New efforts!

[slickriptide]

The whole thing is so very frustrating:  It's too bad NCSoft couldn't just take a page or three out of SOE/Daybreak Studios' book, and make deals concerning emus or just look the other way.  It figures *our* overlords would be the most demonic ones of all.   :P

Yes, it's unfortunate that NCSoft seems to want to protect their IP in perpetuity just on principle.

People who say, "Easier to ask forgiveness than permission" just don't understand NCSoft's position on these matters. Heck, SEGS got a Cease and Desist letter from them a few years back, and as far as I can tell Paragon Chat is more functional today than SEGS ever has been. I don't blame Codewalker and Company at all for walking a fine line between making things functional and making them too "game-like" to draw the attention of NCSoft.

It really is too bad, because I'd play the heck out of an Auto Assault emu. ;-)

That's the problem, though - it depends on every company to decide whether to care. Daybreak/SOE took a tolerant stance and, in fact, invented the idea of a "progression" server as a response to the demand for "vanilla EQ" that was being provided by the emulators. There are dozens of WoW emulators out there. You can be sure that Blizzard knows about just about all of them. Nastalrius became a victim of their own success. Heck, if City of Heroes Freedom had 200k+ active accounts it might still have been around.

Earth and Beyond is, I think, still the poster child for a successful resurrection of a dead MMORPG, but people tend to forget that the biggest reason Earth and Beyond died is that EA never wanted it in the first place. They wanted Westwood. E&B was just an obligation that came along with it. They fulfilled the obligation, then closed it along with their other online games. They didn't give a rat's ass about emulators; especially once a couple of years had passed.

Speaking of Nostalrius, I'm not so certain that Blizzard has bad intentions in inviting them out to Irvine. Blizzard has known that there was a demand for "vanilla" Wow, but Nostalrius proved it could be a commercially viable demand. Blizzard is no stranger to licensing deals. Most of its operations in Asia are done through "native" corporations that license the game in Blizzard's name. Nostalrius was a French "company" ( a fact that also contributed to Blizzard's apparent lack of speed in addressing their existence, I'm sure). It's not out of the question that Blizzard could come to an agreement with Nostalrius that gave them an official imprimatur in exchange for a cut of the profits and an agreement to become a part of Battle.net and abide by Blizzard's management decisions, turning Nostalrius into an international licensee just like NetEase runs Blizzard's operations for them in China.

When people said, "What about vanilla WoW", then they'd say, "Talk to those people over there."

[Surelle]

They were moved to brand new servers hosted in NCSoft's Austin datacenter shortly before the launch of the free-to-play model. The old east and west cost shards were consolidated into a single location onto upgraded hardware.

I confirmed by mapping out the IP addresses after the move was complete that all shards, whether they were previously east or west coast, shared a pool of about 40 mapserver hosts. They didn't ship the old servers (the downtime would have been much longer); they did a data transfer to a new setup instead.

The event that we got this badge for:
https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Defender_of_Primal_Earth_Badge

Was put on in order to stress test the new hardware by getting as many people into one place as possible.

So...those east and west coast original servers still had copies of pre-Rogue CoX on them as well.  I wonder where they are now?  Melted into a heap, or stored somewhere?   :D  So that's another possible backup at a certain point in time that may or may not be hanging around somewhere....  But alas, it doesn't really matter, because in the end, NCSoft isn't playing ball no matter what it seems.

[Brigadine]

So...those east and west coast original servers still had copies of pre-Rogue CoX on them as well.  I wonder where they are now?  Melted into a heap, or stored somewhere?   :D  So that's another possible backup at a certain point in time that may or may not be hanging around somewhere....  But alas, it doesn't really matter, because in the end, NCSoft isn't playing ball no matter what it seems.

Time so launch a raid :)

[Surelle]

Yes, it's unfortunate that NCSoft seems to want to protect their IP in perpetuity just on principle.

People who say, "Easier to ask forgiveness than permission" just don't understand NCSoft's position on these matters. Heck, SEGS got a Cease and Desist letter from them a few years back, and as far as I can tell Paragon Chat is more functional today than SEGS ever has been. I don't blame Codewalker and Company at all for walking a fine line between making things functional and making them too "game-like" to draw the attention of NCSoft.

