Can Microsoft help re-configure server infrastructure to expand max players in Cyro?

Armethius · February 2021

Technologies definitely exist, especially with Microsoft's expertise, to distribute computing across multitudes of machines. I am wondering if ZOS is working closely enough with experts to understand how to take the most demanding pieces of Cyrodil and distribute that across clusters of machines. There are likely many different specific implementations.

Is it the cost that ZOS is unable to support?

Getting Cyrodil up to 1000 v 1000 v 1000 would probably make it the best game available on the market. Not sure even New World will be able to compete with that. Wondering why they aren't taking this very seriously?

alterfenixeb17_ESO · February 2021

Microsoft could possibly help with hardware part and operating system as long as servers are using Windows and are in reality owned by ZOS, Zenimax, Bethesda or MS. However improving hardware resources utilization by reorganizing infrastructure and improving implementation of application layer part are two different things and while MS could help with former they have no competence whatsoever in latter as they do not know this code.

I am wondering if ZOS is working closely enough with experts to understand how to take the most demanding pieces of Cyrodil and distribute that across clusters of machines

This is what I mean. MS may be able to provide some guidance here however the actual implementation depends purely on ZOS as such solution goes far beyond anything MS provides in their portfolio (MMORPG server is not same type of clustering as Azure). In reality, considering also technical debt over years, it may be basically too costly.

Sahidom · February 2021

Maybe a quantum server hosting site would resolve all the performance issues except the bottleneck of the streaming data across the Internet. 😛

Aerenthir · February 2021

Cyrodill doesn't even work when we're like 100x100x100 and you want to increase that by 10 times?

MKintr · February 2021

No, they can't, because the problems come from bad programming and not from the hardware.

$spacefracking$ · February 2021

Hopefully they send in a dream team from azure to figure out how to move this whole thing into a virtualized system. They probably will, but I wish they'd hurry up. No way a microsoft application will be running on the metal for any meaningful period of time unless they are condemning it to a 6 foot hole.

Nestor · February 2021

Azure and AWS are essentially the same. They both are Virtual Environments. They both can span these environments across multiple server blades.

The problem is this game engine started out as a single player engine and it was modified to be an MMO. We used to have good Cyrodiil performance with massive populations. Then the devs started tacking on things like Vet Ranks, Procs, Champion System and Passives that have to be calculated for each one individually. Until that system can be simplified, performance will suffer.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · February 2021

Actually the issues started when many of the client side functions were switched to server side and the DDOS protection from Akamai slowed down the connection to the servers.