's not well liked, it is working as intended. Bugs are unintentional side effects, not how it was designed.

thus, not a bug.

edit: clarity

This would be a non-issue, IME, especially with global channels already in game we can all use to communicate.

I do not know tons about publishing and maintaining game servers for a huge game like this. I would however be astounded if each server was A machine. Each server must be a massive series of machines as is, but maybe I am wrong.

The short of it is, I don't agree if that's the approach they intend to take. SDragon above layed it all out fairly well, community-issues aside.

When this game was formed, Virtue was the "unofficial RP server" (because Cryptic didn't want to name an official one, because it would simply attract griefers, and they weren't willing to commit the specialized staff it would take to deal with and maintain a "real" RP only server. OK, I undestand that. But it's always been an unspoken, unwritten rule that Virtue IS the RP server for CoH, if they want to go to a Serverless archetecture, and leave us out of it (since the rest of the populations of the servers except Freedom MIGHT actually equal the Virtue population) that'd be fine with me. Or if if the individual servers could vote on their inclusion/exclusion, that'd also be fair. The short answer is, that was the expectation when Virtue was around, and if you go to Virtue, you should be prepared to RP, if not, it's probably not the server for you. Sticking around and arguing over an issue where we philosophically differ is only going to turn an otherwise productive thread into flamebait, and make it much longer than it is already. Until I actually see evidence of this sort of proceedure occuring, I'm fine. Once I do, I'll take actions as I see appropriate. Beyond that, I don't see much to discuss about it.

Anyway, back on topic, is test DOWN or is it just reporting no login server for those of us not in? I would assume it would respond with the customary ACCOUNTNAME is not allowed on this server. Reason: closed beta testing.

You are correct, a "server" is not a single machine, it's usually a cluster of machines/databases.

GV

I tried to log in, just for giggles.

I can get to the server screen, but selecting the Training Room times out and gives a "Lost connection to DBserver" error, kicking you back to log in.

Though it shows Test as being up and available in the server select window.

It sometimes does that with the live servers when they are coming up. I'd hope they built in a new message for closed beta access like... Sorry, not allowed into this beta, goodbye! Instead of letting us believe we cannot access due to some server issue.

GV

Ok, yes. That's true. Technically your computer isn't a single machine either. It's several of them working together. But it's labeled as "one" machine for simplicity's sake. My point was, all those linked parts are part of a single "thing." I'm picturing a server tower really. And having one per sever is what I mean. Yes there's more then one component to it, but it's in effect. One thing. You can't unplug one part of it and expect it to work, so I consider it one thing.

You can just plug them into one another and make it "better."

I agree I hope they had the foresight to toss that message in

Well, I learned something today. I figured that was how it worked because the zones fail sometimes without the whole server going down, and also the way the markets are per-faction rather than per-server.

I would have to say that we have no way of knowing if that's what the error indicates. It may be, but it may also be that the server isn't in an accessible state, maybe being worked on or something.

Who is this "us" on Virtue you speak of? I play on Virtue. Yet I have not met you, unless in a PuG. How did I (and thousands of others you probably do not know) not ruin your community already? What features exist on Virtue that do not exist in the rest of the game? Where do you roleplay? Do you really think Virtue is that different from the other servers, because take it from someone who plays on multiple servers, it is not different.

I disagree that turning the thread in to flamebait is the only outcome here. I am very interested in your objections and am also glad you were able to forgive my snarky first comment, because I want to hear possible issues and objections to the idea of going serverless. I appreciate that you have so far been willing to listen and think about my replies to your objections, and you should know that I am listening to and pondering your comments as well.

Community in an MMO is probably the most precious things we have. I was never a big fan of video games, but have played this one for nearly five years. That is all because of community. I want to go serverless to promote community building, but need to understand the potential pitfalls and hopeful solutions in order to talk about the topic honestly.

I can think of one right off the top of my head, assuming instances aren't the norm for such a setup:

I absolutely do not want to log in, go to Cap, and see 587 people at the BM, 800 more in the MA, and various others wandering around all at once. Piower spam at those locations is already ludicrous with only a few dozen present at either at any given point on Pinnacle, at least for people without top-end systems. I couldn't imagine being able to visit that zone again with that many people spamming powers there.

Well, not Lion Voltron.

Vehicle Voltron, maybe?

what you said and my post that you quoted have nothing to do with eachother.

The post I quoted said they hoped they added the message, I was agreeing with that. had nothing to do with the error code given currently.

I've played on other servers also. I spent a short time on Freedom (something I never want to repeat ever again) the sheer amount of leetspeak and unintelligable broadscasts was nearly deafening. Now imagine for a moment if you will, merging those people with the people on Virtue. You have to admit this will not lead to a positive outcome.

I agree with that, the entire reason I've been here for 4 years is because of the community and people I've met. That community has built over time on virtue, and I'm not even a part of the "real" Virtue community anymore. Even as it is, and has been, greifing and anti-RP behavior is much higher than it was say 2-3 years ago (mostly because I suspect CoH has gained some new players, and some more market notice between the Mac stuff, and Architect, and now Going Rogue, etc.) but this has already degraded my play experience. How if you dump the entire population of Freedom into a community that has built over the course of 4-5 years, you're going to see some anger and backlash, likely from both sides. It would be akin to having a lived in a gated community or owned a Condo, and suddenly now anyone is allowed to move in without even a background check, or meeting the qualifications of the community you've set up, Some might see that as positive (those who want in but couldn't get in before) others who were there, and liked the way their communiy was working, likely would not.

Just re-read, you are correct. Disregard that. :P

There's that too, yeah, though generally in "other" games where that's been done, it causes many instances to spawn (upwards of 10-15 generally). So you probably won't see that sort of problem, but you're still going to see a ton of instances, and many of them would be maxed out at any given time (like going to RWZ or Peregrine on a weekend).