New efforts!

[Super Firebug]

Has anyone else been watching "Unity" like crazy?

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

It leaves me in tears every time, and I've seen it well over 20 times. I even downloaded it, so I can watch it offline. I used the Firefox add-on "Download YouTube Videos as MP4" because "Download Helper" couldn't do it.

[Nebularian]

As long as it isn't too dense.  A lot of us stayed off of Freedom and Virtue for a reason.   ;)

Freedom I can understand...But Virtue?   I started out on Champion then moved to Virtue and made it my home.  Was it perhaps it was more geared to RPers?

[Serpine]

Has anyone else been watching "Unity" like crazy?

I so miss costume change emotes...

[Super Firebug]

Freedom I can understand...But Virtue?   I started out on Champion then moved to Virtue and made it my home.  Was it perhaps it was more geared to RPers?

I tried running a toon on Virtue for a short time. A bunch of people were roundly ripping into a player for making a Duncan MacLeod katana scrapper (from "Highlander: The Series", for those who don't know). Didn't seem very "virtuous" to me. I didn't go back.

[Felderburg]

Which would that even be? Citadel?

I was thinking Synapse. From his not-so-stellar performance in the "leet" CoV trailer... or maybe it'd be Manticore: "TA? You rolled TA. LOL"

Or maybe Statesman, just because of the remnants of Emmert dislike?


As far as server names, I always thought that villains got the short end of the naming stick (since the servers were named when it was just Heroes). Although I'm not sure I would want explicitly hero or villain server names, since that might unbalance a particular server's population towards one faction or the other. I'm operating under the assumption that there will be fewer servers than there were originally, so original names would be a bad way to go, since people whose server was left off the new list would be angry.

Now I haven't read all of the 205-ish pages of this thread, but I'm assuming this didn't come up.  With all the issues of resurrecting the game, and getting our characters and such, am I to assume that a resurrected CoH/V will not have a Mac client?  I hope that is not just swept under the rug because I am/was/is a Mac user.  I can not tell you how great it was to have a MMO that supported your platform and not dismiss you.  I hope the new efforts take that in mind too that there are people like me that hope CoH/V comes back, but we also hope that it is supported on the Mac as well.

I think this was addressed. Even if the Mac version isn't part of the initial deal, it was ported to Mac using third party software, so it theoretically shouldn't be too hard to do the same thing. http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/City_of_Heroes_on_Mac

Freedom I can understand...But Virtue?   I started out on Champion then moved to Virtue and made it my home.  Was it perhaps it was more geared to RPers?

RP by itself is one thing, but it had a reputation for having a lot of ERP, which probably kept some people away.

[MWRuger]

So each of the servers where not each their own tower or whatever? I heard each one actually had a back up version of itself to take over if the original went down, so basically each server location may have only had one machine or two behaving like more than one on each coast?

That's the way i understand it. It makes sense if you think about it.  A low pop server like, Champion for an example, would sit idle most of the time while a high pop server, like say Freedom, would strain resources constantly. It makes better sense to assign resources as the shard needs them. It also allows the machines to run balanced loads and optimized. Thus it is entirely possible that tasks for a busy shard might be on 3 or 4 physical machines.

Backups would essential be additional resources that you could assign to the server group on an as needed basis. For example, server 3 of 8 goes pear shaped. You can immediately activate an additional server to bring the functioning number back up to 8. You can then repair or replace the bad server.

You can also rent space on an entire backup server farm in case of catastrophic failure to reduce downtime. Of course this is only viable if your backups are updated. Which is probably why data for MMO's is constantly being backed up. Just another thing going on that we never see in the background. As Iron Wolf suggests, probably done by mirroring the servers or at least the drives.


It's a very cool solution in my view.

[CrimsonCapacitor]

May as well jump into this thread as I read it several times a day.  Have to keep the SG updated, after all.  ;-)

[Nebularian]

It makes no sense to try and keep up with all of this stuff since I do have a full time job and a new house to work on! I reference this site and thread and say that here is where you get information. One of the team leads actually said that the Facebook folks appear to just be setting themselves up for disappointment as they take rumor for fact.

Once it appeared that the silence leash had been loosened a bit, I did post on two of the COH facebook groups I joined...basically groups formed to keep those of us that often played together in touch...rather than try to put out the information myself and risk screwing it up...I simply linked back to this topic. I figured that would be the best way to keep that information as close to reality as possible.

[skippy7721]

Love the name Crimson Capacitor! :D

[Serpine]

A bunch of people were roundly ripping into a player for making a Duncan MacLeod katana scrapper (from "Highlander: The Series", for those who don't know). Didn't seem very "virtuous" to me. I didn't go back.

There are jerks everywhere. Overall that wasn't the norm.

Now me, I would have just quietly reported him as a copyright violation and moved on with my day. :)

[CrimsonCapacitor]

Love the name Crimson Capacitor! :D

Thanks.  Although I'm usually just referred to as CC.  Easier to say and much simpler to type.

[Fanta]

RP by itself is one thing, but it had a reputation for having a lot of ERP, which probably kept some people away.

