New efforts!

[Surelle]

All this talk got me thinking about one of my favorite characters and favorite power sets...the dark defender. I had a blast leveling him to 50. I know it isn't the most powerful or "exciting" of the power sets but it really was fun to play and I always felt like a "difference maker" in any team. The game just had so many facets of play and this was a relaxing one for me. I stayed in the background, healed and debuffed away...missing the game this morning...

I had a 50 dark/dark fender named Twisted Nether on Virtue!  My daughter designed his costume, gold and black with a completely cloaked face, except for two gold eyes.  He was da bomb, although in the early levels I really had to kinda sneak my way onto teams.

And Ironwolf, I saw your unedited post go by, quick as a flash!   ;)  But on the subject of servers, jeez, I never knew they were so inexpensive-- or so low in specs!  Did CoH really run on 2 GHz processors and such a small setup?  My own concern, though (besides this attempt ending like all the rest) is less about the server hardware and more along the lines of how long it will take to reverse engineer that final backup of CoH.   

I know it's a different kettle of fish in some respects, but private servers take *years* to get up and running (ours wouldn't be a private server though, I get that, it would be legal, but still it could likely be a very small team working on CoH around their "real" jobs and they didn't make the original code), and they're usually buggy as heck.  Taking another team's code and running with it is a really tough thing; look at what happened to SG bases when the dev who originally made them left the team.  Although I do understand that once The Mystery Team finally gets the server reverse engineered, they're done working on CoH and on to CoH2 (which likely will be worked on concurrently if anything).

Still, Hellgate Global (formerly Hellgate London) was resurrected and is still running well these days, as is A.P.B. Reloaded.  It does happen.  *twiddles thumbs and stares at NCSoft logo*

[hejtmane]

After editing myself - I decided to address some of the questions I have seen asked:

Servers how many?

Honestly if they are working from a snapshot it would likely be easier to have the same exact servers. All the pointers and everything have paths to the existing stuff.

In server world how much would it cost? Here let's look at Vilayer a common game hosting company:

2 x Intel Xeon E5-2620 (2 x 2.0+GHz)
Show all details...
Cores/Threads
12 / 24

Memory
32Gb

Hard Drive
1TB


Network Port
100Mbps


Bandwidth
Unmetered

€249.95

This is a basic server that you can customize up over 128bg of ram and more drives. If you went top of the line - you could pay maybe $1000 for a dedicated box that would have unmetered bandwidth and if you set them up in a server farm 3 or 4 of these could easily host your game.

Servers are normally virtual or shared - I know that there was one Virtual server with Freedom and a couple others and then another with Virtual and a couple others. Also the other 2 could fail and Test would still be up. I assume that there were 5 servers with 2 for each production and 1 for test. There may have also been a redundant mirror server for each so a total of 10.

This would total you out at about $10,000 a month for top end stuff. It may not be necessary for that level of gear. I just want to float it out that server costs while not cheap are also not expensive. You can host the entire game for the cost of one or 2 full time employees.

I have been considering hosting my own DayZ server as I could do so for about $30 a month for a 40 player server.

Iron the new Intel processors they are starting to released this fall should be 12 or  16 core at least on the HP gen9 series yes I know ridiculous

I wonder if they go blade or rack mount

[Ironwolf]

I had a 50 dark/dark fender named Twisted Nether on Virtue!  My daughter designed his costume, gold and black with a completely cloaked face, except for two gold eyes.  He was da bomb, although in the early levels I really had to kinda sneak my way onto teams.

And Ironwolf, I saw your unedited post go by, quick as a flash!   ;)  But on the subject of servers, jeez, I never knew they were so inexpensive-- or so low in specs!  Did CoH really run on 2 GHz processors and such a small setup?  My own concern, though (besides this attempt ending like all the rest) is less about the server hardware and more along the lines of how long it will take to reverse engineer that final backup of CoH.   

I know it's a different kettle of fish in some respects, but private servers take *years* to get up and running (ours wouldn't be a private server though, I get that, it would be legal, but still it would likely be a very small team working on CoH around their "real" jobs and they didn't make the original code), and they're usually buggy as heck.  Taking another team's code and running with it is a really tough thing; look at what happened to SG bases when the dev who originally made them left the team.  Although I do understand that once The Mystery Team finally gets the server reverse engineered, they're done working on CoH and on to CoH2 (which likely will be worked on concurrently if anything).

