Interview with Mike O'Brien and Pat Wyatt

Hmm. Let's think about that.

To a first approximation, what you're asking for is some 100s of characters of text per person. No search or anything like that; just plain text. Plus you're looking to crowd the party window with a lot of content -- 10s of characters per person that need to be shown to every player in the zone -- or at least those who open the Party window -- and that change frequently as seller wannabes log on and off.

I don't see where any of that would be particularly hard. But are you sure that the usability would be sufficient? How many sellers do you think could be accomodated at once before the browsing and scrolling got excessive, or before the chance of getting a customer was too small to be fun?

And are you thinking of having people hang out in a town, as is needed now for the Party window to work? Or are you thinking of letting them load something up and leave it up while they go farm? If it's the latter, you'd soon have a LOT of listings, and the UI might collapse under its own weight. But if it's the former, would it really make the game more fun?

The party search screen, the one that comes up when someone hits [P] doesn't change at all, except for that extra button, that's it. What people can type as a title to their "player shop" is the exact same number of characters people have now for the party search. No more clutter, just more people using it.

I'm wondering what kind of precautions they already have in place for that. Is there a limit? If everyone used the party search for trade now, what would happen? Maybe some further organization could be done to sort people into districts in the listing, which of course, are limited by number.

They would need to be in town, and would most likely still be spamming as usual - this is not a counter to spam, just taking a tool and making it much more useful to entice people into using it. This is the same party search as we have right now - needing to be in town and all - except with an additional window you can choose to open up with additional information.

The only problem is it being specific to the local town. This is not that big of a problem, since most people only trade in a handful of towns as it is. The community made their own trading towns. Best not to go against the flow on that one, or you'd be fighting a losing battle.

I think the auction house idea was just one of those "New-game, wishful thinking" ideas. Think about it, a system that has X (probably a hell of a lot) number of players, all connected at once, inventories open, stats changing every second, bids popping from random directions, and on top of ALLLL that, chat. Now you try building that from the ground up where EVERYONE is able to do it smoothly (everyone as in everyone thats in a room, or talking to an npc that connects you to every district, town and continent.).

but thx for the info Francais. Good to still have some information fall from Anet.

But what I wanna know is how the Percistence idea is gonna work. Will it be like a Raid in WoW when territory gets pushed back? and is GW2 just a big PvP fest, mixed with a dash of PvE or is there an actual storyline and objective that players will race for?

I always wondered what kind of technology GW ran on. You could've knocked me over with a feather when I read SQL server on Windows.

Very interesting read. Thanks for posting.

Yes, but the drill-down detailed info typed in has to be maintained in server memory, and downloaded to the client when appropriate.

Also, there is a UI clutter problem created simply if lots and lots of people start finding party search useful, whether it's because of your proposed enhancements or some other reason they start liking it.

Anyhow, FWIW -- I don't think your proposal is technically unreasonable, so I don't think it's at all silly that you have started trying to muster support for it in Sardelac.

"Everything about a character is one big BLOB (Binary Large OBject), typically 10K-30K in size. (One component is the whole game map, or at least a record of which pixels the character has opened up.) More precisely, there’s a character BLOB and an account BLOB. BLOBs are updated as the game progresses, then saved every few minutes."

As a long time database developer, that is very disheartening. BLOBs are simple, but woefully inefficient, and you completely lose all the query benefits from a real relational database.

An XBL (Xbox Live) friend of mine is a programmer for software.He would probly get a kick outa 4 1/2 million lines of code.
(<^^>)

Well, yes and no.

Because of the custom cache server and its simple custom transactional API, they can do character-specific things straightforwardly.

But you made an excellent point even so! What they do lose is the ability to use data in other ways, such as cross-player queries. E.g., I'm guessing they don't have a good feel for how many of what kinds of items are in characters' inventories, total. Nor can they easily correlate rare minipets to wealth to see whether or not people like to horde them. Etc.

Nor, for that matter, can they do great data mining to come up with ever-more-reliable indicators of who is or isn't a bot, or is otherwise engaging in wrongful behavior.