It really is too bad, because I'd play the heck out of an Auto Assault emu. ;-)

That's the problem, though - it depends on every company to decide whether to care. Daybreak/SOE took a tolerant stance and, in fact, invented the idea of a "progression" server as a response to the demand for "vanilla EQ" that was being provided by the emulators. There are dozens of WoW emulators out there. You can be sure that Blizzard knows about just about all of them. Nastalrius became a victim of their own success. Heck, if City of Heroes Freedom had 200k+ active accounts it might still have been around.

Earth and Beyond is, I think, still the poster child for a successful resurrection of a dead MMORPG, but people tend to forget that the biggest reason Earth and Beyond died is that EA never wanted it in the first place. They wanted Westwood. E&B was just an obligation that came along with it. They fulfilled the obligation, then closed it along with their other online games. They didn't give a rat's ass about emulators; especially once a couple of years had passed.

Speaking of Nostalrius, I'm not so certain that Blizzard has bad intentions in inviting them out to Irvine. Blizzard has known that there was a demand for "vanilla" Wow, but Nostalrius proved it could be a commercially viable demand. Blizzard is no stranger to licensing deals. Most of its operations in Asia are done through "native" corporations that license the game in Blizzard's name. Nostalrius was a French "company" ( a fact that also contributed to Blizzard's apparent lack of speed in addressing their existence, I'm sure). It's not out of the question that Blizzard could come to an agreement with Nostalrius that gave them an official imprimatur in exchange for a cut of the profits and an agreement to become a part of Battle.net and abide by Blizzard's management decisions, turning Nostalrius into an international licensee just like NetEase runs Blizzard's operations for them in China.

When people said, "What about vanilla WoW", then they'd say, "Talk to those people over there."

Believe me, I've got my hopes up as much as anyone.  However, I've played WoW on and off enough over the past 12 years to know how lazy Blizzard really is....and I also know to what standard of functionality the players would hold them accountable.  Blizzard's games are always polished, moreso than most other MMORPG devs/publishers can ever aspire to anyway, I'll give them that.  And as one of the few sub-based MMOs left, players have the right to demand that.  It's not that Blizzard couldn't fix their own old code either from their own storage, or from Nostalrius', it's just the question of "will they?"  Personally, I don't think they will.  They just don't see the potential financial payoff as being high enough, or sustainable enough, to justify their efforts.  That's just my opinion, though, clearly.  Your mileage may vary, and time will tell.  I'm keeping watch on Nostalrius' Twitter, though, I'll tell you that.  https://twitter.com/NostalBegins?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

[slickriptide]

They just don't see the potential financial payoff as being high enough, or sustainable enough, to justify their efforts.  That's just my opinion, though, clearly.

And you may very well be right. Blizzard historically does whatever the Hell they want to do (see what's happening in Hearthstone right now for an example.) They don't need to invite a bunch of Frenchmen out to Irvine just to tell them, "We wanted to reiterate the fact that we'll take your house, your bank account, and your firstborn if you do anything that harms our interests." They've already delivered that message.

Bringing Nostalrius out to their corporate office is pretty much the opposite of doing the "lazy" thing. I'm not sure what it means, but it's bound to be interesting.

[Codewalker]

So...those east and west coast original servers still had copies of pre-Rogue CoX on them as well.  I wonder where they are now?  Melted into a heap, or stored somewhere?   :D  So that's another possible backup at a certain point in time that may or may not be hanging around somewhere....  But alas, it doesn't really matter, because in the end, NCSoft isn't playing ball no matter what it seems.

Probably wiped and either reused for something else, or recycled / otherwise disposed of. It would have been a post-GR, but pre-Freedom copy.

Though people need to keep in mind that a COH "server" is not a single machine, not even close. No one server had everything for say, Protector on it. What appeared to players as a 'server' was a complex setup with lots of moving parts that talked to each other over the network, and parts of that setup might be shared between them. That's why the developers tended to refer to them as 'shards' rather than 'servers'.

You've got your SQL database server(s) that house the player data, probably on an enterprise-class storage array on a SAN rather than locally for reliability. You've got your dbserver, one for each shard to coordinate things. You've got your mapservers, for which there is very strong evidence that those were dynamically allocated out of a pool and were shared between all shards in the datacenter, so you could easily have a mission map for someone on Justice running on the same hardware as Freedom's Perez Park. Then you've got your global services like global chat, auctions, mission architect, etc. that were shared between shards and probably ran on a dedicated server (or virtual machine) for each.

