The importance or lack thereof of the PVP crowd isn't even the primary point here. The reality is, This game was made for singleplayer and up to 8 player co-op, and they doubled the support for that for good measure, meaning you can get 16-20 player servers running
if you really want to.But it does not change that this game is
for 1-8 people playing cooperatively.It is not a PVP game. It was never meant to be a PVP game; TFP put in some basic options to allow for PVP at the express request of PVPers but made it clear that those small changes were all the focus they were going to put towards PVP. They don't want to take major development time out of other aspects of the game to balance pvp, they don't want to take time to fix glitches and exploits that exclusively effect a PVP experience. They don't want to put major attention to pvp.
Because, And let me restate it here,
This is not a PVP game. It is a cooperative 1-8 player game.
They aren't going to fix up the netcode to support 50+ players, Because the game is not meant for 50+ players. It's meant for 1-8. And the only servers you'll see with 50+ are pvp servers; Which means such a change would basically only benefit PVPers; Which are not their primary demographic.
Originally posted by Generic indie game dev: There are dozens of PVP servers out there with a history stretching as far as 5-6 years back. With communities of hundreds of people per each, are you aware of this at all? I have sunk thousands of hours into this game myself, always on PVP servers.
Dozens of servers with communities of hundreds each? Let's be generous then: We'll call it 2 dozen with 200 dedicated players each. 4,800 players; Let's be even more generous and round that up to 100,000 to account for private servers you aren't aware of, magic, fairies, and pixie dust.
TFP have sold over 12,000,000 copies of the game So, That hilariously over-measured 100k is 8.33% of the total sales.
I respect the point you're trying to make here, But, At best you're coming off as facetious by trying to make the pvp community seem much larger than it is. The reality is that for every dozen pvp servers, there are hundreds of non-pvp servers and thousands of groups playing in private where there's no chance of an external player coming in to ruin their day.
Originally posted by Generic indie game dev:
Originally posted by SylenThunder: Why would any company that cares about it's player base, design code to appease 3-5% of the players at the cost of negatively impacting the other 95-98% of it's players. Where is the money in alienating the grand majority of your player base?
One thing I do not understand and maybe you can explain this to me is, how does it negatively impact the PVE playerbase if you optimise the netcode a bit more and a bit faster? How will this alienate the main playerbase? If anything, there are also many PVE servers that allow for up to 50 players just like the PVP ones. Will a better netcode harm them too somehow? Or is this something of a PR statement? Like "Don't worry folks, no evil PVP notions will ever endanger your peaceful casual experience in this game, we protect you all the way." It kinda reminds me of the gay marriage issue where it is supposed to threaten regular families somehow, though nobody ever specifies how. A really weird statement coming from a dev representative.
It negatively impacts the non-pvp playerbase by taking development time out of the developers day to develop a feature that they will never ever get to interact with. Once more; The game is made for 1-8 people; Spending a hundred or thousand man hours making it so the very few pvp servers can run 50-100+ with less issues means that much less time spent on features important to the majority of the people playing the game. Looking back at the numbers above, You're essentially demanding TFP to set aside the 92% in favor of the 8%, when the 8% are doing things way outside what the scope of the game was ever meant for. It's just not good business, for any reason. (And that's with the inflated number! In reality it's more like 98% and 2%)
Better netcode would not in itself hurt the PVE players; But it also won't help them because it works perfectly fine with the intended and supported playercount and the intended and supported primary gamemode of COOP. Even comparing against the rare PVE servers that allow for 50 players, improved netcode...wouldnt help them much, Since the netcode issue is primarily when it's a player versus a player. They'd still be able to mine blocks, fight zombies, explore, do quests with relatively little hindrance.
Originally posted by Generic indie game dev:
Originally posted by SylenThunder: Because lets be very clear here. PvP is a minority. A very large minority.
Have you ever thought why the PVP playerbase is a minority? Maybe neglecting them and all these ultimative statements on how they are some unwanted deplorables play a role in it?
The PVP playerbase is a minority because
THIS IS NOT A PVP GAME; It is not league of legends where the whole point of the game is to face other players. This is not rust where the game was built around PVP as a primary element. It is 7 Days to Die, where the primary threat is the zombies; PvP was a function added purely by request and with the open statement that that little bit of work was all they would put towards it, Because they are not making a PVP game, As explained above. Those ultimateive statements are because there are people like you who don't give a ♥♥♥♥ what TFP want their game to be and just demand changes, tweaks, additions and alterations for the express purpose of the PVP experience. It's a PVE game; Not a PVP game.
Originally posted by Generic indie game dev:
Originally posted by SylenThunder: I tested on a full cluster with a 128-core EYPC (2x64), 256GB DDR4 Quad-channel, and drive bandwidth of 45GBps using an array of Intel Optane drives.
Lastly, you make my point for me. Do you think you are following the trends in 2021 that you need a NASA cluster to run a multiplayer server for this game? Shouldn't you be ashamed to say that, instead of humblebragging about it? You have invested god knows how much money into twitch integration alone and whatnot, cause you want to grow your game further, and that's understandable, who wouldn't want to? But in all shortsightedness you go for things like twitch integration instead of slightly optimising the netcode?
That's like owning a food store in a city that has no food stores at all, thus making it very successfull. But you the owner have gluten intolerance, so you don't sell any bread at all. Once you generate a substantial money reserve, you decide to open a new french cheese section and a new fish section with only luxurious airplane flown fresh produce because you wanna grow your business. But you forgot completely about the bread.
You completely ignored Sylen's point and think he makes your point for you?
No.
To quote Sylen's full statement here for context:
Originally posted by SylenThunder: First off, the supported player count is 8.
I have put exhaustive effort into testing, and the max stable for 95% of the systems out there is 20 players. I was only able to achieve 30 players stable when I was running on some very extreme hardware. 30. Not 50, not 100. (Yes there are server that claim to host this.)
And just to define that hardware in a little more detail...
I tested on a full cluster with a 128-core EYPC (2x64), 256GB DDR4 Quad-channel, and drive bandwidth of 45GBps using an array of Intel Optane drives. (Offhand it was 10 drives in RAID-0, but may have been 20 in RAID-10) Network between the host and the clients was 10G fiber to 1G Switches straight to the PC's.
I basically had access to an entire rack that was built to run an enterprise AI all to myself for the duration. The game client is simply not capable of handling more data.
30 players on a 12k map was a hard limit before we started seeing corruption. And this was hardware that had previously housed a fully fledged AI. You aren't going to get anywhere close to that when you're renting.
This is well known information. We've been saying it for literal years.
You don't need a NASA cluster to run any old multiplayer server; You need a NASA cluster
to run a server that vastly exceeds what the game is made for. This is NOT an MMO; It is a 1-8 player cooperative game. You need moderately okay server hardware to run a game for 1-8 players. You need a super computer to run for 50-100+, because you're asking your poor PC to do 6-12+ times as much work.
Sylen has put an incredible amount of testing into the subject, and his findings is that the max stable support for the majority of systems out there is 20 players (Which makes sense; As i mentioned earlier, TFP took their 8 and doubled it, made sure it worked for up to 16 and moved on. Because the game is made for 1-8 players.). Sylen further goes on to state that he was only able to achieve 30 when running on the extreme hardware mentioned; 30, Not 50, Not 100. 30 with superb equipment. Because the game was not made for more than 16 at absolute most; And is intended for 8.
There is no shame at all in saying "I have tried extensively to run a server for even just 30 players and am not surprised to find that you need a super computer to do so
because the game was not built for that many players in the first place.
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