Server vs server is the next big thing. SOE pls learn from the failed Hossin event

Rolfski · 2013-08-11, 05:16 PM

SOE's obvious Eve Online-ripped strategy is that players are the content. With that in mind, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the horribly failed Hossin event on PTS today. It was a 100% player driven event but SOE completely failed to make that happen.
For those who weren't there: It was supposed to be on a never-seen-before-scale event, featuring Miller (NC) vs Woodman (TR) vs Cobalt/Ceres/US outfits (VS) that never took off because PTS crashed and everybody was scattered after that.

There are obvious lessons here, the most important being that SOE desperately needs a dedicated instanced event server to facilitate player driven events. Players can organize way cooler events than SOE could ever think of. SOE just needs to make sure these events run butter-smooth and get good media coverage.

Hossin PTS was just pre-cum. Servers but also outfits have a natural tendency to duke it out with each other in an instanced environment. SOE just needs to be prepared for this and this game will literally sell itself.

Hamma · 2013-08-11, 05:23 PM

I don't think SOE failed anything, thousands of players hit a test server that's not really meant for such events. This is what battle islands will be for, but I doubt we will ever see specific instanced areas for outfits to duke it out that would take players out of the main game to often.

See also:

Rolfski · 2013-08-11, 05:31 PM

Originally Posted by Hamma

I don't think SOE failed anything, thousands of players hit a test server that's not really meant for such events. This is what battle islands will be for, but I doubt we will ever see specific instanced areas for outfits to duke it out that would take players out of the main game to often.

You exactly illustrate my point. SOE created battle islands for instanced events while completely forgetting there own "size matters" slogan, that could actually result in bigger battles any battle island could ever handle.

Hamma · 2013-08-11, 06:12 PM

Honestly I don't think they ever intended for players to do what was attempted on Hossin. I'm not making excuses, just saying I don't see how they can fail something they have not planned for.

Redshift · 2013-08-11, 06:20 PM

They would benefit from making sure the test could handle that many players, then they'd actually get the play tests they need for new continets. Chuck up a new map, get a cross server player event to test it to hell and back.

Hamma · 2013-08-11, 06:22 PM

I agree, but they all poured in at once. As Higby said, looks like the tutorial situation is what caused the crash.

Redshift · 2013-08-11, 06:40 PM

maybe they'll just disable that on the test server in the future, it's not of benefit to anyone anyway

Rolfski · 2013-08-11, 07:04 PM

Originally Posted by Hamma

Honestly I don't think they ever intended for players to do what was attempted on Hossin. I'm not making excuses, just saying I don't see how they can fail something they have not planned for.

Exactly my point, they failed to plan in detail for their own "player is the content" strategy. They planned for this "give power to the players strategy" for sure but they just failed horribly in executing it.

Lonehunter · 2013-08-11, 08:34 PM

Originally Posted by Rolfski

they failed to plan in detail for their own "player is the content" strategy. They planned for this "give power to the players strategy" for sure but they just failed horribly in executing it.

No they didn't, SOE didn't plan anything. You said yourself this was a player run event, using SOE resources in a manor other then intended even. You have no one to be upset with other then yourself for feeling SOE is obligated to keep a TEST server bug free, and assuming you'll get a large percentage of people from each server.

If they say "Player is the content" you don't get to apply that to every single aspect of the game and get pissy when it doesn't meet your inflated expectations. I'm betting if that was a quote is was referring to the player studio.

If you meant to have a discussion about an alleged need for instanced combat then you need to refine your topic more. Because outfit vs outfit or anything "instanced" is a totally different topic then "server vs server". That's like World vs World ala Guild Wars 2. Try looking up threads on the battle islands. They are balancing these for MLG and will be 1 faction vs 1 faction. If you really want to turn PS2 into a 100% fair, even sides, scheduled event, invite only, organized with people, and don't want to play the obvious CoD or BF3, then these are probably your best bet.