That's why I kind of give the reports of NCSoft offering to license a "server image" a sideways glance. NCSoft doesn't have a single image with everything on it. They never could have, because all the pieces never ran on the same server at once. I can only assume that someone is simplifying things for reporting purposes and what was being talked about was actually a set of images, or perhaps the filestore containing all of the components that got deployed to severs to update them to a new issue release.

[Surelle]

And you may very well be right. Blizzard historically does whatever the Hell they want to do (see what's happening in Hearthstone right now for an example.) They don't need to invite a bunch of Frenchmen out to Irvine just to tell them, "We wanted to reiterate the fact that we'll take your house, your bank account, and your firstborn if you do anything that harms our interests." They've already delivered that message.

Bringing Nostalrius out to their corporate office is pretty much the opposite of doing the "lazy" thing. I'm not sure what it means, but it's bound to be interesting.

I figured it was so legal contracts could be signed by the Nostralius team instead of them merely giving vague nods and verbal promises, to keep them from releasing that Vanilla WoW code at any point, and to prevent that anti-cheat code Nost apparently also had from getting out into the wild.  Studying that could likely give even hackers of legitimate, current WoW's code a leg up in cheating, and/or stealing Blizzard's current account and user info, etc.  Also, Blizzard is going to want that Vanilla code handed back to them pronto.

[TimtheEnchanter]

That was my next question. There's touch typing, and then there's touch typing.

I'd probably be in that group, too, as my style is definitely not the classically taught method. It's closer to a hybrid style and is much more dynamic.

I don't follow rigid rules (this key must always be pressed with this finger), but I do use all 5 fingers on both hands, only rarely use backspace, and never look at the keyboard.

I really had to think about it, kinda doing it now as I'm typing it. For some reason I don't use my pinky fingers, but I use the rest. I also don't have a 'home' but that has most likely stemmed from a various number of games having strange default keybinds that I never bothered to change. All that aside, I'm rated at somewhere between 80-90 WPM which is good enough for any job that doesn't involve dictating.

[ukaserex]

Clearly, we are busy on the forum today - I keep getting a suggestion to review the thread before I post! Like 5 times in a row!

Probably wiped and either reused for something else, or recycled / otherwise disposed of. It would have been a post-GR, but pre-Freedom copy.

Though people need to keep in mind that a COH "server" is not a single machine, not even close. No one server had everything for say, Protector on it. What appeared to players as a 'server' was a complex setup with lots of moving parts that talked to each other over the network, and parts of that setup might be shared between them. That's why the developers tended to refer to them as 'shards' rather than 'servers'.

You've got your SQL database server(s) that house the player data, probably on an enterprise-class storage array on a SAN rather than locally for reliability. You've got your dbserver, one for each shard to coordinate things. You've got your mapservers, for which there is very strong evidence that those were dynamically allocated out of a pool and were shared between all shards in the datacenter, so you could easily have a mission map for someone on Justice running on the same hardware as Freedom's Perez Park. Then you've got your global services like global chat, auctions, mission architect, etc. that were shared between shards and probably ran on a dedicated server (or virtual machine) for each.

That's why I kind of give the reports of NCSoft offering to license a "server image" a sideways glance. NCSoft doesn't have a single image with everything on it. They never could have, because all the pieces never ran on the same server at once. I can only assume that someone is simplifying things for reporting purposes and what was being talked about was actually a set of images, or perhaps the filestore containing all of the components that got deployed to severs to update them to a new issue release.

I get why they might want one mission map accessible for all "shards/servers" - but that seems like a crazy way to handle things. I'm certainly not at all privy to how all that stuff would work - but, I would think that there would be a better way. Or, at least, a way that doesn't involve so much equipment.

I was actually daydreaming for a moment ( my paycheck was on time, but my bonus is late, so I'm being slightly passive-aggressive by posting here instead of working) about a sting operation to infiltrate Austin, Tx and get the game servers/equipment back - but then I'd have no idea how to get it working again.

Moreover, I have no idea how I'd perform such a sting and get the game back - but it had something to do with Divas from WWE distracting people.

But, I digress.
Seems to me, if they'd ported the files from the hard disks to an SSD, and had redundant power supplies - the darn game could have run unsupported, unimproved for a millennium. (well, minimally supported) But, then, what the heck do I know? Just stating such an opinion can only reveal how misguided my thought process is in this regard.

They never did teach us how a game would be published in my coding classes. It was hard enough to get things to compile and produce the right output.
Pretty sure that's not taught at any level in our CS department. Or maybe I cut that class.

