My guess is the lag is caused because they are trying to host the game "in the Amazon Cloud". No offence to Amazon but their amorphous blob of distributed systems with a wacky extra abstraction layer really doesn't suit itself well to serving an MMO. Remember when DDO moved from physical servers to VMs? Imagine its like that, except the storage subsystem is really slow.

Strake wrote on Oct 5^th, 2021 at 2:18pm:


Ah but would the system work any better if it were running on more suitable hardware? You can get around a lot of hardware shortcomings using software optimization, but that is far and away more difficult than simply getting adequate hardware.

One of the things I've often found interesting is despite the HUGE market for MMOs there appears to be next to zero effort by hardware manufacturers to provide better solutions.

What do MMOs need to do? They need to manage an imperial shitton of incoming and outgoing connections(like a mainframe) and then do an assload of processing on the backend(like an application server), then store it all on a very fast database. Game companies get by through splitting the games across different systems none of which is really optimized for their needs. One company tried back in the late 2000s; they paired an IBM mainframe with some very fast processing blades and created the "game frame". It sadly never caught on.

To be fair I'm just speculating too. And talking shit about AWS's storage subsystem.

Strake wrote on Oct 5^th, 2021 at 3:09pm:


Their storage system is fantastic for all of the general shit AWS does(hosting apps, being netflix, hosting websites, running amazon, etc, etc, etc). Its really great if you need low-speed access to a lot of data in a highly distributed environment(in a nutshell, AWS's storage system consists of thousands of individual drives. A file system sits on top of it which replicates files across those drives. So for example if you want something like Netflix(which lives entirely in the amazon cloud) you simply replicate each copy of Stranger Things 8,000 times(thats what people use netflix for, right?) and store it across a hundred different data centers, making the file very high availability and getting around the low read-speeds of the infrastructure.

Its not so great for running something like an MMO, where you need high speed/high availability storage in a centralized place(for example: if Strake mines some ore while being in NY, then the ore needs to immediately appear as gone if Flav wants to mine it from wherever the fuck France is(somewhere in Asia, right?)). This doesn't work so well if they're both reading off of separate copies of the database distributed all over the world.

But that's just my 2 cents. Someone did apparently get Lustre working on the Amazon cloud and managed to get like a million IOPs, so I guess anything is possible?

noamineo wrote on Oct 5^th, 2021 at 3:41pm:

That's pretty interesting. And, seemingly, remarkably wasteful.

It's funny, I spent 20 years as an embedded software engineer. I know my shit. But for the past year or so, I've been working a blend of cyber security, systems administration, and DevSecOps. It's crazy how there is SO MUCH out there that I have no clue about, despite being a seasoned engineer.

noamineo wrote on Oct 5^th, 2021 at 4:21pm:

Nope, had to Google both. Have to LOL at Heartbleed, though. Seems like my embedded SW experience would have come in handy there - bounds-checking inputs becomes second nature after a while in that segment.

noamineo wrote on Oct 5^th, 2021 at 7:18pm:

I kind of disagree here. Yes, the code was simple, but look at it more carefully. It in itself is relying on capabilities external to the code itself. For example, the String() function. Or the fact that it doesn't need to do any memory allocation or bounds checking on the underlying character array. If you expand the utility inherent in that code, it's probably a thousand lines.

And therein lies my disagreement: the issue was not abject laziness on the part of developers using leftpad. In fact, if everyone wrote their own implementation, 5% or more of said implementations would have a bug. The issue comes down to npm not establishing a secure dependency system. The dude should not have been allowed to delete his code. Developers who used the code do share some of the blame: they didn't perform due diligence (ensuring perpetual availability) on the code they were using.

noamineo wrote on Oct 5^th, 2021 at 7:18pm:

Well, yeah, that's C vs python for ya.

Give it a bit and some old-ass Assembly Troll will come out of the woodwork and drop the run time down another 700%

Re-ran the first group quest again last night, the lag-like issues were gone. After playing solo for so long, it was nice to get into a group. That is one thing I think DDO got right, despite all the derision and their eventual capitulation: requiring group play  in a game that has "multiplayer" in its genre title. I don't know why every single modern MMO is basically a single-player game with occasional but rare grouping until end game, where you must suddenly find people to group up with or leave the game.

I suppose an argument can be made that DDO just shifted that transition downward, and possibly cost them a large chunk of potential players as well. It just felt... right.

Amusingly, NW does not have any kind of group finder, apart from a global "recruitment" channel. I guess it's mostly unnecessary as there isn't a lot of group content (if we ignore the PvP stuff, which is probably not fair to do... end game looks to be faction-vs-faction PvP, and it sounds like a hoot from what I've read in chat).

