Bringing Server Clustering to Ultima Online

[Pandora_CoD]

Folks, I am not sure if this has been tackled in other threads, but I'd like to see the discussion among the player base of UO.

I also played Dark Age of Camelot, another Mythic title. In that game, we got server clustering in a very special and unique way that I think would really benefit this game in a lot of ways.

1) Housing. Shards with less population that are clustered to those with higher population give way to the placing of housing for those players that may not find what they perceive to be a "good spot" for their house on their high population server. Thus, with a flick of a switch, they could technically place their housing on another server and be able to access it with ease, just a flick. Long established player-ran communities would not loose their housing since servers arent being merged, just clustered.

2) RP Community Growth. Shards with smaller populations can have the options to travel through with ease to other clustered shard's RP events, engage with other RP'ers, and bring RP in a more visible manner to their own servers. Shards with higher population would have the option to expand their player bases and visit new, interesting locations on other clustered servers.

3) Faction PvP. Shards can get enhanced experiences in PvP by being able to move from one clustered server to another with better ease. More people would be engaged in FPvP interaction. There may be some coding involved so that when characters "flip the switch" they are still part of their "home" faction and their guilds. Not sure how possible that is but worth digging into. I mean if you can change items with one swoop, this doesn't seem that difficult. (I am CEO of a technology development firm, so I understand the difficulties behind this.)

4) Moon Gate GUI. The moon gate GUI could be given another option such as:

[_] Atlantic
[_] Catskills
[_] Lake Superior
[_] Legends

Before they choose the facet, and the city. So you'd see three columns in the GUI and it would default to the shard that character is currently in.

I think this can be done, and there would be so many good things that could come out of it. Especially by putting the clustered servers on robust infrastructure. It would save a lot of money in overhead. Instead of having to worry about 27 servers, you're worrying about 6 grand servers.

Thoughts?

 

[Nexus]

The biggest issues I could see with this, and I do like the idea btw, are character slots, and passing off a character form server to server.

I doubt its easy to set up. If you used 7 character slots on Atlantic and ventured there from say Legends and logged out, that charactler becomes part of Atlantics save data, and leaves Legends. Would you have to switch to Cluster limits on character to keep it rwasonable for example.

 

[canary]

Love the idea, fully support it, but if it doesn't somehow make money for UO I can't see them wanting to implement it.

 

[kelmo]

N/A?

 

[HD2300]

Wont happen because EA makes money from selling transfer tokens.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

What type of clustering? isn't there like 3 kinds?

 

[Thav12]

No. Absolutely not.

Among a lot of other reasons, the main reason (for me) to keep playing this game is its history per shard. The feeling it is a home. That you contribute something, even small things, and that they stay present in this virtual world is part of its incredible power. Make a new shard, allow people to migrate there, I don't care. However, each existing shard is a testimony to the combined efforts of so many people over a decade and a half. It is not all just about population sizes and number of people at the yew gate, or busy markets. I enjoy that part of the game as well, but I will make a new character on a busy shard for that. My home shard, with all its peculiarities and little tokens of my own presence is where i live though. It is also the reason that I keep coming back to UO despite breaks I have to take for real life and work related demands. Merge shards, and I am done...

 

[Dannyboy]

I can't say I honestly fully understand Server Clustering, but it sounds like it has the benefits of server merging without some of the negatives.

I think something like this really needs to be done, I think it would bring the community together more and breathe a bit of life back into the game. I think it will also make the game more attractive to new players if they see the world around them bustling with activity like it used to be.

So yeah brilliant idea

 

[Nexus]

No. Absolutely not.

Among a lot of other reasons, the main reason (for me) to keep playing this game is its history per shard. The feeling it is a home. That you contribute something, even small things, and that they stay present in this virtual world is part of its incredible power. Make a new shard, allow people to migrate there, I don't care. However, each existing shard is a testimony to the combined efforts of so many people over a decade and a half. It is not all just about population sizes and number of people at the yew gate, or busy markets. I enjoy that part of the game as well, but I will make a new character on a busy shard for that. My home shard, with all its peculiarities and little tokens of my own presence is where i live though. It is also the reason that I keep coming back to UO despite breaks I have to take for real life and work related demands. Merge shards, and I am done...

