ED Server / Servers Down problems discussion thread

[Blacklyche]

chill man...if you know anything about software development and scaling infrastructure this kind of stuff happens all the time. finding and dealing with these kinds of issues are exactly why they wanted players involved in Private Alpha , Beta tests. You chose to pay money and be involved warts and all.....this and other stuff will be resolved soon enough

I agree completely. This is all part of the process, the development team are moving into unknown territory and we are here to help them.

This game has not been released yet

 

[Hellhawk666]

I did not have such problems yesterday playing for about 6 hours. As well as at least one server is already added for sure.

Ditto. Played for 5 hours straight, two or 3 minor issues, but overall very solid. Pretty good for the first day of beta, I'd say - I was expecting it to fall over completely in the first 10 minutes

 

[usernametaken]

If you want to play the game, wait for it to be released. If you want to help test the game before it's released and help to make it stable and better, then do so, understanding that it may be quite broken and frustrating at times.

 

[alphabet]

As a software engineer in real life, I can tell you that the "B" in Beta stands for "Buggy as hell"...

The "A" in Alpha stands for "At least it compiled..."

LMAO! +1 to you sir.

 

[Aleksej]

If you want to play the game, wait for it to be released. If you want to help test the game before it's released and help to make it stable and better, then do so, understanding that it may be quite broken and frustrating at times.

It seems to me that quite a few people think that Alpha and Beta give access to the game that should be as stable and as playable as the final release and do not understand that we are testing it in order to prevent this issues from happening in the final release.

 

[elriytane]

ive crashed quite a lot, most of my crashes are when i try to look at the galaxy map, i click it then boom back to desktop and send report so i dont use it atm... ive had a few lag if its lag coming out of SC haveing to wait 30secs to 2mins for it to kick back to normal space. i also get the menu from the space station overlapping my radar thats quite annoying.

 

[Correal]

It seems to me that quite a few people think that Alpha and Beta give access to the game that should be as stable and as playable as the final release and do not understand that we are testing it in order to prevent this issues from happening in the final release.

That maybe due to how other publishers/dev's have been using the term 'beta' for glorified demo's before the games launch for the last few years. Muddies up the actual definition.

Don't think of this as a demo or stable but something to help the team work out all the bugs and glitches to make us the better game upon release

 

[jinja]

The Premium Beta rocks!

I just played the Premium Beta for several hours. It crashed a few times, but nothing that wasn't a known issue. Oh, and I am logging on from Brazil, btw.

I had a great time... trading, hyperdriving, supercruising, pew-pewing.

Amazingly good for an early beta. The OP needs to look at the list of added features and bug-fixes over the past few weeks and months, before shouting loudly about a game not being playable.

It isn't yet a game, but I just played it for several hours. And it is beautiful! :smilie:

 

[pompomJuice]

hahah this guy... add more servers... haha this is... ****ing funny

We just got loads new (noob) servers with the beta release

Take it slow!

 

[Alex Muad'Dib]

chill man...if you know anything about software development and scaling infrastructure this kind of stuff happens all the time. finding and dealing with these kinds of issues are exactly why they wanted players involved in Private Alpha , Beta tests. You chose to pay money and be involved warts and all.....this and other stuff will be resolved soon enough

When David Braben did ED's kickstarter he said that the networking part was one of the parts they already had working. We've been through some alphas, and networking still seems broken. The only major improvement I saw in networking seems to derive from the fact that ED's universe got bigger and it's rarer to find many players in the same instance.

I can usually tell when someone enters my instance... the game becomes slower and laggier (even NPCs).

 

[Gibbon]

I really want to play this game, but I don't really want to play it in this state, so I'll wait, maybe the temptation will be too great when the standard beta comes along, maybe I'll just wait for the whole game to ship.

Sensible point, one i happen to agree with. I've done way too much testing in my time writing mods for another game, i'll personally wait until standard beta. I have to say it's tempting to go premium, but it's either that or new tyres for my motorbike and bike wins :smilie:

As to the comments from the OP, chill out fella. This is called software development, not playing a game because guess what? It's not ready yet.

 

[pompomJuice]

Yes!

When David Braben did ED's kickstarter he said that the networking part was one of the parts they already had working. We've been through some alphas, and networking still seems broken. The only major improvement I saw in networking seems to derive from the fact that ED's universe got bigger and it's rarer to find many players in the same instance.

I can usually tell when someone enters my instance... the game becomes slower and laggier (even NPCs).

Yes!

 

[dungeonseeker]

That maybe due to how other publishers/dev's have been using the term 'beta' for glorified demo's before the games launch for the last few years. Muddies up the actual definition.

Don't think of this as a demo or stable but something to help the team work out all the bugs and glitches to make us the better game upon release

This. FPS games (DICE I'm looking at you) seem to be using BETAs to get people interested in the game. I understand you need to do server stress tests but you should call them server stress tests and not BETAs because you certainly don't use the BETAs to catch bugs as proven by the fact that your games release with more bugs than the BETA had.

The term BETA is losing its meaning for sure.

 

[Tinman]

When David Braben did ED's kickstarter he said that the networking part was one of the parts they already had working. We've been through some alphas, and networking still seems broken. The only major improvement I saw in networking seems to derive from the fact that ED's universe got bigger and it's rarer to find many players in the same instance.

I can usually tell when someone enters my instance... the game becomes slower and laggier (even NPCs).

Not quite what David said though. This is what he wrote:

We already have a large team who are very experienced at delivering complicated projects, and the key high-risk components (like networking) are already in place.

The networking IS in place and it IS working. Noone would be able to play the game at all if it wasn't.

