Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Still nice to see you around again, Steelwing. Even if it is to pull out the troops. Check back later. The game may have improved to a level that is acceptable for you and yours. ;)I will be keeping an eye out and if the game becomes on I can recommend I shall do so. I am basing my opinion currently merely on feedback. I shall no doubt try it myself at some point before writing it off however I shall wait till much later to do so.Not gonna sugar coat things. It is barebones stuff right now. Pretty much as they described it would be. I think that some are shocked by this and waiting or moving on. It seems almost spot on as described, though I admit a little behind schedule. That is not rare in game developement. Still there is enough in to have some meaningful fun if PVP is not ALL you care about.
I wish I had an invite left. I would offer it to you to try stuff out.
I have already been offered invites and declined. The reason being that if I saw in the state described to me I would probably not come back.
I will wait a bit instead and see if Dancey can pull a rabbit out of that hat.
What I want to se
1) settlement in and working
2) battles consisting of at least 200 a side
3) player looting
4) how threading works (*hint here if too much can be threaded it impacts negatively on a player driven economy)Call me fussy if you like but all these to me are Miminum Viable Product till I can say to my corp hey there is this other game perhaps we should take a look and not get people coming back and telling me "why did you recommend this?"
Check back in for OE; the server population should be big enough that there are occasionally battles approaching that size. Right now there are so few concurrent players divided among so many power blocs that 200 player battles would have to be a staged and scheduled event.
Goblin Squad Member
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I think half the board doesn't have outstanding coordination, and that's part of why PFO is so appealing: same big sandbox style game, but with a targeting system that's more user friendly for them.
Perhaps we should found our own company, "We who can't hit a barn from inside, using a trebuchet" ...
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Goblin Squad Member
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About the economy, my NWN servers, the one I made I mean, had a good economy, because I created a new money, without using gold coins, and giving it an actual weight.Anyway, I am very interested in Shards Online yes, even though after PFO, I will never spend again more than 100$ in promises.
I'm a bit of an economy buff and alternative currency fan so stuff like that makes me twinkle.
As for Shards, it looks even more bare than PFO at this point to actually play. All of the interesting stuff is back end, not systems the players will use. So while I am keeping an eye on it, I am going to wait until enough spiffy mods are available (steampunk ftw) and I think that's really the point to all of these games. NWN didn't get great until about 3 years of players mods were in. EvE by all accounts wasn't great until 3 years in. Shards will probably not be great for another 3 years and neither will PFO.
The big difference to me and where I think Mr. Steve Jobs of MMO game marketing Ryan Dancey (hardee har har) is going to win the battle is what we do waiting for the game to be great. PFO has already seen alliances made and crumble, rivalries have been made and played out, backstabbing, friends made etc etc. AND THE GAME HASN'T STARTED.
Why is that? Crowdforging. Plain and simple, the empowerment of the player base, however material that empowerment actually is. Throw in a couple gasoline canisters like the Land Rush and you have a game before the game. On the first day of EE there will be a mad rush to touch home base and start gearing up, not to be the first to do it, because there is already something on the line, player pride, which is more important than character husks.
I mean honestly, what the heck are you still doing hanging around Audocet? This is a message board for game that isn't even live and you hate it. The reason is because your emotional investment over the last 2 years far outweighs the economic one you keep crying about....
They're relaunching a ks soon on a modest goal. Probably worth a punt again imho: Great design concept. Of which I believe: PFO, SC, Shards that I've seen.
I think half the board doesn't have outstanding coordination, and that's part of why PFO is so appealing: same big sandbox style game, but with a targeting system that's more user friendly for them.
I have initial anxiety and kind of 'packet loss' of the mind. Once I understand the game enough to do what I think then it is coordinated. It takes awhile.
I think it's cool that people can be coordinated just picking something up, but I feel "the best" are like me. I kind of wonder if it's the same for most people who say they aren't. You just gotta work until it's in your mind.
Basically, when I am playing a game I am playing in my mind. My mind has re-created the game. Which is why graphics mean little as long as I can read what's going on.