This idea isn't, merging each shard stays unique, but gains a "bridge" between them. Maybe a better example... Think of Back to the Future when Marty made small changes in history he created an alternate time line. Most of the people and events were the same others changed drastically due to those minor alterations. Now what this proposal says is use a moongate like our own shiny blue DeLorean to hop between those alternate, time lines (shards), without drastically altering their individual flow of history. Each one stays unique to itself just we just get to explore those alternate realities.

 

[Davin Darkblade]

This would help low population shards like Oceania. It also doesn't kill people's latency either since you can move between shards at will.

I think it's a great idea.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

I can't say I honestly fully understand Server Clustering

What I thought... as RAID is for drives, so as clustering is for servers, so if a box(regardless of type - rack mtg, card, etc) dies, another can pick up the slack. I'd be surprised if most places Don't already have this configuration already

 

[MalagAste]

The biggest issues I could see with this, and I do like the idea btw, are character slots, and passing off a character form server to server.

I doubt its easy to set up. If you used 7 character slots on Atlantic and ventured there from say Legends and logged out, that charactler becomes part of Atlantics save data, and leaves Legends. Would you have to switch to Cluster limits on character to keep it rwasonable for example.

I would say that if it went this route you would have combined character lists. Like if the shards get "clustered" into 4 shards into one persay then You would have a choice at log in of 28 characters. Then you could have the EM's of all 4 shards working together...

I think it the idea has merit. Can't see it happening though... Not sure what I'd do with that many characters on one cluster... Hum...

 

[sevan]

If you search stratics archives there have been prevoius threads on creating server clusters or "groups" / "pairing" as an alternatieve to the actual server merges. I still think this is the best of both worlds as it will help increase population thru combination and it makes the housing point null and void as nobody loses their housing spot/size or stuff in the process.

I myself would love to see a cross-shard moongate that would allow me to hop from LS Tram to GL or ATL tram for example to join other RP communities or attend events without having to actually move there or create new characters all together. In the past I have been to several "cross-shard" functions or pvp organized by players but it meant that everyone that went had to create a new character and train it up in advance to participate.

 

[Woodsman]

I myself would love to see a cross-shard moongate that would allow me to hop from LS Tram to GL or ATL tram for example to join other RP communities or attend events without having to actually move there or create new characters all together. In the past I have been to several "cross-shard" functions or pvp organized by players but it meant that everyone that went had to create a new character and train it up in advance to participate.

I want to say such a feature was hinted at around the time of the Inu the Crone plot, that there was some weirdness going on with the moongates - the moongates were talking or Inu or another NPC hinted that the moongates might become more powerful.

Even if they weren't stretched thin, I think EA makes too much money off of cross-shard character transfers. Plus it might be incredibly disruptive if you could easily/freely move around.

 

[hawkeye_pike]

I think the decreasing population, or more the decreasing player activity, is one of the biggest problems of UO today. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "server clustering", but I guess you mean some mechanics that allow players to travel to other shards.

I voted "Maybe" for two reasons:

• I think that many lots of techical problems would arise from that.
• I think it will not solve the problem of decreasing numbers of active players.

What UO needs are not new tools and features for the remaining community. It needs changes which make UO attractive to people who have never played UO before. I'm not going to go into details here, I have already written about this here.

Many suggestions on this board may be good, but none of them address the problem that UO is running out of new players. All suggestions concern features for the existing player base. That is not enough if you want to revitalize Ultima Online.

 

[Warpig Inc]

Mixed feelings. Got my ignore list just right for one shard. Added traffic would test its limits.

 

[Nexus]

What UO needs are not new tools and features for the remaining community. It needs changes which make UO attractive to people who have never played UO before. I'm not going to go into details here, I have already written about this here.

While I won't completely disagree with all that, the changed can't happen without a solid foundation underneath them to start with. And I think a change like this would help lay that foundation.

First off it would solidify the current community, granted this doesn't sound logical but it is... You hear quite often "We don't need more land...blah blah blah... it just spreads the player base out more!" but in truth a change like this would draw community together because it's not isolationism. You see severs like Atlantic where you have large populations comparatively, and then you see places like Origin, or Legends where you find Keeps named "Storage House". By connecting these two types of servers through Clustering you can redistribute the player base more evenly. This redistribution will eventually lead to a closer community as now you have people from Atlantic mixing with Legends, or Origins etc. until they eventually become one community.

Once that is in place, you can build a lure for new players, you know the game can take the hit of decreased attention from the Devs in terms of new content while they do so. You'd have 4-6 EM's that could keep things jumping they could be reassigned to "Clusters" instead of servers creating more in depth chaos than most of us honestly could expect.

