Player Initiated Sharding; Why?

Photosniper89

I'm curious if we could get some transparency on why the decision was made to make the process of player sharding have to be initiated by a player logging in.

The result of this is during peak times, events, ect. you have the servers being hammered by trying to split all of the players information into new/old databases.

Was there ever consideration given to writing a script that could run in the background during low pop times, during maintenance periods (extend it an hour or two to let it run after servers are back up but player login disabled), ect?

Surely, there is another way to have this process happen that isn't dependent on a person logging in.

Stamicka

The only people that have to get moved between databases are those that haven’t login in for a year. I’ll be honest, Xbox is noticeably improved after the cold storage change, so they definitely made the right decision.

SeaGtGruff

How could it be dependent on anything other than a player logging in? The idea is that if someone hasn't logged in for X amount of time, their account gets moved to cold storage. Then if that person comes back later and logs in, their account gets retrieved from cold storage. Logging in or not logging in is the controlling factor (and the passage of time). How do you envision it working differently? They've said that the retrieval process could take a while, resulting in a longer-than-usual loading screen, so it sounds like the server might stretch out the retrieval process as needed due to other processes having higher priority during extremely busy times (speculation on my part).

Dagoth_Rac

After the change, the "hot" database is empty. You can't have everyone log in and get a message that says, "Your character is in cold storage. We have marked it for retrieval. Please come back in a week or so and it should be available." If you log in after the change, you will want to play your character immediately. And that does not matter if it is 3 minutes after change or 3 years after change.

I guess they could have done something like automatically move every account that has played in last year to hot database as part of maintenance, but that might be even slower. Not everyone who has played in last year will log in immediately after change. So basing it on logging in does spread out the workload to some degree. Plus, the idea is to have the hot database be as small as possible. So having it start empty and only filling it in as players log in will ensure the hot database is as small as possible and, hopefully, as efficient as possible.

Photosniper89

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

How could it be dependent on anything other than a player logging in? The idea is that if someone hasn't logged in for X amount of time, their account gets moved to cold storage. Then if that person comes back later and logs in, their account gets retrieved from cold storage. Logging in or not logging in is the controlling factor (and the passage of time). How do you envision it working differently? They've said that the retrieval process could take a while, resulting in a longer-than-usual loading screen, so it sounds like the server might stretch out the retrieval process as needed due to other processes having higher priority during extremely busy times (speculation on my part).

Easy.

How many people play this game every day, week, month - tens of thousands.

build a script based on that and process them over a period of time. If someone logs in, who was once out of scope for the period of time, process the request.

I'd argue the number of people who they had to move in bulk who were active vs out of the period of time was 100 to 1.

Processing the 100 over x amount of time would have been a much better move - IMO.

Photosniper89

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

After the change, the "hot" database is empty. You can't have everyone log in and get a message that says, "Your character is in cold storage. We have marked it for retrieval. Please come back in a week or so and it should be available." If you log in after the change, you will want to play your character immediately. And that does not matter if it is 3 minutes after change or 3 years after change.

I guess they could have done something like automatically move every account that has played in last year to hot database as part of maintenance, but that might be even slower. Not everyone who has played in last year will log in immediately after change. So basing it on logging in does spread out the workload to some degree. Plus, the idea is to have the hot database be as small as possible. So having it start empty and only filling it in as players log in will ensure the hot database is as small as possible and, hopefully, as efficient as possible.

This is incorrect - that isn't how it works.

NettleCarrier

Didn't they say they would split the databases based on how long ago someone logged in? If you've played in the last year you'll be in the smaller hot storage and not have to think about it. Even if you hadn't, we're talking only a little extra time to load your character the first time you come back after a break - not "hours" or "weeks" as people are saying for whatever reason.

Marto

Photosniper89 wrote: »

I'm curious if we could get some transparency on why the decision was made to make the process of player sharding have to be initiated by a player logging in.

What's the alternative? Send a fax to ZOS to unlock your character after 3-5 business days?

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

You can't have everyone log in and get a message that says, "Your character is in cold storage. We have marked it for retrieval. Please come back in a week or so and it should be available."

That's exactly what the new system does. AFAIK it doesn't give you a "Your account is in cold storage" warning, but it does give you an extra-long loading screen (Maybe 5-10 minutes or so) while it retrieves your data.

While the servers were down on monday, ZOS moved all inactive accounts to cold storage. The hot server is the one you and I are playing in, and have been playing in for the past 7 years. The cold server is the new one.

The only additional server load being experienced right now is all the players who haven't played since 2020, logging in right now. Which is not a small amount of players, but it's definitely a small percent.

katanagirl1

What I want to know is why this cold storage wasn’t tried before AWA?

I mean, do that first and if things are much better then AWA might not be necessary.

xXSilverDragonXx

But, doing it right at this time, when there is an update and two back to back events seems like a strange time as you will have a lot of people on. Waiting until just after the events would make more sense. I guess they wanted to do it before the event but due to the update, there would be an uptick. Yet, this is the kind of process you would not want to hit all at once. No?

Marto

katanagirl1 wrote: »

What I want to know is why this cold storage wasn’t tried before AWA?

It was. Consoles got it a handful of weeks ago, and it caused no issues.

But the NA PC servers are considerably older, and have much more data.