Funcom Issues An Official Announcement On Chat Problems

Written by: QuintLyn Bowers (@QuintLyn) | July 13, 2012 10:45 am

17 Comments

Citizens of The Secret World, if you have been experiencing disruptions in communications lately, you can relax. Funcom‘s top men are on it.

As it turns out, the problem many people have been having with TSW‘s chat is a little bit complicated. Luckily the game’s lead programer took some time out to give us a rundown on what’s going on.

For those who are not aware, The Secret World runs on a single server with separate dimensions and players can chat across those dimensions. At one point, however, the engine that the game runs on — known as the Dreamworld engine — ran all the dimensions seperately on the server side.

This changed when Funcom did a Single Server upgrade to the engine. At that time, they implemented a complete overhaul of the chat back-end tech and distributed the load across a network of chat servers that all talk to each other, the users, and the game servers.

Post launch, some of the servers decided they wanted to quit talking to the other servers, and it’s the people that find themselves on one of those non-talking servers that are experiencing issues.

The official post about this goes on to say that this is not an issue they had pre launch or even during the betas — although there was a chat problem that wasn’t related to this — and that the main issue they are having now is trying to reproduce it so they can fix it.

Their team is hard at work on trying to fix this issue, and they just ask for your continued patience while the’re figuring out how to fix it.

Funcom Issues An Official Announcement On Chat Problems

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10 comments

http://profile.yahoo.com/3JO75BNS43WDETCNCO7F7XS6Q4 jo

another month or to before it’s fixed.
- http://twitter.com/Agimat08 Solo Miranda
  
  Ughh…its already been fixed. sighhh people these days lol
  - George Webster
    
    not positive if it’s officially fixed but it hasn’t been cutting out lately.. now if only it would remember which channels i’ve (un)subscribed to whenever I change zones I’ll be thrilled to no end!
  - http://profile.yahoo.com/3JO75BNS43WDETCNCO7F7XS6Q4 jo
    
    no it hasn’t.
    - http://twitter.com/Agimat08 Solo Miranda
      
      Yes it is
Old Ben

Please stop saying the game “runs on a single server”. What sense would it make for a single machine to be able to run the game for every player, but then needing “a network of chat servers”…? Is the game code so simplistic that even chat needs more processing power?

When Funcom says “single server” they just mean the player database is shared for all dimensions (i.e., players are all treated as being in the same region and can transfer freely between shards or dimensions). They obviously distribute players across multiple world servers (probably two mirrored servers per region and per dimension, for load balancing and reliability reasons).
- http://quintlyn.com/ QuintLyn Bowers
  
  Yes… And when I say “single server” I’m saying the same thing they are. Since they refer to it in that way, I will continue to as well.
  
  We all know it’s not one little ole server running a whole MMO. Just like we know Trinity isn’t one tiny little server.
  
  It’s pretty much common knowledge among MMO players that an MMO can’t run on one server.
  - Old Ben
    
    > Since they refer to it in that way, I will continue to as well.
    
    So when Blizzard or EA describe server mergers as “game plan optimizations”, will you also refer to them that way?
    
    Anyway, I’m pretty sure Funcom never said the game _runs_ on a single server. They just say “it’s based on a single server” (referring to the player database, not the servers that actually run the AI and combat for each region in each dimension). Even if they did, it’s simply not true. Journalists are supposed to inform their readers, not just repeat the marketing terms used by publishers.
    - George Webster
      
      it’s “constructive” criticism like this that remind me why I love the internet
      - Old Ben
        
        What are the quotation marks for? Perhaps you think that “constructive criticism” means “praise”…? It doesn’t .
        
        Constructive criticism is defined as “criticism that has a goal of improving some area of another person’s life or work”.
        
        In other words, saying “you suck” is destructive criticism, while saying “please stop hitting that screw with a hammer and use a screwdriver instead” is constructive criticism. See the difference?
      - http://twitter.com/Agimat08 Solo Miranda
        
        Interesting lol
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  Seems Funcom is using the second definition for server.
  
  A Server is a computer program that has an associated client program, as in the client-server definition.
  - Old Ben
    
    They’re using it to refer to the player database. It’s not even the actual game world servers, those are still separate (i..e, the shards, which they call “dimensions”).
    
    Basically they just mean everyone is in a single “region”, so anyone can transfer to any other shard. But players one one shard can’t see those on the other shards without transferring, and there are still multiple machines (my guess would be two per region per dimensions, just because that’s more reliable and easier to code – but if they want to get fancy they can do dynamic load balancing).
Christina Cole

This is rather old news. Especially since they’ve officially fixed the issue. It even says so in the link you posted.

Vinterstum [July 12 1:03pm EST] “We applied a hotfix to the chatservers a couple of hours ago, which so far seems to have resolved most of the issues.”

Also, global chat is actually per dimension not cross dimensional.
- Old Ben
  
  If they say “seems to have resolved most of the issues” (and not “all of the issues”), I guess that means they’re still aware of _some_ issues, so I wouldn’t quite call it “officially fixed”.
http://www.video-game.tv/ Jaxxy

I have yet to read the post but having been in the closed beta i can say that this was a problem in closed beta. In fact I am one of many that reported it during the closed beta! If Funcom is claiming it was not then they are either flat out lying or they are trying to misdirect the issue. They knew chat was buggy from as far back as May if not before. The problem is they don’t want to admit that EA rushed them to launch prior to the game being ready.

Jaxxy
http://twitter.com/DaveyDiablo Davey Diablo

“Funcom‘s top men are on it.”

“Who?!”

“Top… men.”

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