God_Emperor_TRUIVIP
New member
Please....no
Character Transfer Status
- Thread starter Cordovan
- Start date
God_Emperor_TRUIVIP
New member
i really hope they don't ... pop will die off naturally and then we are just back to underpopulated servers
Perhaps it's old news for most already, but I was happy to finally make my transfer from Evernight to Orcrist this morning and it finished perfectly, everything included, within 2 minutes. Housing storage is there as well, just not the house, but that'll come. Glad they figured things out, I hope everyone who 'lost' wallet content got it back as well.
Once_Of_Bree
Well-known member
SSG couldn't mess this up any more than they have, it's been a disgrace from start to whenever it eventually finishes. It's just one total failure after another. What's more baffling are so many of the player base cheering them on, as if it's a success.
one total failure after another? I don't want to touch you, but exaggeration will be one of your stronger qualities...
tanlis
Active member
Yeah, I started writing my post on Tuesday and obviously we don't have that 3rd yet.
Regardless, 5 -> 3 would have been a better starting place to potentially spread players out more. But even that could still lead to one server with more players on it and still have performance issues. We saw that with Evernight despite there being 4 other servers to choose from.
This is a challenging thing to do, knowing how much capacity you allow, how much capacity your application and servers can handle and figuring out how you deal with surges. For an online game, that tends to be harder to do and very much depends on how the server software was architected. Some of this you try to figure out through load testing and some of it you just learn through the pains we are dealing with now.
tanlis
Active member
The client being 64bit has had no need or impact on the server software being 64bit. And for the most part all 64bit really does is increase the accessible amount of memory from 4GB to whatever max limit the OS allows. The theoretical limit for 64bit is really high(in the exabyte range), but no one has a machine with that much.
The client benefited from 64bit by being able to load more textures, entities and other things and not have to swap them to your hard drive when it needed to. The server will now benefit with being able to track more players and actions and entities.
I believe the launcher is still a 32bit application though. Not that is a big deal as long as Windows continues to support 32bit applications.
Fjorgynr
Stout-axe dreaming of trees
I am hoping that it won't be we open tomorrow, a day or 2 notice would be good. Mind you I also hope it is not Tues 1st April, as it could go wrong considering how badly these transfers have been handled imagine the headlines in the gamer press "SSG's ultimate housing April fools..."During the night (from a European perspective, times are CET):
Severlin
Update: We should have more information about housing on the new servers sometime tomorrow. The news will be here and on the forums— gestern um 23:11 Uhr
@Cordovan: We are still hoping that it will not be "Housing opens in 24 hours" around midnight CET tonight. A lot of players & kinships will need some time to prepare (e.g., to take time off).
The timing could be different for US and EU. Severin said in discord sometime during the earlier part of the migration debacle that it would be possible to turn on housing for EU at a time better for the EU time zone. They can't alter times of server downtime for maintenance and patching, but they can vary the time of housing opening.
Highly likely there will be a minimum of four different times for housing. One for the two European servers, one for the two American servers and then each of the brand new servers will have housing when it opens. They could have different times for each server to accommodate people on both regular and roleplaying servers but this seems unlikely.
Marmi
Completionist
Either I failed to explain my idea (which is quite possible, since I'm not native and never learned Eglish properly) or you did not understand me.
Your last sentence is well, I can't find words if you really think people with years of /played time should start from scratch... Most would either stop playing at all or being eventually forced to move further away if they want to keep playing anyway.
Doro
Ecce vir!
No, you explained it completely clearly. You want a US-coded server based in the EU for EU players who mistakenly picked US servers previously, and vice versa for the US. Harvain probably got confused by another post.
maartena
Drinks Coffee All Day!
They added 10 virtual servers in an attempt to expand the capacity of Orcrist. The internal name for those virtual machines is something like "Orcrist Server 81", "Orcrist Server 82", etc through server 90.
When you type /loc in game, the exact server you are on is revealed. People were asked to provide information when they experienced lag, and they found out that by adding these 10 extra servers they actually hit a certain capacity limit, as a lot of data still flows through one master server. The newly added servers caused more problems than they solved, so they were removed. These servers, 81 through 90, became known as the 8x servers.
Based on what Severlin has said on Discord, they have found what their upper limit is for the server architecture, and it appears to be able to host around 2000 people before things start getting laggy. That is still WAY more than any 32-bit server is able to handle, but there is a certain limit.
That is why they likely, and ultimately chose to add a third server. This third server may actually still exist on largely the SAME hardware present, as the upper limit for population seems to be more related to architecture (tech debt, a design made 20 years ago that might be hard to change now) related versus hardware capacity related.