Still, the imagination runs wild from time to time, thinking how it would be interesting to just find some dusty machine and plug the thing in when nobody was looking and sneak back out. Too bad that in reality, a lot of those parts probably went to put another game together.

[Vee]

Moreover, I have no idea how I'd perform such a sting and get the game back - but it had something to do with Divas from WWE distracting people.

Better to just go ahead and distract them with your team of CoH fans, skipping the intermediate step where you have to go back outside and ask the WWE divas to do the heavy lifting for you.

[Ironwolf]

Load balancing.

The servers were likely all running instances from any server. The main Virtue or other servers were likely on a single machine for continuity. Any mission instance where you left the main was likely spread over the farm and could be on any machine.

I assume a server/shard for the market, a server/shard for the player database and then a mapserver set to run instances virtually and main named server singly.


As for the best way to game? I am left handed - the numpad gives you everything you need!
----> for global chat
<---- for teamchat

[Codewalker]

The main Virtue or other servers were likely on a single machine for continuity. Any mission instance where you left the main was likely spread over the farm and could be on any machine.

Not from what I saw. While mapping IPs, I found that the servers hosting city zone maps were spread across the cluster as well, and mission instances were running on the same servers. It wasn't uncommon for Pinnacle's Atlas Park to be on the same box as Virtue's Grandville.

The dbservers themselves (what you initially connect to after logging in to get the character list), appeared to not host any maps at all. I'm fairly sure those had been virtualized, but since mapservers already had dynamic load balancing, it wouldn't make much sense to virtualize them.

That actually makes a lot of sense when you consider that city zones spawn new instances when they fill up, and also that the base zone itself never shuts down during normal operation.

Chances are the "always on" maps fire up at startup, probably just going round-robin to all available hosts. The more dynamic instances like mission maps or overflow zones would be started on whichever server had the lowest load at the time.

That's a fairly optimal way to make sure that your big multicore workhorse servers are being used effectively. Artificially limiting where maps can start just because of shard names would only increase the chances of CPUs sitting idle.

This architecture is also why I maintain that server merges wouldn't have changed the overall picture much. The size of the infrastructure was dictated much more by overall population than the number of "servers".

I get why they might want one mission map accessible for all "shards/servers" - but that seems like a crazy way to handle things. I'm certainly not at all privy to how all that stuff would work - but, I would think that there would be a better way. Or, at least, a way that doesn't involve so much equipment.

It's an MMO. Having a lot of equipment is expected, and required, to be able to handle more than a handful of players. Having a complex design to make best use of that equipment and be able to smoothly scale up when needed is also to be expected. They don't scale linearly since players often interact with each other. As a whole, multiple low-population shards sharing the hardware perform better than one big one due to limits on player interaction.

MMOs, especially ones in the early days, aren't something that can just be tossed together with a canned engine and a few average programmers. It takes serious engineering to handle the kind of load of something even on the scale of COH during its peak, much less one as impossibly huge as WoW. Though WoW cheats and trusts the client far more than it should, hence the need for anti-cheating measures as was talked about in the other thread.

[Arcana]

I get why they might want one mission map accessible for all "shards/servers" - but that seems like a crazy way to handle things.

Not really.  Consider how high load cloud based applications work today.  There's usually a central coordinator service that farms load out to execution engines, and then there's a pool of (usually) vms or containers that can be spun up on demand to handle that load.  What CoH did was similar: after authentication you were put into a "workload" - your starting (shared) zone.  When you entered an instanced mission, you created a new workload and that spawned a new mapserver to handle that workload.  If you think about zones and mission maps as workload, the amount of work can dynamically change from moment to moment and from shard to shard.  Having a big pool of mapservers (VMs, or more likely processes within a VM) that all the shards could share meant you didn't have to overprovision server power to each individual shard.

Most of the components of City of Heroes that we're aware of existing have to exist, and in some form, in almost any MMO.  They all have to have global authentication servers (assuming you log in globally to the game).  Each shard has to have its own database server (or database instance on a mega database server) to track all the things specific to that server.  There usually has to be some central process managing the shard.  And then there has to be some mechanism to run the workload of individual players running around in a particular map, and this one has to support a lot of these.  One auth server.  One database instance per shard.  One server process per shard.  N mapserver instances to run "the game" where N is a dynamically changing but often pretty big number.