As to EA's money from Cross Sharding that wouldn't go away, it would decrease but Clusters wouldn't be connected... one cluster would still require a transfer to another... that still leaves a use for Transfers.

Other benefits are self apparent. If new people go to Atlantic where's their chance to progress? Opening Clustered Shards would allow them to venture in to more of what UO has to offer, not to mention the current player base. Keep getting raided doing spawns on Atlantic? Hop over to Legends or Catskills... Get what I'm saying. PvP dying on your shard, go visit another get where I'm going?

 

[aarons6]

i kinda like it, say if you wanted to string back to back peerless or something and they were busy on one shard they might not be busy on another..

one way to keep the char slots is not let you move to a shard with a full character list?
say you have all 7 logged out on napa you cant move an 8th there.. but if you log into napa and move a char to say baha you would then only have 6 on napa and you could move one from say pacific there.

i dont see this happening tho cause then all of the servers would have to talk to eachother.. tons of moving would be going on and think about all your bank storage..

somewhere sometime something will go wrong and you would lose all of your stuff. it just happens.

because of this, it needs to stay how it is.

 

[Kael]

Love the idea, fully support it, but if it doesn't somehow make money for UO I can't see them wanting to implement it.

Or it could just be part of an expansion pack feature

Regardless I think is a very good idea

 

[Kael]

I think the decreasing population, or more the decreasing player activity, is one of the biggest problems of UO today. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "server clustering", but I guess you mean some mechanics that allow players to travel to other shards.

I voted "Maybe" for two reasons:

• I think that many lots of techical problems would arise from that.
• I think it will not solve the problem of decreasing numbers of active players.

What UO needs are not new tools and features for the remaining community. It needs changes which make UO attractive to people who have never played UO before. I'm not going to go into details here, I have already written about this here.

Many suggestions on this board may be good, but none of them address the problem that UO is running out of new players. All suggestions concern features for the existing player base. That is not enough if you want to revitalize Ultima Online.

Good points but I have found most people quit the game because of boredom. Work to keep the level of satisfaction high for the people who still play the game and hope that different expansions bring new/old players into the game.

This option in my opinion would allow people to hit different shards as a way to "spice" up their game. It would potentially allow others to place homes in locations that they would otherwise not be able to afford on their home shard.

 

[hawkeye_pike]

Good points but I have found most people quit the game because of boredom. Work to keep the level of satisfaction high for the people who still play the game and hope that different expansions bring new/old players into the game.

Exactly, and to my opinion the boredom comes from a lack of active players, and not from a lack of features or good expansions. UO is more crammed with features and mini-games like no other game. Still people get bored. Why? Because what makes a MMORPG are not only features, but the people.

 

[Jhym]

If they are working as most businesses are, they are already on virtual servers anyway.

So, conceptually they could do this, however in reality there would be major issues associated with it.

I don't know if folks remember how much trouble ( and how many exploits/bugs) there were with the initial setup of the subservers. Even with transfer tokens they've had multiple exploits.

Do you REALLY think there won't be any exploits for a major change like this? And SERIOUS bugs?

I give the devs credit for keeping things stable, but I don't expect them to be able to do something like this without major major issues coming up.

I'm fairly sure a lot of the "hardware" changes we had over the past few years were either conversions to virtual server farms or beefing up of those servers, so I don't expect them to want to do something like this for any cost savings -- I think they've already got the cost savings.

 

[Aurelius]

Each one stays unique to itself just we just get to explore those alternate realities.

But when people refer to shard 'history', it's slightly misleading term since we usually also mean the current life and activity on the shard that refers back to the 'history' too, and builds on it, rather than just considering the 'history' as being the places and items that are from the past of the shard. Probably something like 'culture' would sum it up better than 'history', but even that's not quite right...

One problem I can see is that if people want more people present to play with (or against), they will naturally congregate on one of the shards in the cluster, which will become and remain busier than the others, which in turn will decline simply because they are not used - so you may well end up 'preserving' those less active shards in the sense of them being 'museums' rather than active places to play.

If the argument is that some shards are under-populated (which is a tricky argument - there are certainly less people, but there are no 'dead' shards and many people prefer the quieter ones) and therefore we need more people, the key is not 'some places are quieter than others', it's that we need more people. That's the real issue, not 'how do we distribute the existing people differently'.