It is also quite possible that they had hardware reserved for future projects, such as a new "bombadil" type server or a completely different server project idea they came up with, etc.... and that now they have decided that they should use the capacity reserved for that to a new regular server instead. This last bit is of course complete speculation.
maartena
Drinks Coffee All Day!
Yeah that is a bitter pill to swallow. It was recommended to do in 2015 when those server consolidations made clear that EU <--> US transfers were not going to be possible, and anyone who did then...... now probably has an army of level 150s on the "Right" geographical side. Some people however were stubborn back then too, and refused to start over, even though level 100 was then the maximum and it would have been a lot easier.
SSG has learned to never say never, but it is extremely unlikely that EU <--> US transfers will ever be possible. If that was something easy to accomplish, they would have done so 10 years ago and raked in the CASH from transfers already, as people would have been willing to pay.
It should be noted that if you do choose to restart on a server closer to home..... that your original characters won't disappear. You can always go back to them and play them again.
tanlis
Active member
It wouldn't surprise me if those 8x servers are actually virtual machines and not actual individual servers. My suspicion is that a world's architecture is something like database and 1+ physical servers that host a set of virtual machines that host different regions, instances and layers. As a player does different things, you transition between those virtual machines(which is probably part of why we have loading screens as well).
I would also expect that a 3rd server is truly new hardware and not additional VMs on existing hardware. But who knows how they've got things set up.
HappyBudgy
When in doubt... Run! Better: fly, you fools!
On the subject of NA -> <- EU, on Discord just now:
Severlin
Interregional transfer isn't unavailable because of some arbitrary policy; they are unavailable because the old codemaster servers were set up with IDs that are incompatible with our current servers, so the ids for the items from those characters would clash with the ids on existing US servers. We will be looking into code that versions all the items of a transferring character and see if we can get transfer from region to region working, but that's a ways off.
Severlin
— 11:02 AM EST
Interregional transfer isn't unavailable because of some arbitrary policy; they are unavailable because the old codemaster servers were set up with IDs that are incompatible with our current servers, so the ids for the items from those characters would clash with the ids on existing US servers. We will be looking into code that versions all the items of a transferring character and see if we can get transfer from region to region working, but that's a ways off.
maartena
Drinks Coffee All Day!
It has been confirmed in previous posts and streams (years ago) that their server architecture is a combination of "bare metal servers" (presumably database servers, and maybe the "heart" server Severlin referred to on Discord) and virtual servers (presumably open worlds/layers, instances, and pvmp). The exact architecture of course we don't get to know, but this is what I have been going with.
Excuse my entry level DB questions. Can somebody explain, Are the id's he speaks of the primary keys, which are used to link all the tables together. Don't database engines have the ability to assign new keys, and then relink everything? Why does this take a team of engineers or is it just that they are non-specialists working on these databases?On the subject of NA -> <- EU, on Discord just now:
Severlin
Interregional transfer isn't unavailable because of some arbitrary policy; they are unavailable because the old codemaster servers were set up with IDs that are incompatible with our current servers, so the ids for the items from those characters would clash with the ids on existing US servers. We will be looking into code that versions all the items of a transferring character and see if we can get transfer from region to region working, but that's a ways off.— 11:02 AM EST
I understood it fine. They just are not going to do the idea because there is no point for it and would lead to "greater confusion".
Especially now we'll have 3 Servers for EU and US in the near future from March 26th/27th.
We'd then need a 4th Server and keep in mind that LOTRO's Launcher gives very limited details about what a Server is, they don't label 64-bit Servers, they even have some of the "US-hosted Servers" not having a US tag, and so on.
- Having a "US-code Server hosted in Europe and an EU-code Server hosted in the US" would have a very finite amount of Players.
- This would also lead to the same old issues where if they need to Transfer it would still be US<->US or EU<->EU only.
- So if say theses 2 Servers closed people would still wind up right back where they were.
HappyBudgy
When in doubt... Run! Better: fly, you fools!
I am understanding it correctly?
There are EU players on every NA server and NA players on every EU server.
Is the suggestion that EU players on NA servers would be able to transfer to a new NA coded server located in the EU, and vice versa, if such existed?
Do players on both sides of the Atlantic really feel this way? Are kinships that clearly based on geographical location and not on what a kinship has to offer, regardless of location? With the French and German speaking players I understand that, but those too may have ventured into English speaking territory in the NA?
How does this idea jive with 'adding 3rd servers on both sides will rip communities apart'?