That's just wrong :P I immediately thought of the episode of "The Big Bang Theory" where Howard was doing that with someone's troll character in Wow.

[Harpospoke]

The new 5?:
Resurgence
Renaissance
Resurrection
Restoration
Rebirth

I like this.   

The only issue might be confusion since they sound so similar.   But at the same time it has a feeling of unity and hope.

I have to check myself a little because I might be falling into "I wish we were all more alike" territory.   My mind was thinking, "Maybe it's a good thing if we didn't have different personalities for different servers....maybe we should be more united!"

But then I have to remember that this game was vastly different things to different people and thus that's why the servers developed differently.

[Codewalker]

So each of the servers where not each their own tower or whatever? I heard each one actually had a back up version of itself to take over if the original went down, so basically each server location may have only had one machine or two behaving like more than one on each coast?

Old-school COH at launch, each dbserver (which does basically nothing except track and save character records) was likely on a different physical machine, or possibly a pair. The mapservers, which do 99% of the processing required to run the game, have always acted as a pool. They are not tied to a particular shard. It would be easy for Freedom's Atlas Park to be running on the same physical server as Justice's Mercy Island, along with a dozen missions for people on Champion, Pinnacle, etc. Mission maps especially start up and stop often, so the dynamic allocation of resources helps balance the load.

Post-freedom, they got rid of the coastal datacenters and moved them all (including the EU shards) to new servers in NCSoft's Austin facility. At that point, instead of having two separate pools of mapservers, they consolidated it down to one. Judicious use of netstat to document IP addresses revealed that there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 physical map servers running the entire game. IIRC one of the devs mentioned they were blade servers, but that doesn't make much of a difference to anything other than rack density.

We also know from developer remarks that at the same time, the dbservers were virtualized, so they no longer needed a physical machine for each, instead running as virtual OS instance on a cluster with fewer physical servers. It's likely the global services (chat, authentication, auction) were virtualized as well, probably on the same cluster. It wouldn't make much sense to virtualize mapservers as due to how they operate as a pool anyway, there would be no benefit to it.

In any event, the bulk of the server resources needed are on the mapserver side, and those are shared across all shards. The number of shards would affect the load only slightly in that kind of setup.

[Super Firebug]

Has anyone else been watching "Unity" like crazy?

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

I like to envision the initial nine-hero team as Ironwolf and the buyout negotiators, leading the charge to retake the city. :)

[UnitFour]

You know it occurred to me, way back when the devs were going to hold a contest to design the new Freedom Phalanx Member to replace Statesman (not as leader, just on the team).

I don't think the new guys should do that.

Because we already have a perfect character for the Phalanx.

And I don't think anyone would dispute it.

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=cox-supergroups.com%2Fascendant.jpg

[Harpospoke]

I've been in other MMOs too long - I forgot about that! Still, would still want to be in a highly populated server to be able to find easy pickup groups for radio and newspaper missions, for when I don't want to solo...  that and easy sewers for the first 10 levels or so...   and Ourorbos friends... etc...

That's why I moved to Freedom.   Was nice to be able to do a search and have all those players available to form a team.   When I wasn't feeling social I went into hiding.   Option.

But I totally get those who like the wide open feel of the lesser populated servers too.   I'm not sure if it's feasible for the new owners to support enough servers to have a "less crowded" one, but it's a real thing to a lot of players.

[Super Firebug]

You know it occurred to me, way back when the devs were going to hold a contest to design the new Freedom Phalanx Member to replace Statesman (not as leader, just on the team).

I don't think the new guys should do that.

Because we already have a perfect character for the Phalanx.

And I don't think anyone would dispute it.

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=cox-supergroups.com%2Fascendant.jpg

If I'm guessing right, that's the best idea yet to memorialize Ascendant.

[MWRuger]

That's why I moved to Freedom.   Was nice to be able to do a search and have all those players available to form a team.   When I wasn't feeling social I went into hiding.   Option.

But I totally get those who like the wide open feel of the lesser populated servers too.   I'm not sure if it's feasible for the new owners to support enough servers to have a "less crowded" one, but it's a real thing to a lot of players.

Well, from reading what Codewalker wrote, it's probably feasible. However if you want to homogenize the servers, then you would probably want to reduce the number to balance the population. Still if we can get character data back probably easier to bring them all back and then do a merge as it will help handle duplicate character names much more easily.

[Nebularian]

I tried running a toon on Virtue for a short time. A bunch of people were roundly ripping into a player for making a Duncan MacLeod katana scrapper (from "Highlander: The Series", for those who don't know). Didn't seem very "virtuous" to me. I didn't go back.

Understand....I found a##holes on every server.  Unfortunately, there wasn't a damned thing we could do about it. Confronting the a-holes just filled up chat and made everyone else grumpy :) 

And there WERE times when the shear number of people got to be too much....that is when I would just hop back over and play my toons on the extremely less populated Champion server :)

But over all, over all, for teaming and quality of people, I found Virtue Quite nice.   LOL  Of course, I am sure I would probably say the same had I ended up in any other server (other than Freedom) and the first people I met were the good kind :)