ANet is getting on my nerves. rant about Observer mode

QSatu

In short:

"I’ve mentioned that spectator mode is coming to us in beta form, but there are some limitations that I feel will hamper its success. Each player that spectates also takes up a slot on the server. That means on a twenty slot server, if ten people are spectating, only ten players can be playing.

Until that limit is removed, the only way to watch a match in large numbers is to get a spectator to stream it. "

 I expect to not being able to spectate today anything b/c all observable servers will be full. I'm tired of them forcing e-sports on us. It's obvious they do it to force us to watch streams and increase GW2's stream numbers. Lame.

I was very exicted about this since observber mode in GW1 was wonderful but things like this really make me loose faith in ANet.

 

duggyfr3sh123

(mod edited)

and in a week or two when the limit is removed...?

 

EDIT: it's not going to stay this way, they're deploying these things with a limit temporarily for load testing and the like.

pmiles

Don't know anything about GW2 system, but what you described is exaclty how RtCW:ET does it.  Server has x slots.  The idea being that all x players are actually playing and not AFK in spectator mode.  They kick players in spec who are not actually playing to make room for other players that want to play and not merely watch.

 

Now if it's set up where there are say 10 slots, and everyone in there queued up to do 2v2 battle, then the other 6 slots are merely players waiting their turn at battle.  They get added as each game ends and the previous players end up in the spectator slots.  If people leave spec, new players are added to fill the slots.  They can stay there all day if they want, so long as they are ready to battle when their name is called.

 

If all 10 are supposed to be playing at once, why would you even have spectator slots?  Like I said, I don't know what there system is, so I am just guessing here.

Quizzical

Have they explicitly said that there will be a cap on how many observers there can be?  Because I don't see any technical reason why there would have to be a cap (within reason, of course; 1 billion people watching a single match presumably won't work without major changes to their server architecture).  If you're only observing a match and not interacting with it in any way, then the server doesn't have to send any data about what you're doing to anyone else who is observing the map.

The usual network problem with too many players in an area is that the amount of data that the server has to send per player is proportional to the number of players.  But for observing, it's proportional only to the number of players in the game itself, and not counting observers.  If you have 10 players observing each of 10 matches, the server load for that is the same as if you had 100 players observing one match and none observing 9 other matches.

If there's an observer chat channel, then that could scale with the number of observers.  But if that's the barrier (which isn't likely), then there's a simple solution:  don't have an observer chat channel, or at least cap the number of people in the chat channel without blocking others from observing the match.

ZenIrishChai

I haven't caught up on the news about this, but it sounds totally crazy to me to fill a player slot with an observer. Isn't that what twitch.tv is for? I don't get it. ANet can stream matches all they want in other ways but don't fill player slots with observers. That's an obvious hit against paying customers.

Vorch

Originally posted by Quizzical

Have they explicitly said that there will be a cap on how many observers there can be?  Because I don't see any technical reason why there would have to be a cap (within reason, of course; 1 billion people watching a single match presumably won't work without major changes to their server architecture).  If you're only observing a match and not interacting with it in any way, then the server doesn't have to send any data about what you're doing to anyone else who is observing the map.

The usual network problem with too many players in an area is that the amount of data that the server has to send per player is proportional to the number of players.  But for observing, it's proportional only to the number of players in the game itself, and not counting observers.  If you have 10 players observing each of 10 matches, the server load for that is the same as if you had 100 players observing one match and none observing 9 other matches.

If there's an observer chat channel, then that could scale with the number of observers.  But if that's the barrier (which isn't likely), then there's a simple solution:  don't have an observer chat channel, or at least cap the number of people in the chat channel without blocking others from observing the match.

This sounds reasonable. I have no clue how it will actually work, though. I think I'll ask on forums later.

someforumguy

I'm pretty sure that observer mode in GW1 wasn't live. If the match was still going on, there was already a delay of a few seconds. And of course you could watch the top ranked matches back for a while after the fight was over already. I think it was more like watching a delayed live recording. So the spectators weren't in the same instance as the PVP. Why don't they use this method in GW2. Actual live observer with spectators present in the arena (invisible) will only add possible lag.

Anyway, I am still waiting for observer mode and guildhalls. I also hear nothing anymore about the personal instance area or possible housing. I guess everything has to be new dungeons and temporary content now.