Unless they just figured out that the Auction Houses would not be possible in GW1, I do not understand why they just didn't tell Gail to tell us the same thing so people can shut up about it.

Of course, Auction Houses would not increase the number of transactions or database lookups per second now would it? Oh wait... it would. Hugely.

Well, it's sure good of you people to go lecturing on database design; I'm sure that you all have the necessary qualifications ad experiece to provide worthwhile commentary.

I can't speak for the others posting here -- but some of my qualifications can be easily found starting from the article I linked to.

I post very little, as can easily be seen, but I use this forum to find out the "neat" little things that others like to talk and gripe about. I have been using it since X-mas 2005. I have 4 kids and myself that have played since this time. We aren't "hardcore", in fact there's only 3 of us that have finished the storyline in Prophecies. But we love playing the game. We all own the first 2 (Proph and Fact) 3 of us have Nightfall. We will probably play this till the end of the server life and we are turned away (heads hanging low) in search of a new NON-SUBSCRIPTION game.
In all I have nothing (NOTHING) but good things for all your hard work. You took things in a completely new direction and made it work. You used unconventional methods and made it work. You listened to thousands of griping, annoying, and sometimes hostile people and still you made it work. I could (and who can't...) find something to gripe about in ANYTHING, but instead I will choose this moment to thank all of A-net (and all involved) for making and maintaining a highly entertaining, all-age involved, deep, and solid game that will be played in my house for probably years more.
If you people are SOOOO annoyed and upset over "this" not getting done.. or "that" not being just right, or they just nerfed my favorite skill, blah, blah, blah.... THEN QUIT ! I for one don't care about what hasn't or possibly won't be added next, I LOVE THE GAME AS IT IS AND FIND THE UPDATES TO BE JUST ANOTHER CHALLENGE.
In my dojo there's a sign..."The Beatings will continue untill morale improves.." I think if you bought the game and you think it sucks then it probably won't be the first (or last) one you buy TRUST ME. But if you bought it and liked it then you are still plugging away and having fun. Like I said earlier... YOU CAN WHINE ABOUT ANYTHING if you search hard enough.... How about a compliment when it's deserved...?

I bow in appreciation for the work these guys have put into this game.

and no, I am not a A-net employee, relative of one, or anything else. Just a Dad of 4 kids who loves to play and loves this game.

Post this anywhere in A-net that you want as a morale booster when you're feeling overwhelmed at all the annoying people who curse your lack of "whatever" over the next problem you run into.

Thanks,
The Harrison Family

Well said, Mr. Harrison!

Meanwhile, I've started a new thread based on a new blog post I made on these subjects. It's focused on shoulds/coulds rather than what's actually been done.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10167252

My apologies, I was referrig to the myriad of people who repeatedly make demands with no knowledge or thought of the underlying technology. Mayhap with a little look at this more people will see what goes on behind the scenes.

Good morning all.

I think I will type something up here, just to let people know that GW is “good” and that your worries are unfounded.

“~30 kb for chatacter info? including maps and storage... quite little actually.”

Ok so we take 30 times it by some larger numbers and we get a very large number. Ok now its not storing all this data that the problem, its moving it around. There are servers all around the world that store you character data.

So when you join a new map, all the characters have to be transferred to that new server, then you click enter mission and ya get moved to yet another one with ya seven buddies for the battle. The battle finishes, then you are sent back to the server that say your guild hall is on. Then the master server has to get the results of the battle, and update ya ranking.

For ever HoH battle 30kb*8players*3teams has to be sent to the main server, possibly from 3 different corners of the earth, every time you see someone complain about lag, this is a reason why.

This does ad up. And bandwidth is expensive. As a large part of the GW community, or their parents are against ongoing payments its going to be hard to send around much more data.

You have to remember, GW isn’t a mmo, its more like StarCraft or Diablo, but the lobby is a nice pretty town instead.

Utterly standard items -- greens, mods, inscriptions, even minipets -- could probably be handled on the current trader system, I would think.