Micro · 2013-08-12, 12:10 AM

Well we did give them two weeks of time and told them to expect a HUGE TEST of Hossin.

Rolfski · 2013-08-12, 01:22 AM

Originally Posted by Lonehunter

If you meant to have a discussion about an alleged need for instanced combat then you need to refine your topic more. Because outfit vs outfit or anything "instanced" is a totally different topic then "server vs server".

It's really not when you come to think of it actually. SOE designed the whole battle islands thingy with e-sports and outfit vs outfit events in mind, but in the process they might have forgotten their own "seize matters" motto and completely overlooked the possibility of servers fighting other servers, which makes a hell lot of sense when you think this through: Players are just as proud to fight for their own server as they're proud to fight for their own outfit. Fighting for your own server might actually sound more fun. Not only for the scale but also because you finally have the chance to play along with the people you fight everyday.

Roy Awesome · 2013-08-12, 01:47 AM

Originally Posted by Rolfski

It's really not when you come to think of it actually. SOE designed the whole battle islands thingy with e-sports and outfit vs outfit events in mind, but in the process they might have forgotten their own "seize matters" motto and completely overlooked the possibility of servers fighting other servers, which makes a hell lot of sense when you think this through: Players are just as proud to fight for their own server as they're proud to fight for their own outfit. Fighting for your own server might actually sound more fun. Not only for the scale but also because you finally have the chance to play along with the people you fight everyday.

You realize that the live servers could have handled such an event, but the Test server couldn't? The test server is NOT running the same hardware that live servers are.

This was a player organized event where they all piled into a server not meant for that.

Canaris · 2013-08-12, 04:34 AM

Originally Posted by Roy Awesome

You realize that the live servers could have handled such an event, but the Test server couldn't? The test server is NOT running the same hardware that live servers are.

This was a player organized event where they all piled into a server not meant for that.

the reason the test sever was chosen was to level the playing field cert and equipment wise, just choosing 1 live server to hold the event on would mean two thirds or more of those attending would be BR1, while the rest would have the unfair advantage of it being their server with their fully kitted out characters.

Exactly what happened on Woodman when they shifted the event over to it least give it go.

I had a feeling it would end up like this trying to ram so many people into one server but this is why pencils have erasers.
Remember people something like this has never been done yet in PS2, there's always bound to be trouble and issues.
This event can be easily rescheduled as the ground work and idea are planned out.
SOE can help by maybe disabling the tutorial section for a weekend to ease the servers burden. This ain't no sky falling thing tbh.

Hind sight is always 20/20, take the lesson learned the hard way apply them to make thefuture easier.

Roy Awesome · 2013-08-12, 05:25 AM

Like, I fully respect what you guys were trying to do (and even put it on the banner on /r/planetside), but did you really expect the test server to not do any differently? It's not a live server. They don't need the resources of a 6,000 person game server because that many people don't play on it.

Atleast you guys did give them a heads up. It should have lead to someone being on-call to give it a restart if that was needed, but it was Sunday so I'll give them a break on that.

Mastachief · 2013-08-12, 05:42 AM

On the plus side there are now atleast 1500 EU players with the pts downloaded so perhaps if SOE ran (actually ran, not just give a date and time) test event to stress test hossin - searhus - oshur they will get a meaningful amount of player taking part.

As for rushing the server tutorial... not sure how low the threshold is for that but most of the players taking part had setup days before to spend certs and in fact the miller outfit had over 300 players online about an hour before the issues started.

Also had the server not fallen over the event would still have failed due to lag and other network issues.
-invites taking 15seconds to arrive and then timing out
-terminals not working
-repair heal not working
-shields not working
-esf controls intermittently failing to respond
-players dieong 5 seconds after you have killed them

The PTS (atleast on hossin) cannot handle any meaningful numbers (300).

Another plus for miller atleast is increase communication between all the outfits on the server.