Still, Hellgate Global (formerly Hellgate London) was resurrected and is still running well these days, as is A.P.B. Reloaded.  It does happen.  *twiddles thumbs and stares at NCSoft logo*

A standalone server for a small CoH group say - 50 to 100 players would likely be less than $100 a month. The Xeon is different from a desktop and the 2 CPU's on the those boxes have a total of 12 cores capable of 24 threads. So they are quite powerful. I was showing how with simple game hosting company how cheap it could be to run CoH.

[MM3squints]

After editing myself - I decided to address some of the questions I have seen asked:

Servers how many?

Honestly if they are working from a snapshot it would likely be easier to have the same exact servers. All the pointers and everything have paths to the existing stuff.

In server world how much would it cost? Here let's look at Vilayer a common game hosting company:

2 x Intel Xeon E5-2620 (2 x 2.0+GHz)
Show all details...
Cores/Threads
12 / 24

Memory
32Gb

Hard Drive
1TB


Network Port
100Mbps


Bandwidth
Unmetered

€249.95

This is a basic server that you can customize up over 128bg of ram and more drives. If you went top of the line - you could pay maybe $1000 for a dedicated box that would have unmetered bandwidth and if you set them up in a server farm 3 or 4 of these could easily host your game.

Servers are normally virtual or shared - I know that there was one Virtual server with Freedom and a couple others and then another with Virtual and a couple others. Also the other 2 could fail and Test would still be up. I assume that there were 5 servers with 2 for each production and 1 for test. There may have also been a redundant mirror server for each so a total of 10.

This would total you out at about $10,000 a month for top end stuff. It may not be necessary for that level of gear. I just want to float it out that server costs while not cheap are also not expensive. You can host the entire game for the cost of one or 2 full time employees.

I have been considering hosting my own DayZ server as I could do so for about $30 a month for a 40 player server.

Good to see that they will bring up old servers again, but with the lessons of the past, and if people will have a clean wipe, they will have little or no reason (besides emotional I guess) to stay on the server they used to play on and migrate to a server with the most population (I would think even in the new system, Freedom/Virtue will be on top just because that became the standard) Do you think money would be better spend in expanding the capacity of servers with lower number of servers to host more player on (no red bars or grey out) so when a person wants to play, they won't be locked out? This also will aid new players to go in a server with a thriving community instead get turn off of the game from a small ghost town server (don't get me wrong, I used to play on Triumph and enjoyed it, but if I was a new person to the game and went to Triumph first, I would wonder where is the MMO aspect in this MMO) retaining more customer?

[Ankhammon]

All this talk got me thinking about one of my favorite characters and favorite power sets...the dark defender. I had a blast leveling him to 50. I know it isn't the most powerful or "exciting" of the power sets but it really was fun to play and I always felt like a "difference maker" in any team. The game just had so many facets of play and this was a relaxing one for me. I stayed in the background, healed and debuffed away...missing the game this morning...

Had a blast leveling him, eh? I'm betting your dark/dark was a little younger than mine.

Mine got his start back at the beginning (maybe as late as I2) and they were a little different back then. Subtle little issues like tar patch was just a slow. Twilight Grasp had some incredibly awful activation time of like 4 seconds (but I loved that old animation). Fluffy was a stationary pet. And I was a n00b and took/used the snipe as part of my regular attack chain (only char I've played who could really pull it off semi-regularly in an earlyish build).

Don't get me wrong, My Dark/Dark was a lot of fun after a few issues and I often ran ahead of the group to get the next group of baddies controlled. It was a true Deftanktroller.

But those first few months were just not right in de head.

[Wammo]

Had a blast leveling him, eh? I'm betting your dark/dark was a little younger than mine.

Mine got his start back at the beginning (maybe as late as I2) and they were a little different back then. Subtle little issues like tar patch was just a slow. Twilight Grasp had some incredibly awful activation time of like 4 seconds (but I loved that old animation). Fluffy was a stationary pet. And I was a n00b and took/used the snipe as part of my regular attack chain (only char I've played who could really pull it off semi-regularly in an earlyish build).

