Topic
How will the game scale?
Let's say the game becomes wildly popular and you'll have 100,000 players playing all at the same time. How will the global chat work with that many people chatting? Will you still get a list of all the people in an area that you enter when there's 1k people in that area? How about resources (like items, plots, houses, trees)?
I guess a bigger map could solve some of the issues and I'm sure the map will be increasing all the time. But how about that global chat?
Paula
Replies
- At least on the Global chat end of it I will reference you to this thread alpha.glitch.com/forum/idea... that should partially answer your question. For the rest of it...well, someone more knowledgeable will have to do that.
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as Fictoris mentions and links, there will probably be no more global chat as soon as the next testing session.
as for 1k people in an area, i don't know what is planned, but i'm sure something is. possibilities include:
having 'full' areas that cannot be entered until someone leaves, with the option to 'pass through' to adjoining areas.
simply to show "only friends" visible when visiting a super saturated area. or maybe "only friends, and friends of friends" depending on how saturated the area is. and let people select additional 'unrelated' players to appear from a level population list.
just show everyone, but reduce everyone's speed and action rate proportionally to the number of people on the level. think of it as "crowd mode", where it takes a longer time to weave your way through a throng of people. depending on how this is handled, it might not even be annoying. although it might be good to have it be *a little* annoying, to help prevent supermassive crowds from forming in the first place.
many different ways to handle scale, i think. -
thinking more about crowd mode .. here are some details i'm thinking.
when entering the level and beginning to move, you get a message like "wow, there sure are a lot of people here! your speed is slowed by X as you navigate through the crowd." to provide feedback illustrating that any slowness is 'part of gameplay' in order to reduce frustration.
also provide options to leave the level through any street sign in the level no matter where you are in the level. like a little ever present window that says "tired of the crowds? escape to *option 1* *option 2* *option 3*"
disable the chat entry box for a period after you say something, have that period be equal to the number of people in the level. in place of the chat box show feedback message like "with all the people here, it's going to take a while to get a word in edgewise! wait *countdown timer* seconds before you can speak again.
some people could be immune to the effects of crowd mode. residents of the particular area, homeowners for example, could be totally immune. perhaps the owners of the level could also designate "presenters" who might also be immune. this could allow for large audiences for conversations, presentations, performances etc. without the designated active participants being slowed down. -
although ..
perhaps a large crowd would be only on one side of a level, such as only on the far left. then it would be weird to get frozen while trying the move through the essentially vacant right side of the level.
a solution here would be to trigger slowness upon overlapping other players. each player you overlap reduces your speed. if you are overlapping 3, 4, 5 or more players at the same time, and moving left or right overlaps you with other players, your speed slows down to next to nothing. the static crowd starts to form.
once your speed is reduced to this point, the "tired of the crowds? escape to *option 1* *option 2* *option 3*" window appears.
when entering an area where crowds have already formed, a "want to avoid the crowds? escape to *option 1* *option 2* *option 3*" window appears. -
while i think having crowd mode could be incredibly cool for presentations and large gatherings and just general excitement, i think the most likely option is to have a level population cap.
when entering the level, you'd get a "this area is full! pass through the area to *option 1* *option 2* *option 3* or wait until someone leaves and you'll enter the area automatically."
homeowners could be exempt from population caps in the realm where they own a home. - Looks to me that the plans will automatically solve most scaling issues as long as each drop and vendor are available in lots of places and/or the game has multiple universes.
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the devs have said that the game will take place all in one universe, which is really exciting!
i like the idea of unique drops and unique vendors tho. i think there could be unique drops and vendors that require some queuing to visit, due to crowds/full levels. there could also be more generic vendors all over the place, for selling staple items.
i think people will be intentionally and unintentionally flooding levels no matter how much things are spread around and how much space there is. the trick is to make the crowds fun, not frustrating. -
Drain energy if too many people are in one area and watch them scatter. "The gods are angry! -1 Energy per second!" heh
I'd rather Glitch spawn a temporary duplicate area for me than have me queue, be blocked, or deal with a slowed server. -
"I'd rather Glitch spawn a temporary duplicate area for me"
part of glitch's appeal is that it won't be sharded up, like so many MMOGs. how would you avoid:
"oh, i was waiting for you in groddle junction!"
"which groddle junction were you in?"
"i was in groddle junction 2"
"that one was full so i had to enter groddle junction 7"
"ooooh"
it just doesn't seem very elegant, and evaporates the concept of glitch as a unified world. - I was just illustrating that queues/blocks aren't the makings of good gameplay. Have to sit in a line, yippee?
