Praetorian Invasion!

[shadewing]

www.cityofheroes.com/news/news_archive/prepare_for_the_praetorian_inv.html

Shit is about to get real. Will the Legends be there in full force?

May 11th starting at 4PM PST for virtue, to be precise.

[Warp Factor]

I'm down.

[Hollowpoint Heroism]

Turned out to be a complete cluster-fuck of lag. Great idea, sloppy execution.

[shadewing]

Yeah...Team I was on managed to beat Battle Maiden twice though.

[Warp Factor]

Yeah, the lag sucked but Caios, Fenix and I were able to school a few AVs. I'm pretty sure Virtue is on the east coast, I can imagine it must have been even worse out you guys' way. I think they'd have been better off focusing on a smaller number of more powerful mobs, rather than sending in hordes of mobile artillery and giant robots.

[shadewing]

Even then the massive amounts of players running around caused a lot of the lag. If NCSoft was looking for evidence that their server hardware sucked...Well, there it is

[The Cheshire Cat]

I'm pretty sure the RWZ raids have been giving them evidence of that for ages. That and the ITF.

[ghostveil]

May 12, 2011 11:17:09 GMT -5 shadewing said:

Even then the massive amounts of players running around caused a lot of the lag. If NCSoft was looking for evidence that their server hardware sucked...Well, there it is

I'd be willing to bet everything I have that their hardware is actually really good.

It's the software that sucks. 99% of MMO server performance is about software.

Edit: Math here, yay. To explain what I mean, MMOs deal with problems of scale. A typical situation in an MMO might have 100 players in close proximity to each other.

Lets say that we have a big fireball that happens, and every player in the area needs to know how much damage the fireball dealt to each player.

So, each player needs to get an update about every other player. So each player gets 100 updates. And there are 100 players. So that means that 10,000 updates must be processed! That's a lot! And each player adds more updates than the last, to the point where you can't get many players together in the same place without getting to the point where the server basically stops working entirely for a long period of time.

Now, you could upgrade your server hardware to make things run twice as fast! And so now that 10,000 update process takes the same amount of time as 5,000 updates used to. So you should be able to fit twice as many players in the same space, right?

Nope. In order to get back up to that 10,000 update time, you only need 42 more players. The number of players you can fit in a space is not linear with your processing power.

Lets say instead that we find a way to batch up all those updates though, so that instead of processing 100 x 100 updates, we're processing something like 100 x log(100) updates. Suddenly, our 10,000 update process goes down to 200 updates! That's a 50x performance increase! Try getting a performance increase of that size from a mere hardware update.

It gets even better when you start talking about transitioning from linear search algorithms to hash-tables, and other such things. You start looking at making operations work completely independently from the number of players you have, which is awesome.

[mattbrp]

May 12, 2011 16:38:18 GMT -5 ghostveil said:

May 12, 2011 11:17:09 GMT -5 shadewing said:

Even then the massive amounts of players running around caused a lot of the lag. If NCSoft was looking for evidence that their server hardware sucked...Well, there it is

I'd be willing to bet everything I have that their hardware is actually really good.

It's the software that sucks. 99% of MMO server performance is about software.

Edit: Math here, yay. To explain what I mean, MMOs deal with problems of scale. A typical situation in an MMO might have 100 players in close proximity to each other.

Lets say that we have a big fireball that happens, and every player in the area needs to know how much damage the fireball dealt to each player.

So, each player needs to get an update about every other player. So each player gets 100 updates. And there are 100 players. So that means that 10,000 updates must be processed! That's a lot! And each player adds more updates than the last, to the point where you can't get many players together in the same place without getting to the point where the server basically stops working entirely for a long period of time.

Now, you could upgrade your server hardware to make things run twice as fast! And so now that 10,000 update process takes the same amount of time as 5,000 updates used to. So you should be able to fit twice as many players in the same space, right?

Nope. In order to get back up to that 10,000 update time, you only need 42 more players. The number of players you can fit in a space is not linear with your processing power.

Lets say instead that we find a way to batch up all those updates though, so that instead of processing 100 x 100 updates, we're processing something like 100 x log(100) updates. Suddenly, our 10,000 update process goes down to 200 updates! That's a 50x performance increase! Try getting a performance increase of that size from a mere hardware update.

It gets even better when you start talking about transitioning from linear search algorithms to hash-tables, and other such things. You start looking at making operations work completely independently from the number of players you have, which is awesome.

/mindfucked

[drjackwolfe]

Well was it at least almost fun? I've been on the road all week and haven't had a chance to log on in weeks

[ghostveil]

May 13, 2011 6:26:28 GMT -5 mattbrp said:

/mindfucked

Sorry. >.>

I just get excited when I get to talk about the sort of stuff I work on.

[shadewing]

May 13, 2011 8:47:47 GMT -5 drjackwolfe said:

Well was it at least almost fun? I've been on the road all week and haven't had a chance to log on in weeks

Well to me it wasn't, since the entire game had a 30 second delay between everything you did. In the time it took between me pushing a button and the game finally activating said button, I could have made a sandwich.

But then again it might have just been Talos Island. A friend of mine in atlas park said the lag wasn't too bad.

[Warp Factor]

Me, Fenix and Caios were in Peregrine, and it was pretty laggy, but playable. I had a lot of fun, though I really think the choice to use mobs whose attacks create a lot of smoke was not the best. Making me deal with obscured vision is fine if there isn't a lag issue, but it should have occurred to them that the combination of lag plus the smoke generated by the mobile artillery units would be bullshit. I did enjoy it, though.

[drjackwolfe]

It's ok Veil I was bat Interop all week, the cloud will solve all lag problems.