Don't get me wrong, My Dark/Dark was a lot of fun after a few issues and I often ran ahead of the group to get the next group of baddies controlled. It was a true Deftanktroller.

But those first few months were just not right in de head.

Mine was Dark/Rad and was created in the later issues. I always teamed and was never much concerned for offensive output...if I wanted that I switched over to my other characters with more "pop"... Good times!

[Codewalker]

This is a basic server that you can customize up over 128bg of ram and more drives. If you went top of the line - you could pay maybe $1000 for a dedicated box that would have unmetered bandwidth and if you set them up in a server farm 3 or 4 of these could easily host your game.

For minecraft maybe...

Servers are normally virtual or shared - I know that there was one Virtual server with Freedom and a couple others and then another with Virtual and a couple others. Also the other 2 could fail and Test would still be up. I assume that there were 5 servers with 2 for each production and 1 for test. There may have also been a redundant mirror server for each so a total of 10.

Off by a factor of 5x-10x.

(source of this info undisclosed for hopefully obvious reasons)

Login/Chat/Auction/AE/Per-shard dbservers/etc: Virtual. Rough guess, you'd probably want a cluster of 6-8 midrange physical hosts for proper availability and load balancing

Mapserver pool: Around 40 physical servers, probably high-capacity blades. Shared between ALL shards, so how many of these you need is solely dependent on how many concurrent players across the entire game you want to support. CPU is important, but having tons of RAM is more important due to heavy use of instanced maps.

SQL servers: 4 (physical). If it were me, I'd probably set these up with shared SAN storage in a 5-node cluster, so you only have to have 1 spare for failover.

If you went with a really high-end virtual cluster you might could reduce that some, but from what I hear certain things are quite sensitive to latency, so too much overprovisioning or VM migration would result in lag spikes.

[Teikiatsu]

Mine was Dark/Rad and was created in the later issues. I always teamed and was never much concerned for offensive output...if I wanted that I switched over to my other characters with more "pop"... Good times!

I had a dark/elec, dark/ice, dark/sonic, and dark/psi.  I was so happy (and amazed) when they gave dark affinity to controllers.  I was on my way to making a */dark troller of every type when the shut down dashed my plans against the jagged unforgiving rocks of despair.  And earth/dark was my favorite.

[Sihada]

If I start from the assumption that the game is going to come back in some form, then the only thing I really hope for is that enough people will support it - financially - to keep it a going concern.

It would be really tragic if all of the time and energy and effort that is going into bringing the game back turns out to be for naught because there aren't enough people willing to pay to keep it afloat.

[Dal]

Good to see that they will bring up old servers again, but with the lessons of the past, and if people will have a clean wipe, they will have little or no reason (besides emotional I guess) to stay on the server they used to play on and migrate to a server with the most population (I would think even in the new system, Freedom/Virtue will be on top just because that became the standard) Do you think money would be better spend in expanding the capacity of servers with lower number of servers to host more player on (no red bars or grey out) so when a person wants to play, they won't be locked out? This also will aid new players to go in a server with a thriving community instead get turn off of the game from a small ghost town server (don't get me wrong, I used to play on Triumph and enjoyed it, but if I was a new person to the game and went to Triumph first, I would wonder where is the MMO aspect in this MMO) retaining more customer?

I think this is just a hypothetical situation in case they resume the game as things were before it closed. If the game starts clean, I think we probably won't have as many servers as before.

If I start from the assumption that the game is going to come back in some form, then the only thing I really hope for is that enough people will support it - financially - to keep it a going concern.

It would be really tragic if all of the time and energy and effort that is going into bringing the game back turns out to be for naught because there aren't enough people willing to pay to keep it afloat.

If they need funds and go kickstarter, I'm sure they'll get a lot of donations.

[JanessaVR]

If I start from the assumption that the game is going to come back in some form, then the only thing I really hope for is that enough people will support it - financially - to keep it a going concern.

It would be really tragic if all of the time and energy and effort that is going into bringing the game back turns out to be for naught because there aren't enough people willing to pay to keep it afloat.