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"I was just illustrating that queues/blocks aren't the makings of good gameplay. Have to sit in a line, yippee?"
glitch is different, it isn't necessarily like other games.
for one, when you're sitting in line you have other people to talk to. you can talk about why you're standing in line, and about whether it might be better to go somewhere else. a line can also be a challenge to find what you want somewhere else, or find a new regular source, which provokes exploration, breaking routine and other fun stuff.
pretending other players don't exist by spawning new clone areas all the time is just pretending the other players don't exist. in the real world, crowds can be exciting, and waiting in line can be an extremely social experience. it's urban in character.
creating generic duplicates of everything sublimates social activity. like a mcdonalds in every neighbourhood that you can drive through. you never queue, but it's always the same and there's nothing special about the activity. in character it is .. suburban?
there's probably room in glitch for both modes. and everything in between. but i don't think the game should necessarily make everything convenient all the time. a lot of social interaction is based around purposefully allowing oneself to be inconvenienced by others, and cultivating natural 'inefficiencies' as opportunities to take a break and hang out.
much of this relates to the nature of the waiting. for example, last summer trinkers and i wanted to go get some molly moon ice cream in wallingford, coz selva said it was really good on plurk. driving to the place in rush hour traffic and then finding parking was an annoying and frustrating form of waiting. then we got to the store and started standing in a long line outside the place, and talked with each other, and listened to the other people in line talk, made some plurks and read some plurks from our phones. watched the neon signs get brighter as the light grew dimmer and so on.
some lines have buskers moving up and down them, providing entertainment. disney has made an art of lines by putting fun diversions all along the lines to entertain people as they wait. sometimes these diversions are almost a exciting as the ride itself! i remember once visiting a sparsely visited ride at disneyland and moving quickly through the winding corridors long lines normally pass through and feeling like i was missing part of the experience.
obviously some kinds of waiting are frustrating, like being stuck in traffic. if treated with consideration, however, crowds and lines and waiting can be elevated to something that enriches an experience instead of taking away from it. - I don't like spawning, I was just illustrating a point. Queueing/blocking has a different type of sharding (can't get into a room where another is for awhile) and has the bonus of delays in gameplay. Spawning has sharding and no delays. Neither are good solutions.
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I'm not sure you can make waiting or crowds fun if every room is crowded. If only one or two rooms are crowded, that might work, but if every room is crowded to the point that you can't get anything done, people would just get annoyed.
I know currently every room is unique but perhaps some sort of automatically generated rooms with similar resources & vendors might be an option. If a certain room gets too busy, the game would generate 5 alternate versions of that room (kind of like alternate realities), some would have the same vendor or resource as the main room, some would not, you might have to visit them all if you're looking for a specific vendor. If you're looking for friends you might have fun trying to figure out which alternate reality your friend is in.
Paula -
you'll never have every room crowded, so long as you make more space than the maximum number of people playing. that part of it is pretty straightforward.
"If a certain room gets too busy, the game would generate 5 alternate versions of that room (kind of like alternate realities), some would have the same vendor or resource as the main room, some would not, you might have to visit them all if you're looking for a specific vendor."
i just think that avoiding people in order to get to the shops faster is one of the least interesting aspects of modern life. - I realized that a large group of people or a very industrious person could use queues/blocking to prevent other players from accessing something unique, not necessarily on purpose. I thought doing something valuable while you're waiting could heal queues, but some are still gonna find the wait annoying and others will seek out queues to get the valuables.
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We are confident that just setting a theoretical max number of people in one location (say 100) and then reducing mood/energy or putting you in to a "stressed out" state at around 50 players (and increasing the crowd penalty if the crowd continues to grow) will keep any one place from getting too crowded.
Including "instanced spaces" (like some of the quest levels) and private player- or group-owned locations, we aim to have somewhere between 10 and 40 locations for every 100 simultaneously connected players. So, 100,000 players playing all at once means somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 locations.
Many times you will be alone or with one or two other people, exploring or working at achieving something. Other times you will be in a crowded area. Both of those are probably more common than an in-between number of players, but the average would be somewhere between 2.5 and 10 players per location.
And maybe someday we will effectively handle large crowds for "broadcast mode", like giant rallies (but it is not on the short term to-do list). We'll do as good a job as we can turning crowds into fun (up to a point) and when long distance transportation is needed, you'll have plenty of time in the train car to make friends in a small crowd. - train cars! : ]
- Is there a magic number of players you're striving for?
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"We are confident that just setting a theoretical max number of people in one location (say 100) and then reducing mood/energy..."
This made me laugh, 'cause I'm imagining the whole stressed out crowd being sent to Hell as their energy plummets.
:-) -
Luckily hell is instanced, else we'd be making our problems worse!
(Well, it's not actually instanced at the moment, but we'd talked about it, at least)