A small fear of mine - the problem with the global server

Verbatos

Veteran endo
Joined
Aug 9, 2019
Messages
220
#1
The game has been running well in alpha so far, people have been enjoying it, builds are being shared, groups are interacting and people can meet any other player from around the world, all thanks to the global server/P2P system.
As wonderful as the upsides of the system are, I have a small concern about it and I thought it would be good to put it out there.

In short: the current system creates a lot of delay and lag between players.
Since everyone is in a different part of the globe, connection difference feels enormous, which can create multiple problems in regards to PvP and player interaction.
I have seen multiple cases of ships colliding weird, shots appearing to hit too soon after firing, or far too late, and just a general sense of jankiness in a lot of player to player interactions.
This, IMO, is a big problem for the future of the game. A lot of casual players who haven't been following this game for years as I have might feel turned off by the general connections jankiness present in the game currently.

I know Frozenbyte has been pretty clear on their wish to make one big server, but I was thinking what might help would be creating multiple smaller servers per region, just to let players play out with people from their country, their area, with minimal connection issues. You don't even have to scrap the global server, it could be the main server for the game, an all-encompassing melting pot of different people and different ideas. Regional servers could just tide up the difference for people who would rather not have a half-second delay for their interactions between players.

Of course, this is just a suggestion, I mainly posted it to bring up the idea and start a discussion, does anyone else have any thoughts?
 

Shulace

Well-known endo
Joined
Apr 26, 2021
Messages
53
#2
That is certainly a viable concern, though its an issue pretty much all MMO suffer from if you're familiar with the genre. I guess this is why there aren't many MMO on the market because its so hard to have a seamless experience for everyone due to the network/latency limitations. You would have the large alliance folks on the other hand be strained because the universe would be fragmented, along with the playerbase from your proposed solution.

It will be interesting to see how the devs handle and optimize this on release. My guess is that it will be this way for a long time to come, I have yet to see a P2P MMO sustain seamless performance in a populated player environment. Even most server hosted MMO suffer from this.
 

CalenLoki

Master endo
Joined
Aug 9, 2019
Messages
741
#3
What if those servers would be connected?
One global server that everyone can visit, with warp gates that only people from specific zone can cross. One leading to EU server, one to NA, one to AU, ect.
So whenever you feel like your server is a bit too empty, you travel to global. Or if you want to trade.
Whenever main feels too laggy, you go to local.
 

XenoCow

Master endo
Joined
Dec 10, 2019
Messages
562
#4
How about this: Different starting stations for different regions. New players would all get to experience the best connections and only experienced players, that know what to expect, will ever frequently run into players from other regions. You could choose to start at a region that isn't your own, but would then have to experience the weird lag.

Seems like a plenty doable idea, It would just be some text defining each starting station as a perticular region but nothing internal would change. There would just be higher densities of like-region players in differerent areas around Eos.
 

kiiyo

Veteran endo
Joined
Jul 11, 2020
Messages
136
#5
How about this: Different starting stations for different regions. New players would all get to experience the best connections and only experienced players, that know what to expect, will ever frequently run into players from other regions. You could choose to start at a region that isn't your own, but would then have to experience the weird lag.

Seems like a plenty doable idea, It would just be some text defining each starting station as a perticular region but nothing internal would change. There would just be higher densities of like-region players in differerent areas around Eos.
Yep, since we were getting multiple starting locations might as well make them named after regions or something like that to give the starting players a better beginning experience.
 

Venombrew

Master endo
Joined
Aug 9, 2019
Messages
369
#7
i think they are doing something similiar to way ESO maintains their servers, without the instance(dungeon/raid) shards. now ESO has a very large player base but they only run 2 main servers, US and EU. what they do is allow players to set how many people they can visibly see at once with a min/max. and it always puts friends, guildmates, and parties on the same shard. and i think this is something FB is wanting to do.

so when they have a very large player base, you may only see 200 people at once, including their ships. when your in a party you still only see the 200 people, plus the number of people in your party. so it like it shards you with your party or they with you. i think this is the direction they are going but i can see where this may cause problems, such as in World of Warcraft who are using a about the same system, people running from others in pvp can join a friend's group and jump on his shard disappearing off your screen. this, will be a pain in the ass for those pursuing others to just have them shard out. another incident in server games like that is when your about to use a resource node and for some reason right in front of you it disappears even with no one there to mine it. thats because its a person on a shard within the same server as you, you just can't see them.

from what i read over the last year this seems to be somewhat of the system they are going for and it def has its pros and cons.
 
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