Go down the cluster route and I can pretty much guarantee you'll soon see "well of these four in the cluster, only one or maybe two are 'active' so why keep the dead ones hanging on?", and effectively we're back to where we are now.

 

[Zyon Rockler]

I think they should just pick one shard that other shards can connect to, mainly for events. The only problem that I see, is that, it would create lag issues but there should be connection between the shards and i'm sure this topic will come up over and over, until something happens.

If they did this, to the servers and allowed a type of travel where players could meet up from all servers, I would say make one Illshnar because there is no housing on Illshnar. So, if you picked Illshnar from any shard, you would end up in the same area. This would boost Champ Spawn Activity and allow a good testing ground, possibly a new ruleset where you can't drop or trade items.

Delucia and Papua, also have no houses. So, again for the 20 shards, you would have one Delucia and one Papua and the ruleset would be no trading and no dropping things on the ground. This would immediately increase the population in those areas. This way, housing isn't affected.

 

[Kael]

Or people will spread out more for bigger and better placed plots and player run towns, not as cramped popular farming spots, champ spawns that aren't raided as frequently.You may even see more faction fights, pvp raids onto another shards or even more player run events like the Rares Festival on Chesapeake

 

[Amber Moon]

I think this is a great idea. It would ultimately strengthen the game.

That said, I don't believe it will ever happen for technical reasons, but it's nice to wish upon a star once in a while.

 

[Zosimus]

I also played DaoC. I played in the Killibury Cluster on the merlin server. I thought it was a very good idea how they worked housing but helped the population on lower servers to be together in rvr and pve areas.

Server Clustering

In order to combat the problems of dwindling population, Mythic began to initiate server clusters. This involved grouping various servers together, allowing players to interact with those from other servers. The first server cluster went live with patch 1.74 on February 8, 2005, grouping together the Palomides, Iseult, Bors, and Gawaine servers.[17] Over the years, the server groupings/clusters have changed numerous times. The latest incarnation, Ywain, is a super cluster which grouped the entire playerbase into one. This went live with version 1.99b on September 10, 2009.[18

I'm not sure if it coud be achieved with UO doing clusters but I did vote yes. Anything is possible and "never say never" (yes I had to slip in a Bieber on stractics). Good post and poll Pandy

 

[Woodsman]

Exactly, and to my opinion the boredom comes from a lack of active players, and not from a lack of features or good expansions. UO is more crammed with features and mini-games like no other game. Still people get bored. Why? Because what makes a MMORPG are not only features, but the people.

Exactly. If the shard populations were at least twice what they are now, and I'm not talking about subscriptions, but actual people who are actively playing in-game, then we wouldn't even be talking about this.

Some of the most fun a lot of us had was working with new players, and that requires a strategy to unify on one client and an upgrade in graphics/artwork.

In addition to things like the client/artwork to bring new players in, I would toss in a better in-game communication system. Right now we have GC and some people have bulletin boards at their homes and even fewer people have mailboxes at their houses. It's 2011, we shouldn't have to step out of the game and into ICQ or Skype or email to do certain things or stay in touch with people who are offline.

 

[Woodsman]

I'm fairly sure a lot of the "hardware" changes we had over the past few years were either conversions to virtual server farms or beefing up of those servers, so I don't expect them to want to do something like this for any cost savings -- I think they've already got the cost savings.

I agree with this. We know they are running the shards on blades, and the server hardware is so much cheaper/better/faster than what we had 10 years ago - shards no long require as much hardware as they used to. If they did require it, I think you would have seen some shards closed/merged, since there would have been financial pressure.

Plus EA sunk a lot of money into virtual server hardware/data centers in the past few years in the US. A lot. I'm sure some of it was for Warhammer and now Star Wars, but there was a lot of work going on for the entire company, and it would make sense that UO would be moved to that hardware.

Even if they aren't on some kind of virtual server/cluster setup, they are on blades and depending on how many blades are necessary for a shard, it's fairly cheap, cheap enough to not require any closures if shards are at rock-bottom population wise.

 

[Zosimus]

Good point Woodsman but until Bioware decides to change the 90 day timer on housing and make it monthly you wont have that many active players. If I get bored I can take off a year and make only 4 payments for the full year. Now maybe I play for the month I paid for until it runs out then have 90 days to renew.