Well, I know I'm not the only person here shouting "Shut up and take my money!", so I think that's indicative of a pretty good desire by people to spend money on the game.

[Sinistar]

This was discussed way back in this thread, the Sentinel files are missing some bits of data the game used. So they wouldn't really be useful in restoring characters.

It would be nice if they could be used, I've got backups of all my toons, but the likelihood is near zero.

If the files can be use to restore levels, badges, inf, powers and what was slotted into them that's fine.
If the missing data is regarding costumes, that is what the tailor shops are for.

[Blackstar5]

If it comes back with the same servers, I will probably start on Champion just for nostalgia but if the population is too low I might migrate to a more populated server( but I'll still be back and forth depending on mood).

[Waffles]

Watching Ironwolf and Codewalker speak about servers comes out as this to me as Na'vi language without the subtitles.

My computer knowledge ends when it goes past P.C hardware :c

[BadWolf]

I had a 50 dark/dark fender named Twisted Nether on Virtue!  My daughter designed his costume, gold and black with a completely cloaked face, except for two gold eyes.  He was da bomb, although in the early levels I really had to kinda sneak my way onto teams.

Dark and Kinetics were always dicey for lowbie teams, because even if you were experienced, the people you were playing with weren't always aware of how to get their heals. I remember I'd always explain it to them, either "I am a Dark Defender, stand near me if you want to be healed" or "I am a Kinetic Defender, stay near the enemies if you want to be healed". Once they got that in their heads though, they usually noticed pretty quick that my heals spammed like crazy and kept them constantly topped up. They learned to love the Dark, then. :)

Mind you, there was one lowbie team where they didn't have ignorance as an excuse. It was a Kheld in Nova form who kept screaming, "Why won't you heal me!?!" when he was taking massive damage. My response was just, "Because you're standing way over there and my heal is PBAoE." Not stated: "How did you get a character to 50 without knowing how this works?"

[Waffles]

Fun fact #2. I have never slotted a single power with an enhancement until i7.

And considering my main before I discovered the amazingness of brutes, warshades and Spiders, was a dark/dark defender who never made it past 47, yikes.

[Ryo Kinsaru]

Some may look down on it but if everything does get wiped I fully intend to reroll my Elec/Fire brute and rebuild my AE maps. Those vets who want to recover a build that they already put all the blood/sweat/tears into will be more than welcome on my maps. Just stand at the door and talk amongst yourselves. I WILL however be checking credentials, I will not be PL'ing any new players. I've always got lowbies (being an altoholic) and I will group with them when possible, but you're not going straight to 50 with no knowledge of the game on my time hehe. 0-50 in less than five hours and off to trials.

Snobbish PL - if you have to munch purples then you're doing it wrong. Period. Have a nice day!

[hejtmane]

Watching Ironwolf and Codewalker speak about servers comes out as this to me as Navi language without the subtitles.

My computer knowledge ends when it goes past P.C hardware :c

I racked and stacked all that stuff in the last 6 years the hardware can get more expensive depending on what options you thrown on it but the hardware is cheap compared to licensing sometimes.

Stay away from IBM they will gouge you to all hell and back.  There where periods where we spent more money on monitoring the server each year than we did for the actual  purchase the dam thing. Stupid arse managers

[AlienOne]

Last time I ran a server was waaaaaay back in the Unreal Tournament 2004 days. I remember it being relatively cheap, but those types of servers are nothing like what MMO servers require to avoid massive lag spikes...

[Waffles]

Some may look down on it but if everything does get wiped I fully intend to reroll my Elec/Fire brute and rebuild my AE maps. Those vets who want to recover a build that they already put all the blood/sweat/tears into will be more than welcome on my maps. Just stand at the door and talk amongst yourselves. I WILL however be checking credentials, I will not be PL'ing any new players. I've always got lowbies (being an altoholic) and I will group with them when possible, but you're not going straight to 50 with no knowledge of the game on my time hehe. 0-50 in less than five hours and off to trials.

Snobbish PL - if you have to munch purples then you're doing it wrong. Period. Have a nice day!

I'm going to hold you up to that.

My sentinel files were kinda destroyed, so i'll just sorta submit this as my proof >_>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3vYLVv2frU