[Arcana]

Hardware from 2011 shouldn't be too hard to come by, I don't think.

Plus, Wintel servers are pretty much the definition of commodity. I'd be frankly quite shocked if they managed to write something that was somehow dependent on specific hardware. Especially since word is that at least part of the server infrastructure was virtualized.

In fact, if anything modern hardware would make it a lot easier to run City of Heroes because the resources you can shove into modern hardware for similar cost is a lot higher.  I've been managing a private cloud since 2006, so in CoH terms basically since Issue 7.  In that time, my standard consolidated server platform went from 64GB of RAM to 768GB of RAM and from 8 cores to 20.  It would not be difficult or even unusual to spec a hosting platform with a terabyte of RAM and terabytes of SSD storage which would be several orders of magnitude faster than what I expect CoH was being hosted on at the time of the shutdown (SAN storage configurations have gotten equally aggressively higher in performance).

[switch]

To me both the graphics and sound/music is still top notch. Incredible use of colors and effects in game. The polygon count is low but that does not matter so much.

Still today i would stop playing all my other favorite games if coh came bacl

coh would compete with any mmo today if marketed at all unlike the way ncsoft did it   hell  the cw  alone u could have a commerial spot 3 shows a week 
to get the word out and many other ways with all the superhero stuff the way it has blow up .    if  ncsoft would have marketed it right  and cared enough for the us market  it could have been huge  but instead they didnt and it launched then  wow came out shortly after and everyone flocked to it 

[Victoria Victrix]

I've said it before.  NCSoft would have marketed "sushi" as "dead fish on vinegared rice served cold."

[TimtheEnchanter]

coh would compete with any mmo today if marketed at all unlike the way ncsoft did it   hell  the cw  alone u could have a commerial spot 3 shows a week  to get the word out and many other ways with all the superhero stuff the way it has blow up .    if  ncsoft would have marketed it right  and cared enough for the us market  it could have been huge  but instead they didnt and it launched then  wow came out shortly after and everyone flocked to it

WoW was the worst thing to ever happen to the MMO genre. It murdered ingenuity and diversity in MMO's practically overnight. One could almost just call it the WoW Genre now, because every MMO looks and plays like it. The only ones that don't, were already in development and have still managed to survive. Even that didn't save SWG though. It had already been released, but got a new skin slapped on top of it in a sad, desperate attempt to turn it into a WoW-clone.

Thanks, Blizzard.  :roll:

[Ulysses Dare]

Thanks, Blizzard.  :roll:

It's hardly Blizzard's fault that so many other developers try to copy WoW. I recall an interview with one of Blizzard's developers where he suggested that the best way to compete with WoW was to do things differently. In fact, he specifically pointed out City of Heroes as an example.

[TimtheEnchanter]

It's hardly Blizzard's fault that so many other developers try to copy WoW. I recall an interview with one of Blizzard's developers where he suggested that the best way to compete with WoW was to do things differently. In fact, he specifically pointed out City of Heroes as an example.

Actually that became bad advice the moment he said "compete with WoW." There is no competing with WoW. No matter what recipe you try, if you expect to get WoW numbers, you will see your game as a failure, and so will your investors. That's simply how it is. WoW was a perfect storm, and partially because of its own existence, it's something that can never happen again. It's akin to seeing the sweeping devastation dealt to a city by a bomb and then saying, "I want to make a bomb that does as much damage as that one did," but then you have to drop it on the same city that has already been laid to waste. Obviously, you're not going to see the results you hoped for, because all the damage was already done. That first bomb is WoW on a global scale. The reason it worked so well is it brought in new gamers who weren't already playing an MMO. By now there is only a tiny fraction of the population who are 'yet-to-be' MMO players. WoW didn't have to wrangle people away from practically anything, but any MMO attempting to gain traction absolutely has to wrangle people away from WoW, along with the rest of the over-saturated market of MMO's that only exist because businesses are having delusions of reaching WoW levels of sales. SWTOR should have ultimately proven to the business world just how impossible this is, and yet this hallucinatory gold rush continues.

[Ulysses Dare]

There is no competing with WoW. No matter what recipe you try, if you expect to get WoW numbers, you will see your game as a failure, and so will your investors.

I believe what he said was "stand out from WoW". That was certainly his meaning, regardless of the exact wording. And it's good advice for precisely the reasons you list—most developers lack the resources to duplicate WoW's success and even the ones who do would need the right circumstances and more than a little luck.