[MUD-Dev] [bus][des] Anarchy Online and the free MMORPG...

[ceo]

ceo wrote:

> Right. Surprised that no-one has commented on this so far (or have
> I lost an MD thread somehow :) ?).

>  http://www.anarchy-online.com/content/news/articles/8447L

> ...

> First thoughts:

> ...

> Well, that was a quick tour of the biggest glaring problems. If
> anyone's interested (and I get time) I'll follow this up with a
> quick tour of some of what AO does really really well.

Before I start, there's some things that need clearing up, and some
epilogue to the previous post.

Firstly, to the various suggestions that my problems were because my
machine was too old, I was mostly playing on an Athlon 1800+ with a
Geforce 4 MX, that was bought brand new within the last 1.5
years. This is NOT an old machine; it wasn't physically available at
the time AO was launched.

Ditto the suggestions that my net connection was too crummy: I was
playing on a DSL connection from one of the top 5 UK providers (by
performance, not by fame/wealth/etc), although quite far from the
exchange: ping times to the net gateway are 16-17 ms; ping times to
NYU (from Brighton, going via London) are under 90 ms. This is not a
(generally) poor connection, although I've had considerably better
when closer to the exchange.

The other, more specific, responses I'll reply to separately. But
these two seemed big enough it was worth noting them here.

Epilogue:

  "up to 5 minutes [with the machine hung when you try to move
  through a zone boundary, e.g. just walking along a road]"

Did I say 5? In the last 24 hours, it's been an average (*AVERAGE*)
of 10.

Yes, folks - TEN MINUTES to move across an invisible boundary
between "zones" that are stitched together to make the game
world. This is in a game where EVERY gameplay action *requires*
moving through at least one such boundary, even for newbies, and mid
level players are expected to move through 4 or more of them to get
anything done (and another 4 if they want to get back to where they
started).

Frankly, it feels like I stepped through a time-warp and found
myself in late 2001, playing the first live version of this new
sci-fi game that had sounded interesting in previews. I feel very
disappointed that even after testing it (allegedly) the performance
is so incredibly bad.

Hang on, though - it's 2005, not 2001, and this is *the* game that
had the worst "couldn't handle the number of players who tried to
play" problems of all. Hmm.

  Conclusion: AO staff *never* solved the god-awful design /
  architecture / implementation mistakes that led to AO's near total
  failure 4 years ago. What actually happened is that the number of
  players had dropped so much in that time that the servers were
  eventually able to cope with the small number of players who were
  still left.

This only occurred to me very late on; even now, I find it
incredible, but it seems more probable than any other explanation
I've thought of.

FYI: for all those who don't play AO and don't believe me, this is
being experienced by most players. I went through this *** with 5
different teams, each with 4-5 other players, and everyone was
having the same problems. Yesterday, in a 2 hour period, I managed
to enter a dungeon precisely 3 times, and died within 2 minutes of
entering on each occasion. It then took an average of half an hour
to get back to try again. This particular dungeon is *a 1.5 minute
journey* from my respawn point; even heavily loaded a few weeks ago
it was still only 3-5 minutes usually.

This dungeon is one I can also solo most of the way, but in a group
of 6 I was dieing in seconds. Why? Because the catastrophic server
overloading is causing huge bottleneckes trying to get into the
instances, and when people get in they're in a hurry to play...

...In such a hurry, they rush into the dungeon, often leaving behind
one or two members of the team who have been "in transit" wiht their
PC's hung for over 10 minutes and everyone who did get through in
less than 10 minutes is bored waitin for them.

...They rush in, and being a bit careless (being annoyed, bored,
frustrated, angry, and without much free time left, having spent so
long trying to just START playing the game), they sooner or later
muck up, and try to retreat.

...The overloaded server invariably makes the retreat fail: people
get stuck in walls, people rubber-band and take the wrong turns,
running TOWARDS the boss mob instead of AWAY from the pursuing
pre-boss mob, etc.

In one particular case where I killed my team (accidentally), what
happened was approximately:

  1. team leader went to deal with something; didn't come back and
  stopped responding to tells (usually means he's been attacked by
  an unexpected respawned mob)

  2. map showed leader standing in a room, alone (usually means
  under attack)

  3. Went to investigate / help

  4. Found team leader; he ran off when I got there, then ran along
  the wall, turned a corner, and went somewhere stupid.

  5. I followed, to heal him, and then he sent me a tell asking why
  I was running around miles away from everyone else

  6. (he wasn't ANYWHERE NEAR the location his avatar was. He wasn't
  even in the dungeon any more; the server was replaying to my
  client his movements *outside* the dungeon (it seems; very hard to
  tell if this is what actually happened))

  7. All the mobs respawned at once, our team was split up, the lag
  meant our messages were delayed (or couldn';t be typed! AO
  designers chose to freeze the chat client when the client lags!),
  the lag meant we couldn't see where we were going to regroup, and
  when the lag subsided a little, we were in more or less the smae
  place but with almost every mob in the dungeon aggroed on at least
  one member of the team. No-one had attacked anything, but when you
  can't (reliably) see where you're going it's hard to avoid running
  into mobs.

It is worth mentioning explicitly that this is in an *instanced*
dungeon. For those not sure what this means, technically speaking an
instanced dungeon is trivial to prevent overloading problems with,
because it can be shunted to any physical machine in the cluster. I
had never before experienced serious/chronic overloading problems in
a dungeon beyond the onece-every-10-minutes lag etc, but yesterday
the server was clearly on its last legs.

Perhaps AO can't afford to buy any more servers? Perhaps yesterday
somethign "unusual" happened? Talking to players, I eventually got
reports from the hardcore ones who'd been around a long time that
this had been going on for at least 15 hours, and had 3rd-hand
reports that it had been going on for days. But, of course, a 3rd
hand report is almost never to be trusted when it comes to players
and complaining ;).

.....

A few more followups to last time:

Inventory de-ordering:

  100% of the time, my inventory was being scrambled. Someone
  mentioned that I should turn list-mode off. "list mode???"
  (undocumented; instead of large icons you get a list a la an HTML
  table / spreadsheet with critically important data THAT SHOULD BE
  ON THE ICONS (but isn't; this is the awful GUI I referred to last
  time) in additional columns).

  I checked that it was off by turning it on. Isn't useful, because
  it lacks basics such as fine-grained sorting and customizable
  columsn [the stuff that is included with every GUI library you can
  get your hands on for free, but obviously passed the funcom staff
  by; but that's a separate story...the failure of some games to use
  standard GUI widgets]

  And...lo and behold! My inventory never scrambles!

  Personally, I class this as a typical beta-test bug; it affects
  everyone, it's pretty easy to diagnose and trace with a normal
  amount of tracing and re-testing, it's VERY easy to confirm/deny,
  and it's quite atomic (not a quantitive bug, but a boolean
  one). It also appears to be a single uninitialized variable or
  flag or array (guess).

  But...this game has been gold for almost 4 years. c.f. previous
  comment aobut how core and critical bugs are still ruining AO.

No manual for new players:

  There was a "manual" (ha!) on the website, which took almost 5
  minutes to read end to end and contained almost nothing more than
  the in-game help and mouseovers already had.

  But, several weeks after the new players came along, they released
  a PDF manual for new players which actually had useful information
  in; pity that many people had probably outgrown it by then or
  already given up (I know several who told me that when the manual
  arrived they just deleted the email because they no longer cared)

PS: the rest is to follow in a separate email because it was too
long for one post!

Adam M
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