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We sort of do something like that, in that we offload the initial player experience (the first tutorials) onto the client. But, doing that with more widespread content is a lot more problematic. Latency is a factor (anyone else playing with the individual has to deal with their ping times, CPU load.. not just for one ship "skipping" around, but for every NPC and the whole game-world failing), as is cheating, which I think you meant by "security". But that isn't resolved by encryption, and in fact it can't really be resolved at all. Anything running in memory, on your computer, can be modified. So, if we choose to allow server-authority to be given to people's computers, some people will cheat, period.
And, ultimately, this doesn't solve problems that are actually problems. It's entirely possible for us to "peer-to-peer instance" a part of a game experience that is lightweight and allows a small group of players to do some kind of fixed gameplay (like an instanced-dungeon type of situation). But honestly, that kind of situation isn't really a huge problem anyhow. There are absolute memory capacity issues at some point, but those sorts of sectors don't use much CPU, so from that standpoint, there isn't a lot of value to moving them elsewhere (and incurring all the related issues that would come up, like cheating, or people blaming us for the internet quality of a peer-to-peer experience, or whatever).
The big problem are large monolithic play situations, like Capitol sectors being flooded with newbies and traders and people on missions. This is why we added the emergency instancing thing. A big iPhone promo can be a million downloads a week. Say we get less than that, "only" 100k new players per day. That's easily a thousand or more concurrent players who want to be in Itan J11 at the same time. If that were all "instanced" to each local player, then basically you don't have an MMO anymore, you have a "massively-single-player" game, which is.. not what we're making here.
But, ultimately, all this client-side-instance stuff would cost us a great deal of time to implement and test and roll out properly, so like arf says, it doesn't really outweigh comparatively to just.. adding more server capacity. Someday it might. But, our game itself is very scalable, and server capacity has become pretty cheap, it's mostly a process of finding the right balance of reliability, latency and expense, in the right location.
Milwaukee, for instance, does not have much local hosting stuff that could be used for emergency "cloudburst" situations (where we spin up dozens of additional gigs of ram and CPU-cores, to sustain a temporary week-long load from a major promotion). Chicago, NY/NJ, VA, Atlanta, and other locations do have a lot of local providers that make this more possible.
And, ultimately, this doesn't solve problems that are actually problems. It's entirely possible for us to "peer-to-peer instance" a part of a game experience that is lightweight and allows a small group of players to do some kind of fixed gameplay (like an instanced-dungeon type of situation). But honestly, that kind of situation isn't really a huge problem anyhow. There are absolute memory capacity issues at some point, but those sorts of sectors don't use much CPU, so from that standpoint, there isn't a lot of value to moving them elsewhere (and incurring all the related issues that would come up, like cheating, or people blaming us for the internet quality of a peer-to-peer experience, or whatever).
The big problem are large monolithic play situations, like Capitol sectors being flooded with newbies and traders and people on missions. This is why we added the emergency instancing thing. A big iPhone promo can be a million downloads a week. Say we get less than that, "only" 100k new players per day. That's easily a thousand or more concurrent players who want to be in Itan J11 at the same time. If that were all "instanced" to each local player, then basically you don't have an MMO anymore, you have a "massively-single-player" game, which is.. not what we're making here.
But, ultimately, all this client-side-instance stuff would cost us a great deal of time to implement and test and roll out properly, so like arf says, it doesn't really outweigh comparatively to just.. adding more server capacity. Someday it might. But, our game itself is very scalable, and server capacity has become pretty cheap, it's mostly a process of finding the right balance of reliability, latency and expense, in the right location.
Milwaukee, for instance, does not have much local hosting stuff that could be used for emergency "cloudburst" situations (where we spin up dozens of additional gigs of ram and CPU-cores, to sustain a temporary week-long load from a major promotion). Chicago, NY/NJ, VA, Atlanta, and other locations do have a lot of local providers that make this more possible.
Do players have any control of how the instances behave, like members of a group or guild will end up in the same instance when they jump into a multi-sector?
I was worried about that too, but then i thought of how unlikely it'd be for this sort of thing to happen.
We're talking about > 50 players in a sector to cause emergency instancing, right? This is to avoid noob overflows, and probably wouldn't affect large pvp battles like station wars.
We're talking about > 50 players in a sector to cause emergency instancing, right? This is to avoid noob overflows, and probably wouldn't affect large pvp battles like station wars.
hmm? station zerg attack!
Currently the instancing is set to 300 players in a single sector.
Obviously, this is not very likely with the current userbase.
With an iPhone or Google feature? Yes, totally plausible, or worse. iPhone, Google, AndroidTV, Steam, etc? Makes sense to have it as an option.
Right now there is no control over anything to do anything. The point is to handle an emergency situation and hopefully let some people still have a good time. If this instancing should happen, stuff like who-is-in-what-instance is about the least of our concerns.
Interestingly, we've had this system in place for years on Training sectors, which instance at like 16 players or some such, to give newbies a good experience regardless of the current influx.
This actually led to a "problem", when an enterprising person with a Trident decided to invade a training sector, left their trident (and died), and then tried to come back in again, but was flipped to an additional instance and couldn't get back to their Trident. Kind of funny, actually.
Anyway, the Training Sector defenses are now buffed enough that this is not likely. But this sort of thing could happen in other production sectors with very high numbers of concurrent players (300 in a single sector is thousands in the game), and we're aware of what might happen.. but honestly the negative ramifications of this kind of emergency solution are not a priority right now.
Obviously, this is not very likely with the current userbase.
With an iPhone or Google feature? Yes, totally plausible, or worse. iPhone, Google, AndroidTV, Steam, etc? Makes sense to have it as an option.
Right now there is no control over anything to do anything. The point is to handle an emergency situation and hopefully let some people still have a good time. If this instancing should happen, stuff like who-is-in-what-instance is about the least of our concerns.
Interestingly, we've had this system in place for years on Training sectors, which instance at like 16 players or some such, to give newbies a good experience regardless of the current influx.
This actually led to a "problem", when an enterprising person with a Trident decided to invade a training sector, left their trident (and died), and then tried to come back in again, but was flipped to an additional instance and couldn't get back to their Trident. Kind of funny, actually.
Anyway, the Training Sector defenses are now buffed enough that this is not likely. But this sort of thing could happen in other production sectors with very high numbers of concurrent players (300 in a single sector is thousands in the game), and we're aware of what might happen.. but honestly the negative ramifications of this kind of emergency solution are not a priority right now.