I mean, how fast do you type? Action-based games can definitely be fun... they just take practice. I'd like to have 50/50 of action and thought. So you can create a good build and have a good strategy, but you will also need execution.
Altho, to be honest, I do get dizzy in first person games sometimes. Not really physically ill, but I lose focus. Again, I think it's related to anxiety though. It's like IM GETTIN ATTACKED WHERE ARE THEY OGOD.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Is there anyone full able and mentally stable looking at this game I sometimes wonder by the litany of ailments:) Speaking as an hfa myselfOnly the dead are mentally stable.
Its relatively common for the guild leaders in online games to be either institutionalized (either in prison, hospital, a mental facility) very young (high school age), house bound due to some disability or just unemployed. No-one else has the time for it.
Its also common for them to have access to money. Hence you get individuals who are off work from an accident and have insurance money, school children with well off families and in some cases people like The Mittens in EVE who have quit their day job and make a living from the game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Its relatively common for the guild leaders in online games to be either institutionalized (either in prison, hospital, a mental facility) very young (high school age), house bound due to some disability or just unemployed. No-one else has the time for it.
Its also common for them to have access to money. Hence you get individuals who are off work from an accident and have insurance money, school children with well off families and in some cases people like The Mittens in EVE who have quit their day job and make a living from the game.
Interesting, I'm not any of those completely, but enough of some of them.
I have a good deal of free time, and two positions (jobs) that afford me time to go online even when at work.
I am actually, pretty well to do financially, so it is no monumental task to pay for multiple accounts or game subscription + website + TS + dedicated server if need be.
But my most valuable trait is that I can fully function with only 5 hours of sleep a day. As I'm writing this post I'm already in my 22nd hour of being awake on this day.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I generally work overtime each week and have had a steady/happy relationship that became official in March. The fact I have a life is why I ultimately handed over TEO. When you're working 96 hours a week you get some members of your group who instead of showing appreciation for the time you do give them whine about how you are never there.
I would say you can lead a guild and have a life. You just can't lead a large one because you need time to have a personal relationship with the majority of your members. That was the ultimate problem.
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Goblin Squad Member
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So in LiF our server experienced our first player being banned. It was not so much that he broke any rules of the game, but more so how he responded to requests that he not be so aggressive about his actions on the chat channel.
That then led to his entire group being banned, when they retaliated with a slash and burn Zerg, cutting down every tree they came across.
The main take away I got from this was that our policy within the UNC was and still is the correct one. Do not over fish the pond!
The first banned individual repeatedly raided and killed the same group of people, for days in end and dozens of times per day. He rapidly moved from being a nuisance, to a threat, to a menace, and finally to a detriment to the server.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think it's fascinating that they're generating interesting social dynamics on a server with less than 64 players.
It partly has to do with how the server was advertised. When a server is listed as 24/7 friendly and helpful, all welcome and behaviors operate outside of that, the GM has God-like powers to enforce the server description.
The opposite holds true as well. There are servers that are listed as "hard core PvP" and if you complain too much about suffering at the hands of others, you will get banned.
As far as the social dynamics, there is an opportunity to create role played social structures in the game. The group that got banned was a Danish based group, that was obviously named with Danish names and all sporting Nordic weapons and armor. They were a raiding group, very much along the lines that I have been planning on doing in PFO and in LiF. Where they went wrong is they crossed the line between having fun and beng spiteful.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...to a menace, and finally to a detriment to the server.Pray tell: how was he the former, and not yet the latter? An in-game menace became an out-of-game detriment?
No, he was an in game menace (which is fine) who, along with his group, became an in game detriment. When the one member dared the GM to ban him, got band, his friends on the server went into a deforestation Zerg, cutting down every tree in their path. If you deforest the entire map, there is only two ways to fix that.
1. GM must manually uproot every stump. Then plant new tree and advance its growth. Problem is, the GM has no idea what quality that tree was, unless he/she takes a sample of the log left behind. That takes up time. Hours or even days.
2. Server reset.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Number of incidents per time period isn't any better at identifying Griefing than any other formula. Identifying Griefing requires human judgment and context. Once we identify an enemy, we're likely to attack them fairly consistently, but that's not Griefing.