You still get an entire copy of the green item on you character. Its not just a number. There is a staff where people that have the old version get the old skin. This is because the base item is changed, and all the copies in on the characters are not.

“"We think it would be too hard" is strange reason for not implementing something so desired.

Sooner or later they will have to implement it anyway (for GW2 or something else), and having previous experience doing similar thing will help them a lot.

Besides, i cant seriously see hypothetical ex-anet emplyee explaining "didnt do it because i thought its too hard" to his new employers.”

Something being to hard is exactly why you don’t implement something. What if they said we could give you an auction house, but you would get no GW:EN, and you would have to pay just as much for this auction house. It’s about priorities.

Every project will have a whole heap of limitations, that’s what makes its features so good. When these limitations are met, and new system is designed, They called this new system GW2. What’s the problem?

“Quote:
"They have no full-time DBA, and when the developers started this project they didn’t know SQL."

I think that this speaks volumes -- in multiple ways.”

Yeah and did ya know that Google didn’t know html? When it first came out there was no Search button, just had to press enter.

The point is it doesn’t matter. The database just stores the data. GW has excellent network code, they spent years on it just its self, they came from battle.net. years and years of network coding. Yes a database can send data over the Internet, but it isn’t designed for GW. That’s where GW has worked, they have done it them selves.

“Finally, suppose they built an auction house -- the question isn't just the back-end. This isn't a very interesting idea unless there are lots of items up for auction, right? Well, what do you imagine the UI being like for that? I imagine it's a much more detailed transactional/inventory UI than anything else that's even been seen in Guild Wars. Well, how do you imagine that would be integrated into the rest of the UI?

The UI would be fine, they could whip one up in the afternoon. Here is what might take a bit longer, and just for the UI
Scope it, (write up why, how you will do it. And how long it will take)
Team leader signs it
UI expert makes sure its not going to give anyone an epileptic fit.
Language dude does the languages for it.
Team makes a presentation to NCSoft requesting time to implement it.
GW:EN is pushed back 2 months,
Gail get food poisoning from NCSoft.
One afternoon over a beer they draw up the UI.

Ok now we still got network code and database jazz to worry about.

“And finally -- it is VERY common for highly smart and able programmers to not understand the difficulties of a transactional system until they sit down and actually try to design it.”

Very true, this is why we design things.

“I always wondered what kind of technology GW ran on. You could've knocked me over with a feather when I read SQL server on Windows.”

GW doesn’t run on it. Just the data. This sounds great to me. It means ya can set one up in pretty much any country in the world that has an Internet connection. Giving any local player less lag.

* When they find a “gold-seller” — somebody who plays the game professionally and sells in-game commodities for real money – what are the characteristics of that account? E.g., what patterns of trading and/or playing behavior reliably flag a seller, as opposed to a generous person who makes gifts to friends?
* Which rare loot is the most popular to be kept by “wealthy” players?
* Which skills are use by whom in what ways?
* Which modifications are deployed on the equipment players actually use?



Yup that is exactly what they did. And Loot scaling is the result. You can no longer solo easy maps and sell the minor items. This makes it harder for bots. Yes the system isn’t perfect and is ongoing modifications.

A gold-seller isn’t a generous person, they are usually a bot. they don’t make friends and they don’t need many equips. They are usually on what ever game has a good exchange rate on eBay(or where ever).

“As a long time database developer, that is very disheartening. BLOBs are simple, but woefully inefficient, and you completely lose all the query benefits from a real relational database.”

Once again they don’t query through the database, it’s to slow, the GW master server engine just gets a BLOB (a good way to send data) and then has its way with it. It will know what bits mean what, but it into an internal database format and much faster than SQL queries.

Personally I love the GW system; I fell in love with Battle.Net years ago. I’d love to do a Masters on GW, if they ever let me see it. Watch the NWN July 20 contest. After I win that maybe GW will hire me:P

What I’ve said is pretty basic stuff, the reason the GW devs aren’t in here, is because they are kinda busy at work and id expect reading the Internet isn’t really what they should be doing. They have a Public Relations department for that.