Now active players are paying 12 payments bored or not. So inactive players can take a break, save their real life money, keep their pixels and housing, and wait for the next new pixel event to attract them to come back and play. Then go back to being bored and wait yet again.

 

[Basara]

One of the variations on this I've brought up before on several occasions would be to have Ilshenar and Fel's T2A shared in shard clusters, and have Ilshenar opened to reds (but otherwise Trammel ruleset). However, you'd also probably need to remove the banks from T2A as well. Trammel Lost Lands would remain with their own shards, but as a Facet in its own right.

The shared Fel T2A would become cross-shard faction battlegrounds. The T2A would become accessible to reds (like Ilshenar in the suggestion above), get SOME of the Fel Champ spawn sites, with those spawn sites functioning as Fel-ruleset similar to the SA champs accessible from Trammel (and incorporate some of the non-Trammel spawn types, such as the ones from Malas & Tokuno).

Characters couldn't cross to other shards, but Ilshenar would become a means of cross-shard trade.

 

[WarUltima]

I am sure the whole "Server Clusters" would be cool... but then again, players will be happy, and might as well remove xfer tokens... (aka more expenses just so they can effectively reduce their income to EA)

What about server locations? or you are gonna do with West Shard cluster, East Shard Cluster and Asian Server Cluster?

I doubt any UO Shards EA own can have more than 1000 players logged in at the same time... and look at the lag and dc ect... and that's with the supposedly "upgraded hardwares" they just put in.

Now lets stuck 500% more players on the same server...

Besides can UO's current backbone support such structure?
Last time I checked UO came online when having 28.8k internet access is lucky, 56.6k is luxury and 128k ISDN will cost you hundreds a month.

 

[Mapper]

I voted no, Take Europa and Drachenfels for example. One is doing ok, the other is quiet.

If they merge Drachenfels players have more players to play with.. Great! But Europa's landmass is also doubled meaning Europa players get the bad end of the deal...

 

[Elden of Baja]

Interestingly enough, I am actually with warultima on this one. I highly doubt the hardware presently running UO could handle such a daunting task, and server lag on those servers would become so Immense they would be unplayable to anyone not on fios and living near the servers.

IT would be REALLY Cool, and save me from having to make my next 4 pvpers and trasnfer them to those shards

 

[Pandora_CoD]

First, I think we need to let go of the idea that somehow, magically we're going to attract new, active players to a game that is a 2D-rendered-into-3D game, 13 years old, with no marketing, no campaigns, and little to no customer support. Really. If you want that, push for the release of UO2 --- Mythic/Bioware needs to examine that possibility. For now we need bandaids... not cures.

Secondly, clustering of servers refers to grouping multiple gaming shards in a manner that allows easier travel between them without loosing ANYTHING (History, housing, or otherwise) from the individual servers that share that cluster. The core technology for this already exists, which also existed on DAoC prior to clustering (we could /charcopy); that is the character transfer token. All it requires is automation.

For any character that is logged outside of their "home" server, they can be defaulted to their homes upon log in. Although we had no problems with this in DAoC, I logged in right where I logged out, regardless of home server or not. I still had to make the choice of server when I log into the game, just the exact same way. So yes, I had 40 characters available to me on Killibury cluster, but if I wanted to play my Dwarf Healer, I had to choose Lancelot (my home server) first.

Character Transfer Token would still exist, they would just be Cluster Transfer Tokens instead. Rares and other events would still pull those sales in, sure... at a decreased rate, but with might be worth it to them for the increased customer satisfaction, which draws in more subscriptions anyways.

EA/Mythic's servers can hold probably just as much as Blizzard WoW servers, especially if they have just upgraded recently. The lag you see on big events for example results mostly from the client-side programming, nothing we can do about that. Remember that at one point these servers used to hold TEN THOUSANDS in the age of 56k modems and dialup and we survived it. We should be fine.

Physical locations matter very little when it comes to the technical execution of server clustering. US West Shard cluster, US East Shard Cluster, European Server Cluster, and Asian Server Cluster would do just fine right where they are. They are still independent stand-alone servers, so its not like you are adding 500% more players to any ONE server. Its as easy as saying one "character ID" is passed from one database to another automatically rather than manually (like transfer tokens). And besides its not about hardware cost efficiency, not really, its more about customer satisfaction, which like I said increases subscriptions.

There would be no "merge" of land... Europa would stay exactly like it is, so would Drachenfels. They would just have a connecting "bridge" for players to cross on.