There comes a time when an enemy becomes a helpless enemy and then perhaps even a hopeless enemy.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think it's fascinating that they're generating interesting social dynamics on a server with less than 64 players.
64 players online at a time. That's pretty key. You can actually get some fairly large groups on a server that size because you have to consider that the vast majority of the population won't be online at any given time.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Number of incidents per time period isn't any better at identifying Griefing than any other formula. Identifying Griefing requires human judgment and context. Once we identify an enemy, we're likely to attack them fairly consistently, but that's not Griefing.There comes a time when an enemy becomes a helpless enemy and then perhaps even a hopeless enemy.
That's a valid point. Once our declared enemy was no longer a threat, we'd almost certainly cease attacking them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If it mirrors MMO metrics, the PCU will be 20%. So a 64 person server could sustain 320 people. (can't do maths today)
I'm not sure that is how this works. It is more akin to a Counter Strike server where the 64 players are persistent to that server. There is not another 80% waiting in the queue to log in.
I've not been in the situation of being the 65th person trying to log in, so I don't know what the error message would be received.
Eventually they will have MMO servers that can handle 10,000+ players.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I wondered whether 64-person servers meant a given 64 people, and no alternates, in which case one might expect only 20% to be on at a given time--if the MMO stat holds--or whether it's "up to 64 people", and the server-lord can have 75 people, or more, on the "approved" list, knowing not all are available at the same time, and, presumably, that not all 75 are ever available simultaneously.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Andius - I'm really curious about your comments about graphics.
I've looked at this game and the graphics seem neither meaningfully better or worse than ours. What is it about Life is Feudal's graphics that has grabbed your attention?
Well I for one noticed ............THE GRASS!!!! goto 12:06 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yfChHJaIhc
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Goblin Squad Member
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A look at Life Is Feudal's graphics and a brief look at terraforming.Andius - I'm really curious about your comments about graphics.
I've looked at this game and the graphics seem neither meaningfully better or worse than ours. What is it about Life is Feudal's graphics that has grabbed your attention?
Awesome demo Andius I really noticed the ground textures quality along with the realistic grasses and wildflowers covering rough terrain. The trees also seem less repetitive and that mountain is simply awesome!
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Goblin Squad Member
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The jump from 64 people to 10,000 people is the difference between walking and jet travel. There's a lot if discontinuous functions in that progression.
Server capacity and map size are the main obstacles, and I don't believe they are very technical in nature.
Right now, even on the 64 client servers, the entire map (including players made tunnels) is rendered almost constantly, and possibly re rendered at the top of every hour. This produces lag spikes from time-to-time, and at the top of every hour.
That constant rendering does allow you to see with great clarity, very long distances. As Andius explains in his demo, everything you see is a "real" object that can be interacted with.
One thing Andius should have shown was the character modeling in 3rd person view.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I wondered whether 64-person servers meant a given 64 people, and no alternates, in which case one might expect only 20% to be on at a given time--if the MMO stat holds--or whether it's "up to 64 people", and the server-lord can have 75 people, or more, on the "approved" list, knowing not all are available at the same time, and, presumably, that not all 75 are ever available simultaneously.
I'm fairly certain it is 64 current player characters on the server, maximum. Same as a TS / Vent / Mumble server limit.
Now, there is the potential that more players than just 64 may be aware of that server, or even set it as a favorite. But, once the 64 cap is reached, they won't be able to log in until a slot opens up.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Bluddwolf,
A friend of mine told me that there were some issues still with small amounts (as in people over the 100-200 range) being on the same server. He also said something about combat shutting down the servers, almost all the time.
EDIT: Not the current 64 Man bought servers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Server capacity and map size are the main obstacles, and I don't believe they are very technical in nature.ROFLMAO
Not being tech savvy, I have no idea of the specifics. I am of the impression that increasing server capacity is more a matter of finances than technology.
Same goes for map size. I believe it is more a matter of choosing the method, than creating it from scratch.
I would imagine a game developer can build a game much in the way a modular home is built. Then the real work is getting all of those systems to mesh, but the basics components are all there.
Again, I'm probably wrong in some of my thoughts, I'd imagine Lee could point to my naivete in mere seconds.
