Annnd their down again, on Xbox at least.
PC too by the looks of it.
Aps
Annnd their down again, on Xbox at least.
PC too by the looks of it.
Aps
Multiple ways.
ESO is completely free to play, but those who decided to subscribe get benefits from it; like, for example, we don't pay for DLC's (expansions everyone pays for); plus we get crowns per month that lets us buy things on the in-game shop. Star Wars: The Old Republic does the same; but they limit the F2P players quite a bit (I don't agree with that at all).
IT HAS dedicated Server's. And they scale on the hour average load.
What FDev was unprepared for was teh scale of players jumping at once. Its the Transaction/Adjucation servers that are handling it. each jump makes a few ajax calls to a php backend which in turn handles the db requests which decide if players get grouped together in instances and try to balance them. You can think of it as matchmaking in a way but also more. Once players are grouped p2p comes in place for all "realtime" stuff in an instance. The problem with alot of players in an instance jumping together to a known location the Adjucation servers attempting to group the people togetehr based off wing/friends/fleet criteria against eachother player that was in the instace. This creates an ENORMOUS queryload and each request takes longer per server. If then some time out and get set back to their last savestate ( mysql-db ) and try to log in again the adjucation servers again try to group them with their friends while alot of people are still jumping or in the area. So it again may lead to a timeout -theres a point where you cant throw much more cpu's at it in time without hitting some sort of a bottleneck. The Architecture scales but it cannot handle 10% load -> 10000% load within 10 minutes. Server scale was usually over a 4hr average now its like 1hr. Its a balance act.
Developer & Serveradmin - NOT employed by Fdev btw.
Cheers!
down again, will go down 4 more times before midnightim sure