This game is definitely addictive. I don't know how, but they somehow made gathering and crafting enjoyable. After spending years collecting trinkets (what were they called? Collectables?) in DDO, only to have them use completely new ingredients when they finally brought in crafting, it is weird to have a game where EVERYTHING has value. The vendor-less economy is shockingly booming. Abundant, easily farmed raw materials sell for good money on the trading post (auction house). It's crazy, but I get it... you're trying to level up one of the crafting trees and need 100 doodads. Sure, you could run out and farm them, or you could just hop on the trading post and drop a little coin and get that crafting level now.

I'm still blown away by the beauty of the world. Graphics and textures have come a long way, that's for sure. Nothing feels repetitive - it's not the same 3-4 buildings over and over. Each zone has a unique feel and look. The environment is massive and very immersive. The lighting, shadows, and general environment movement (think leaves on trees, grass in fields) is unbelievable. And, impressively, it doesn't seem to be much of a strain on hardware. My rig was built five years ago, and admittedly it had high end stats for the time. I'm playing on a 4k monitor at native resolution with all settings maxed while also running a second 4k monitor with an interactive map, on a GTX 980ti... no problems at all.

Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect.

- Combat, particularly when in a group, is very visually loud. Between all of the nameplates, health bars, and damage numbers, you can easily lose your character in the assault on your ocular nerves. It significantly detracts from combat, IMO. I suspect the answer lies in changing text sizes and some color palette updates, but I'm no human factors engineer, so I really can't say exactly how to fix it.

- There is a lot of walking, and there are no mounts. I don't really disagree with the decision on no mounts - the world is large, but not prohibitively so. There are some limited teleportation capabilities that take the edge off, especially once you learn how to ration those abilities wisely. But, also, gathering resources is a big part of the game, and you find those resources by wandering the world. Plus, the world is beautiful!

- Some of the storyline questing takes weird paths that result in a player getting stuck until they figure out what they missed. The details are boring, and the issues are minor and common to all new MMOs. It's not really a big deal but it can be annoying.

- You cannot manage inventory on the run. You can do other things, like read your quest journal and look at the map, but inventory management stops all activities. I suspect this is very intentional, as it puts a soft cap on dynamic gear loadouts (meaning, it's harder to change gear mid-combat, beyond the limited weapon set switching inherent to the combat system). It's just, you know, there's a lot of walking, and I'd like to read item descriptions while on the run.

noamineo wrote on Oct 11^th, 2021 at 6:18pm:

"Exploit early, exploit often."

The later you get in, the more exploits you miss out on. I think my exploit of Wildstar was pretty fucking epic, particularly given the internal attention it received from Carbine.

Whew... tough times for New World right now. Bugs galore. It seems like nothing works as described. Massive dupes going on - it got so bad that they have completely shut down all forms of wealth transfer. You can't give someone money or items, you can't use the trading post (auction house). I've heard you can't pay your property taxes, and companies (guilds) can't maintain the towns they own. This means all crafting stations will soon be downgraded to the lowest tier.

Amusingly, many of the exploits should sound very familiar to folks here... dragging your window around to freeze/render your character invincible, using rate limiters and storage sheds (banks) to duplicate items, unsanitized chat windows, etc. One of the more recent ones is even more low-tech. You can use Steam to share your library with friends, essentially enabling you to spawn endless free NW accounts. People were doing that, zerging through the first couple starter bits, then transferring that ~500gp to their character. Rinse/repeat and you can earn a lot of money in a small amount of time... particularly if you're a gold farmer with 10 bots running at once.

noamineo wrote on Nov 2^nd, 2021 at 6:23pm:

Hah! I missed the duping fun by a decade. But I did do a lot of window holding to get past the original goggles room in Abbot!

I am willing to bet that my favorite exploit is still in place in DDO, though no one cares anymore. Way back in the day, back when there were maybe 3 raids, our guild used to hold massive farming trains on Velah. I'd park Qwijy inside the door at the end of VoN 5. We'd send a group in to take her down, but before we killed her, everyone would leave except one person. That person would kill her and get two pieces of raid loot - which, if I remember correctly, could still be passed to other group members.

Then, people would join the group, run upstairs in VoN 5, /death next to the door. Qwijy would grab their stone, place it on the other side of the door, and throw them a rez. VoN 6 would reset to a new instance after everyone left it.

We would get all of the alts of the entire guild flagged for VoN 6 during the week, then run the VoN 6 train for hours upon hours upon hours... sometimes days, I think... burning one flag per run (sometimes two if a piece popped that someone wanted). Then we'd start recruiting non-guild friends too, to use their flag.

Anyway, $10 says this still works

Strake wrote on Nov 2^nd, 2021 at 6:47pm:


I meant the massive dupes going on in New World, which this thread is about

Strake wrote on Nov 2^nd, 2021 at 6:47pm:


Fairly sure that method stopped working when they shifted away from the 2 guaranteed drops and into the raid loot only drops in the chest approach they currently use.

Quote:


I'm loving this with the light staff. Skills can be fired immediately after a shot. Dodging interrupts the basic attack cooldown, and basic attacks reduce skill cooldowns.  You can basically fire it 50% faster than "intended" without even realising that you're "exploiting"