Oh and I love the idea of better communication ... for one, I'd like to see the ability to create moderated chat channels (like before). But yeah everything you said about 2011 chatting systems, me likes.

 

[Neutron Bomb]

I am for it, but then EA would lose income with Transfer Tokens, and I doubt they would get rid of one of their most lucrative out of game buy ins.

 

[Freelsy]

I voted yes. But now I'm retracting my concurrence. It basically opens all the lands to an already small playerbase. Do spawns on any server... Be harder than you think to get good fights.

Overall point. Way to much land for small playerbase.

 

[Zosimus]

I am for it, but then EA would lose income with Transfer Tokens, and I doubt they would get rid of one of their most lucrative out of game buy ins.

She already had an answer for that in the above post above yours....here Ill quote it for you.....

Character Transfer Token would still exist, they would just be Cluster Transfer Tokens instead. Rares and other events would still pull those sales in, sure... at a decreased rate, but with might be worth it to them for the increased customer satisfaction, which draws in more subscriptions anyways.

I love this part of her post....

First, I think we need to let go of the idea that somehow, magically we're going to attract new, active players to a game that is a 2D-rendered-into-3D game, 13 years old, with no marketing, no campaigns, and little to no customer support. Really. If you want that, push for the release of UO2 --- Mythic/Bioware needs to examine that possibility. For now we need bandaids... not cures.

That a girl Pandy. What she says is totally right.


The only way this game is going to get a major influx of NEW players imo, it would have to be F2P and some marketing. To many games online that players can choose from. They have to make a decision on what direction they want to take UO or one day it most likely will be on facebook. I hate facebook btw

 

[Neutron Bomb]

What's a cluster transfer token? How was that "the" answer to my statement? Is it a token to jump from one cluster to another? They still wouldn't sell as many tokens as they do as it stands now.

I also now believe this will make the current servers more devoid than they already are. It sucks for servers like Drach, but I am satisfied with Chessy, so *shrugs*

 

[Woodsman]

I voted yes. But now I'm retracting my concurrence. It basically opens all the lands to an already small playerbase. Do spawns on any server... Be harder than you think to get good fights.

Overall point. Way to much land for small playerbase.

Yeah. It brings up some interesting ideas, but in the end it's just shuffling a small playerbase around.

I kind of like Basara's idea of only having a certain area or two being cross-shard such as Ilshenar and T2A being the cluster, and removing them from the normal shards.

In the end, still need a fixed up EC and some updated graphics that scale decently on a modern display to bring in new players, then revisit it.

 

[Gilmour]

Mythic opened the possible of server merges or something like this sometime ago with a book that spawned in our bank called "the shattering"

but yes i would support this also, either in a mannor of clustering as you say to travel between servers on will, i would also support a round of server merges.. even if this means i would likely loose my houses in the process since i am on a fairly low populated shard.

tho i think server merges are generelly not a supported idea. while clustering would be more valid.

 

[red sky]

They should just do an analysis of each shards active population per year and any shard that is below a certain population minimum get's a warning that the server will be shut down within 6 months and give each character that has logged into that server within 30 days a free non-transferable transfer token.

If you lose your house, that's just a risk of playing a low population shard. Thus, encouraging people to play well populated shards.

Or, just leave the shards alone and let people choose which one they want to play.

Oh yeah, and create a rules free shard that expires every year and resets itself. I love land rushes when everyone has nothing. These are probably one of the best experiences in the game. Screw the classic set up. Just remove all guard zones and make everything fell. This would be epic.

 

[Zosimus]

What's a cluster transfer token? How was that "the" answer to my statement? Is it a token to jump from one cluster to another? They still wouldn't sell as many tokens as they do as it stands now.

I also now believe this will make the current servers more devoid than they already are. It sucks for servers like Drach, but I am satisfied with Chessy, so *shrugs*

It's still the same thing as shard transfer tokens. Yes clusters would combine shards but if the prices were reduced people would buy more cluster tokens then they would shard transfer tokens. EA would see an increase of income coming in because peopel buy more when the prices are lower.

If you could buy 2 cases of good beer (cluster tokens) for 10 dollars from one store but you could buy decent case of beer (shard transfer tokens) for 20 dollars from another store, which one are you going to buy? How much would you buy at those prices given at each store? If the prices stayed the same at both stores forever which store will have more business? As long as the store selling cheaper is making money does it matter how they did it? We are human and we do like good deals is all I am saying .

