DEV QUESTION - Server scaling and instancing to remove cross-server woes in each region

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#1

Hey there!

I have a region based server question for the team.
(Brought on by all the current moaning going on about the downtime currently due to day-one non-early access release and people who are unable to play with friends due to server locking new account creatation)

Why with the power of Amazon and specifically AWS scaling are each regions split into separate ‘servers’ in 2022?

I think that most people understand that each server is very unlikley to be ‘one server’ in the phsycial sense. But more a gateway to many clusters of servers that make up each one. IE, login servers, world servers, database servers…etc.

Each one of these clusters then provides players with many instances within it to split up the playerbase and not overwhelm people fighting for quests…etc on the same instance (channel number / Ch. top right).

So my question is… why wasnt it modified by the Amazon dev teams when all localiisation work was going on, to just utilise modern AWS scaling methods.
This would mean there’s just one “server” per region as far as the players are concerned but the compute power could be dyanmically increased or decreased due to demand to provide however many instances/channels are required at the time.

This would not only stop all the aggro between players wanting to transfer chars to play with friends but allow Amazon to scale back down when peak player demand eventually tails off, allowing all players to still play together with progression in their global region.

I’m guessing that this is an inheritied 4-5 yearold game by another dev team but surely somthing that could be re-designed.
Obviously user global chat…etc would have to be disabled…etc and just channel chat allowed as ‘global’ but this seems like the sensible step.

I’m sure there are unconsidered bottlenecks in performance here, but in a day when pretty much all infrastructure and compute in AWS can be dynamically cluster scaled it seems mad not to use this approach?

Any constrictive feedback or reasons would be great to appease the playerbase perhaps?

PS. I thought the same regarding New World.

Cheers!

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#2

I was wondering why they didn’t go this route as well. For all things considered, it should be perfectly doable to have one actual server and many channels instead. Multiple games already go this route such as Runescape.

My only actual guess is it is due to some inherent internal code limitation of Lost Ark.

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#3

You are assuming is an infrastructure problem when it could be a software architecture problem.
At that point the entire feedback is obsolete and pointless.

#4

Either way…

A software engineering problem that can’t be solved by the might of a game development team/publisher backed by the 3rd largest company in the world which happens to run one of the world’s leading IaaS/PaaS/SaaS cloud providers?

When it comes to changes that could potentially win or lose 100s of millions of global currencies over a lifetime of the game product. I’m not sure that is a valid or constructive point.

#5

All Im saying is there is no easy solution and the feedback provided above is pointless if the issue is not server capacity but how the game is developed.

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