I have to admit, I still wish Fallen Earth was reskinned as Pathfinder Online for many of its basic systems.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Bluddwolf,
A friend of mine told me that there were some issues still with small amounts (as in people over the 100-200 range) being on the same server. He also said something about combat shutting down the servers, almost all the time.
EDIT: Not the current 64 Man bought servers.
I was not aware there were larger population servers in testing.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The jump from 64 people to 10,000 people is the difference between walking and jet travel. There's a lot if discontinuous functions in that progression.Server capacity and map size are the main obstacles, and I don't believe they are very technical in nature.
Right now, even on the 64 client servers, the entire map (including players made tunnels) is rendered almost constantly, and possibly re rendered at the top of every hour. This produces lag spikes from time-to-time, and at the top of every hour.
That constant rendering does allow you to see with great clarity, very long distances. As Andius explains in his demo, everything you see is a "real" object that can be interacted with.
One thing Andius should have shown was the character modeling in 3rd person view.
Still not the place for it, but I would like to see some 3rd person activity. The only that I have seen was older and not that great. The toon models, movement, and interaction, that is.
@ Andius
If you do another with 3rd person and some toons to watch moving about, etc.., let me know please. Would appreciate it.
The graphics do look different. I will admit that they are intriguing. I am not sure if it isn't "first glance glamor" just because it IS different. Yet I will give it to you that they are improved over older views and not bad.
Is it true that it is a more "realistic" genre? No magic at all?
I won't say that it looks like a bad game. I am just more into larger populations and interactions. It could end up a great game, even if very different than PfO. What are the rumors of crashes from combat, easy player engineered server disasters, etc... Are they common? Do they have a handle on that? How about the rumors that the stand alone servers will get no more love, that the $$$ are going for larger server/game developement?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Have you ever seen a scyscraper built out of modular pieces.
I think someone even calculated how big a house you can build out of Lego pieces - the hall mark of modular building. Fascinating science.
There is a limit at which it just crumbles in itself if you stack them higher and higher and well before that stage you need different building blocks.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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@Bluddwolf - ok, that's a legit place to start. It certainly isn't obvious to the average player why "making a multiplayer game into an MMO isn't just adding more server capacity". I'll try to explain a bit.
The topology of most multiplayer games is a hub & spoke model. One machine is "the server", and all the players in the game connect 1:1 to the server. Often one of the players is also playing the game on the server and it may be invisible to the players that this topology is being used - it "just works".
In this model, all the game state information is held on one physical computer. In a slightly more advanced model, there may be one computer that manages the game mechanics, and one computer that works as a database. The "logical server" is two physical computers. However, even in this topology, one of the physical computers is really running the show, the other is just acting as a parallel processing solution for data - a Master/Slave relationship where the slave just does whatever it is told.
This is how Neverwinter Nights worked, or how Battlefield and Call of Duty work. It's how Life is Feudal "Your Own", and Rust works.
The key difference between this topology, and a true MMO, is that this topology doesn't scale. There's a certain amount of overhead for every client connection. At about 128 connections, even the fastest computers, with the very best network connections become overloaded. In real-world applications that number is usually 64 people not 128 people, and for games with a very low latency, the number is lower - around 16-24 connections (thus the relative sizes of the forces in Battlefield and Call of Duty multiplayer).
As soon as you hit that limit, if you want to continue to grow, you have to move to a multi-server architecture and that's where things go through a discontinuous function (for the first but not last time).
If you have multiple servers, they need a way to coordinate with each other, as well as with the clients. They need to allocate resources in some coherent fashion. They need to be able to transfer data between them as clients change connections between servers. They need to have some fault tolerance and some redundancy. At this level, you are almost guaranteed to have a database system running in parallel as well, but now instead of a master/slave relationship, you have to figure out how multiple servers can read and write to that database without overwriting each other's data.
On the front end, you need a system to pool inbound client connections, because you don't want the clients to be making individual connections to physical servers. The clients connect to a fixed address, and then their traffic is routed to the proper physical boxes. That has scalar problems too, and eventually you have to have an array of those front end routers and those routers have to be synchronized and coordinated.