It is a "funny wierd" how a site can sell transfer tokens cheaper then the actually EA site. I bought plenty of tokens from the site at half the costs then the EA site. If EA had those low prices then I would of bought them off of them.

EA makes more money off of UO more then just xfer tokens. If xfer tokens was the only thing keeping the game alive then it be dead by now.

 

[phantus]

Sounds like something new an innovative. I don't like it. It doesn't mesh well with UO. Sorry.

 

[Bianca_CoD]

EA makes more money off of UO more then just xfer tokens. If xfer tokens was the only thing keeping the game alive then it be dead by now.

Absolutely! As Pand said, they wouldn't loose the sale of these items either because this game, unlike any other ames I have played we seem to have a dire affinity for rares and I do not believe that's going to go away just because we have 2-3 servers clustered together. We're still going to want to collect rares from the other clusters. And not just rares, but items and replicas and so on. I do not think its going to cut their sales very much, and whatever it does cut out would be replaced by increases in subscriptions.

I am sure many players would like the idea of being able to return to servers they love and have histories with if they were allowed to openly travel to other clustered servers to experience new communities. I know of at least 7 of our guild members who's main gripe is that Catskills has a very low RP population, thus thier interest in reactivation is null. If we clustered Catskills with the other EST shards like Atlantic and Lake Superior, they would reactivate their accounts.

I vote hell yes!!!

 

[Cogniac]

I would rather see the elimination of server lines on individual shards first. Servers lines were originally created due to the limitations of hard drive space on servers in 1996 - you couldn't fit an entire shard on one disk, so you had to break it up.

Nowadays, you could fit an entire 1996 server onto an average desktop or laptop HDD, probably with quite a bit of room to spare, so I have to doubt that server lines are really still necessary.

 

[WarUltima]

Interesting I dont like it nor do I think EA would re-structure UO's backbone dramatically. I am a contracted IT and have worked with many major companies (e.g MGM International, and Park Palace Entertainment, you know caesar's palace, Rio and harrahs group ect) and in their main cold room and have seem all kinds of servers.

You will be surprised for certain giant company how antique some of their servers are, we are talking about servers from late 60s and early 70s. Why do they still use it and pay me 5 to 10 times more solely because of most new IT has no knowledge on how to maintenance those? (thank god I self studied those with a tons of books) The costs of a few projects on improving their oldest servers can buy them a brand new 2011 super server with like 12+ processors in em PER SERVER (and we usually have 1 or 2 more identical server running in duplex as the slave(s)).

I will let you think about this. Why are "they" (the big giants with $$$) so stupid and wont just buy new ****?

 

[Fayled Dhreams]

For now we need bandaids... not cures.

not ready to give up on a bug free day ...

far off in the dim mists of the future: true ...

but IF you have given up hope of ever being more than a dwindling niche of die hards ...

I say the merciful thing is to cut power to the "extreme life saving devices"

DNR

 

[Woodsman]

Interesting I dont like it nor do I think EA would re-structure UO's backbone dramatically. I am a contracted IT and have worked with many major companies (e.g MGM International, and Park Palace Entertainment, you know caesar's palace, Rio and harrahs group ect) and in their main cold room and have seem all kinds of servers.

EA has re-structured everything on the hardware side and did so a while back - UO is running on blade servers now (and possibly individual blades). They've also upgraded the back-end software a bit - setting up a new shard in the past was a nightmare from what I've read and heard from people who worked on it in the past, but I understand what you are talking about.

I don' think it's so much the technical issues as it's the lack of manpower. Anybody who doesn't think that UO was heavily impacted by EA's bloodbath in 2009 is nuts - Mythic was hit really hard by those layoffs, and UO does share resources with other MMORPGs under Mythic. They probably got hit on both the server and client side.

It wouldn't surprise me if the partial stagnation with the EC is due to some of those layoffs, assuming UO is running on a similar client to DAOC or Warhammer. If UO is running on the same engine as DAOC or Warhammer, then it would definitely explain it - layoffs of devs involved with the engine(s) would ripple across all groups/games that use those engines.

 

[Nexus]

UO does share resources with other MMORPGs under Mythic. They probably got hit on both the server and client side.

Sure they do, it's already been noted in the past that part of Mythics UO staff is assisting with the PvP system for SW:TOR. Heck they even share office space with other titles....