There is still however lots of work to be done to make it as bugfree and smooth as possible and they are hard at work on this as we speak. Lots of the problems we see now is due to corner cases around certain players connections and network hardware/settings. Things they can only find and deal with when testing it "out in the wild". One of the devs wrote this a couple of days ago:

It is a challenging problem, we're both trying to fix underlying network protocol issues, and also look at workarounds. The protocol is intended to handle lost packets, but subtle bugs can sometimes creep in due to packets lost or arrived out of order, or if two machines both send each other conflicting requests, which overlap in flight.

One machine with a lossy connection or slower ping times can affect everyone in the p2p session, it gets worse with the size of the group, and is especially difficult for a new player joining the session.

One of the plans I'm working on is for all the machines to evaluate a 'quality of service' metric for all their connections (based on loss rates, ping times, overdue message queue size, etc) and report this to the server, which can then combine them into a session 'health'. We would then use this to avoid adding new players into a dysfunctional session.

The main changes from Alpha3 to Alpha4 were:
* Optimisations: reducing total network traffic load
* Flow control: don't send too much to another machine that can't keep up
* Load balancing: a busy machine will hand-off authority over NPC ships to less heavily loaded machines
* Improved prioritisation of messages

Howard

http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showpost.php?p=417153&postcount=21

This kind of work coupled with the upcoming matchmaking/grouping system will probably make huge improvements in this area.

For me personally every build have been better than the previous one in terms of networking.

 

[dungeonseeker]

Unfortunately I'm yet to encounter a game which uses P2P that doesn't suffer from networking issues from time to time, its something that's always going to happen as there is such a huge diffenece in network speeds from town to town & city to city, never mind country to country, and your always gonna get the jokers who insist on joining the game while their utorrent client is downloading every TV show from the last 7 days.

The only real solution is to drop players with bad connection into their own instances however that then makes their game single player. Other than that I think we have to accept that lag, at least from time to time, is an inevitability.

 

[kilvenny]

My experience thus far has been very positive. I have not played as much as some, but had no crashes. Had some issues with the graphic and controller options and the galaxy map which appear to be a screen resolution issue - I think this is well documented. Once I changed my resolution all is wonderful again.

I have an I7 4770 and a GTX760 plus a decent network connection. Whilst my setup is not top end its semi decent. I am minded to think that maybe some of the issues are stemming from poor performance from either a hardware or network performance side for one or more players in an instance. Generally with unoptimised code in testing its better to have over specified system resources so you can account for the sub optimal code.

It would be interesting to see what happened if all the players in an instance had decent kit and internet performance.

Maybe the suggested specs are too low and ought to include suggested upload/download speeds for the purposes of beta testing.

This is not to suggest there are not bugs on top of that, but I wonder if this is a major factor.

 

[Kroenen]

Maybe I came a little late to this party, but I'm loving the ride so far! However this got me wondering...why did it end up with this P2P 32 player net bubble design, when surely a dedicated central server would handle it so much better, and allow for many more players to interact at the same time?

Don't get me wrong, I don't profess to be an expert, nor will I be bothered if it remains the way it is (albeit optimised a little over time), but I'm just curious on the reasoning behind this design decision.

 

[Squicker]

Maybe I came a little late to this party, but I'm loving the ride so far! However this got me wondering...why did it end up with this P2P 32 player net bubble design, when surely a dedicated central server would handle it so much better,

It's a weird one, and I don't know the answer to this because I also have not been paying much attention. The question it leaves me with is, how is authoritative validation of client state and transmitted data performed? Surely there is a server based process checking this all the time to ensure no exploits or hacks are being performed by clients, and therefore some centralised servers exist if merely to ensure security, client consistency and data integrity?

I'm not saying they have not thought of all this, perhaps FD have made a great solution, but generally that's something performed by the central servers because they can be trusted whereas clients cannot. It can be engineered around but massively increases complexity, which compromises reliability and performance, plus of course makes support of the whole thing far more onerous.

You only have to look at ESO and the ZOS decision NOT to have their central servers perform checking of client side data due to performance reasons. An excellent game is over-run with bots and item dupes and people are leaving in their droves because of it.

Then we have the nature of consumer broadband being asymmetrical and often highly contended for cheaper connections, which of course means peers cannot send data as effectively as a server which will be on a leased line with a 1:1 ratio.

P2P does seem a peculiar choice given the security and performance risks, but perhaps there is a really good reason to use it we've not considered.

 

[Iain M Norman]

Even without p2p there'd be a similar player per session limit.

 

[Grav]

The reason instances are limited to 32 players each is for a combination of reasons that relate back to each other. (Disclaimer: I am a software dev in RL, but not really a networking guy, so I hope this makes sense.)

In multiplayer gaming, everyone in the same instance needs to know where everyone else is. The more people/objects you have in an instance, the more bandwidth is needed to keep track of everything. The required bandwidth increases exponentially with each new object, so it doesn't take long before you start hitting some hard technical limits there.

One way of putting off that limit is to reduce the amount of activity bouncing between objects in an instance. Once you've got your networking running about as efficiently as you can make it, the next thing you can try is reducing the frequency of pings between objects. This is one way that Eve Online gets so many people together; since Eve is not a true flight sim, it can get away with pinging everything around every second or so. But "twitch" games like ED and most others need to be pinging way more often to keep everything in sync and running smoothly, at the cost of bandwidth.

So you basically have a choice between a good experience with relatively few people, or a slideshow lagfest with a lot. I know which one I'd choose.

As for P2P, I dunno, perhaps it was done to maintain a certain performance balance between people from all over the world, as opposed to Euros connecting to Euro servers, Americans connecting to American servers, and oceanics like me getting shafted like usual.