I wonder what SS is going to do to High Seas when half available servers have just one boat on them and high seas folks are spread again across low count servers. Say you have 10k players. You have 5k servers available. Half of those will be single ship server, im betting the farm on it for this hypothetical. So 5k players, averageing 2per server, on 2.5k servers. Leaves 5k players for 2.5k servers. Now take away 1k players doing alliance servers, on a packed server would be at max 20-24 people per server.... Continue on down the line and High seas will be worse off then reg servers are now. I wish they'd just put out good content, story and items like they used to. It was amazing, real updates, excitement, suspense, eagerness to want to play. I don't know what happened about 12-16 months ago, but it was detrimental to the fame current state. Unfortunately.
Safer seas and server stability
People still get excited to play, people still enjoy the content and the game.
Just because some of us are going through something doesn't mean most players are or that the game is.
Time will tell on performance but lots of people still enjoy the game outside of just using it as a social dart board.
Servers are built with scalability in mind, meaning they adjust in real time according to demand, so they're not running on a fixed count. When you drop your anchor and a server migration occurs, that's exactly what's happening. Your previous instance will probably shutdown, as it is no longer necessary. This elasticity is important to stop wasting resources where it's not needed, with an added bonus of keeping populations between instances balanced.
I'm assuming they're running on Azure servers, which of course are very capable. Unfortunately, most issues faced by the community are probably more related to networking rather than processing power, and I say "unfortunately" because networking issues are waaaay harder to deal with.
That being said, do expect some hiccups here and there in December if the demand exceeds their expectations. The instance you're playing relies on several other servers doing their job.
Also, I'm obviously not affiliated with Rare, so take it with a grain of salt.
@r3troraccoon "I wonder what SS is going to do to High Seas when half available servers have just one boat on them and high seas folks are spread again across low count servers."
Doesn't matter, it is Azure, it just spins up another virtual instance.
That’s not how SoT servers work…
The servers are coded to keep as many ships on them at once, so new ships will join when people leave and server merges will happen to keep the server at capacity. Which is currently 6 ships maximum with 17 maximum player slots. So at full capacity you could have 5 full brigs and a duo sloop, if the servers paired them that way. But if the population is low, the server will pair 6 solo sloops if that’s the best it can come up with at that time.
To give you an idea of what that currently looks like. There are data centers all over the globe that host the servers for SoT, one of those locations is in Australia and services most of Oceania, but the population dips so low after midnight that by 1-2am they actually stop using that data center and start porting people to the next closest one, which is in Singapore. So now anyone in Australia who decides to play at 2am gets put on servers with people from Singapore and the surrounding areas that data center services so that they can continue to have full capacity servers.
Servers spin up and spin down all the time, there are not a set number of servers that sit around waiting for ships to join. If it’s empty, it closes, you’ll experience that on servers in the Asia/Oceania area a lot. If you’ve ever been playing during the hour before they take servers offline for maintenance, you’ll have seen this warning that pops up in the top left of the screen that says you have 15 minutes before the server shuts down, then it’ll count down until your screen goes black. That happens to people all the time on the Asia/Oceania side and it’s just normal daily play, it isn’t maintenance, but the game deciding that server needs to go and being unable to merge it with a new one, so it shuts it down instead.