Suddenly you have a huge new load on the system, which is all the overhead traffic required to keep all these physical machines in synch. So each physical server becomes less and less efficient compared to the original single server topology.
Eventually, you reach another discontinuous function. Adding another physical sever means that the total overhead required to keep everything in synch exceeds 100%. You have to come up with some other solution. The first generation of MMOs did this by sharding - they split their game worlds into independent slices. The current generation is trying to avoid this using single servers (EVE, Pathfinder Online, etc.) and "mega servers" (Elder Scrolls, Wildstar, etc.) Making this work requires some very deep level planning about how the game is designed and built from the ground up.
Let's talk about some use cases.
The simple case is that I want to have a character walk from a hex served by one physical machine to a hex served by a second.
Standing in Hex 1, I want to be able to see what is in Hex 2. So there has to be some mechanism on the border for the game state in the two hexes to be shared in near realtime.
Standing in Hex 1, I want to be able to shoot something in Hex 2. So there has to be some mechanism on the edge for the game state to understand that I've targeted across a server boundary, and that effects are going to cross the server boundary.
Now I want to walk across the boundary. All the data associated with my character, it's inventory, it's chat, it's current game state, it's flags, it's party, Company and Settlement entanglements, etc. all need to be transferred from Hex 1 to Hex 2. Permissions to write and read in the database have to be changed. Pending transactions have to be committed. Etc. etc. etc.
There are complications. How far into Hex 2 should i be able to see? What about seeing even further - should I be able to see mountains on the horizon that are even further away?
What if a bunch of players all line up on the hex boundary and coordinate stepping across all at once? How will the servers handle becoming overloaded?
What if the handoff is inconsistent? What if Hex 2 thinks that the data Hex 1 is sending it is corrupt, desynched, or otherwise dangerous?
What if there's a network or hardware failure in the middle of this process? How do things get unwound? How can the system be put into a "safe state"?
Are we extracting analytics data? Do we have telemetry coming out of the server or from the clients? Where does that get stored and how is access controlled to it?
Oh, and by the way, everything has to be encrypted, so we have to be running a bunch of computationally intensive math continuously on every packet.
This is where hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost in trying to make multiplayer games into massively multiplayer games. The implications of doing all these things reverberate to every corner of the project. For example, yesterday I updated the Combat Guide to describe the timing of how attack actions work. There's a 300 millisecond "validation" component to that system that exists purely to enable the server to detect and reject attempts to compromise the client, and to detect desynchronization. If we didn't build that 300 millisecond period into the animations, and we learned later that we needed to do it, every combat animation in the game would need to be revised. That's one example of literally hundreds.
It took 15 years to learn just the rough outlines of "best practices" for making MMOs. It's one of the big differences between teams that have made them before and teams that are making one for the first time (and one of the reasons I get whatever sleep I get at night is because Mark has done this 3 times, Lee has done it twice, and Mike has done it twice). The learning curve on stuff like this is atrocious. And there's no one-size-fits-all solution, even for games that are seemingly similar on their surface. We have unique problems that World of Warcraft doesn't have, and vice versa. So each team not only has to have a working fundamental knowledge of all the things that could go wrong, but also has to be creatively thinking about all new ways to catastrophically fail and try to avoid them.
The difference between a multiplayer game and an MMO really is the difference between walking and flying in a jet plane.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There's a joke in here somewhere about how this is our week's blog - but I don't think I can pull it off w/ just the right amount of believability to be funny... :)
That was *very* interesting - let me echo Schedim: thanks very much for taking the time!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ryan, you should actually turn that into a Blog Post, I think that actually would go a long way into explaining things to a lot of people.
There was a post by a GW artist recently about the state of the games graphics (and why things are the way the are now, and how that contrasts with the future plans) AND Ryan elaborated recently about "Early Access/Agile Development" process and why people are having a hard time understanding it; I would add those two subjects to what Ryan wrote above: New Master Blog!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Just reading an article on bbc news about assasins creed Not sure this works outside the UK
Some glitches in the program sound pretty familiar to PFO - like the falling through the floor to infinite depth and the desynch issues.
